Archive for May 2014

Jacob Clifton, Mad Men Creator Calls Out Entitled Baby Boomer Bullshit

It’s not hard to understand why Baby Boomers still consider themselves the center of the universe. For one thing, we all do. For another, they were manufactured under factory conditions to replace dead Americans from the War […] But to me, the most important part is the invention of television:

Imagine a new appliance in your own home whose only function is endlessly telling your life back to you, in brighter colors than reality and with a soundtrack we’re still listening to, and autobiographical feature-length music videos like The Big Chill suddenly make a lot more sense: ‘This is us, remember us? We are trying our best.’

Going on to embed Matthew Weiner’s clip from Tuesday’s (May 20) Colbert Report, Weiner talks about how the 1960s mythology has been created by Boomers, and he wanted to tell the story of those adults (like Don Draper, born in the 1920s) who experienced it, rather than the juvenile experiences of the young-adults who have since mythologized it.

Colbert: The Baby Boomers, they won’t let us stop thinking about the Sixties
Weiner: They think they invented sex, drugs and you know … and so they have a view of it that is a child’s view of it, so I wanted to say, what would it be if you were an adult that lived through, let’s say, some fairly interesting things like World War II and The Great Depression, and then this comes along. And there was tremendous change, and the cliché turbulence, and free love and things like that. But there’s free love in the 1920s, there’s free love in the 1930s, the Beatnik movement of the ’50s; no one invented any of this. What really happened was, there was a generation that was asked very little. They got education, they got a lot of entertainment, they got a lot of spending money, they became the focus of the economy, of entertainment, of everything. There was a war going on that they were supposed to fight, some of them didn’t. But the generation before them, all of them fought. They have a very sort of demanding thing, I experience it in real life, they’ll come up to me and be like, ‘what happened to this?!’ or ‘what happened to that?!’ and I’m like, ‘I’m not telling your story, I’m telling the story of your parents, or your grandparents’.

From How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors Are Shaping Your Future by Eileen Gunn:

Smithsonian spoke with the eminent critic John Clute, co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, who quotes Bertrand Russell’s prophetic words from 1924: “‘I am compelled to fear that science will be used to promote the power of dominant groups, rather than to make men happy.’ The real fear today,” Clute continues, “is that the world we now live in was intended by those who profit from it.”

Kim Stanley Robinson—the best-selling author of the Mars trilogy, 2312 and Shaman—shares this fear, and sees it manifested in the popularity of Suzanne Collins’ novel The Hunger Games, in which a wealthy governing class uses ruthless gladiatorial games to sow fear and helplessness among the potentially rebellious, impoverished citizens. “Science fiction represents how people in the present feel about the future,” Robinson says. “That’s why ‘big ideas’ were prevalent in the 1930s, ’40s and partly in the ’50s. People felt the future would be better, one way or another. Now it doesn’t feel that way. Rich people take nine-tenths of everything and force the rest of us to fight over the remaining tenth, and if we object to that, we are told we are espousing class warfare and are crushed. They toy with us for their entertainment, and they live in ridiculous luxury while we starve and fight each other. This is what The Hunger Games embodies in a narrative, and so the response to it has been tremendous, as it should be.”