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’.