The Boomer Q

Trusting The Plan From Cradle to Grave

How do you solve a problem like The Boomers? That’s something we all seem to be grappling with as they reach the end of their natural lifespan still holding onto outsized wealth and influence in the western world. Social media and internet culture has taken what was a decade ago a pretty bland age signifier and turned it into an insult evoking stupidity, cluelessness regarding current reality, selfishness, greed and senility. Being a Boomer—in the colloquial sense—is one of the worst things you can be; it means you are mentally enfeebled, especially regarding technology, and uncool all at once. Its rise belies a resentment towards a generation often blamed for all of the ills of the modern world—a generation that has never done themselves any favours in terms of who they let speak for them.

Acting as a lightning rod for this resentment has been the slew of media regarding The Villages, the largest 55+ retirement community in the world situated in central Florida, portraying it as the dark heart of America to some degree. Most dripping with artistic pretence amongst them is the award bait documentary Some Kind of Heaven, directed by Lance Oppenheim; a Harvard graduate educated at Pine Crest School, which is —depending on who you ask—the number one private school in America. It’s hard to find a piece of media about The Villages that doesn’t have Oscar of pulitzer pretentions. An editorial about The Villages in The Lamp Magazine by Sam Kriss is no exception, a hopelessly overwritten and under edited piece, it nonetheless highlights some commonality in the behaviour of the middle class American Boomer:

“Almost everyone I spoke to in Florida seemed to believe in the New World Order. They believe that the world is governed by a secret demonic cabal whose main two goals are to have sex with children and to wipe out the human species. And then they play golf about it.”

- SHADOW ON THE SUN by Sam Kriss, The Lamp Magazine

The frequency with which right-of-centre Baby Boomers in America come into contact with the broad umbrella of Q-Anon cannot be understated, partly because ideas as tame and grounded in reality as the mere possibility of ballot stuffing have been shunted into this realm. Had I not heard the parents of my American friends talking about lizard men on the moon first hand in a completely serious capacity I might have believed Q-Anon was all media hype, like the much vaunted Neo-Nazi groups that simply do not exist at scale. This overlap of reality and unreality has created a bizarre informational soup in Boomer dense retirement communities, but much of it is regarded in the same tabloid fashion as celebrity gossip.

Q-Anon, in its totality, is difficult to explain to the uninitiated; it started as a potential leaker on imageboards such as 4Chan who went by the moniker—hence the “Anon” suffix—but quickly spiralled into a deliberate Flood The Zone approach. A flood not from Republicans themselves, but from the intelligence services, in a bid to wash away real information in a torrent of fantasy. The federal government themselves have been leaning into this approach by fanning the flames of UFO and alien conspiracies and injecting them into the mainstream news cycle.

I find these endless editorials and documentaries about the boomers and what amounts to The Boomer Question very tedious because, within the current narrative of history, explaining why The Boomers are how they are is not possible—because all explanations must in some way reinforce what has become known as The Boomer Truth Regime.

People born post 1945 in The West live in a world saturated in propaganda, they were the first generation to be educated overwhelmingly in a fully integrated state education system that stretched from kindergarten to college. Their formative years were spent on rails, sleepwalking through this mass education system. We must remember that this was not normal in The Old World, the question should really be “How could they NOT turn out to be a generation of selfish, perpetual children?” They are simply the first fully realised human incarnation of The Revolution of Mass and Scale: The Mass Man.

The specifics of Q-Anon don’t matter, it seems that every supposed adherent has a different set of ideas about “what is really going on” in America; the only way it can be adequately explained as a phenomenon is thinking of it as what happens when civil rights era thinking meets current reality. There were enemies and shadowy conspiracies in the 60s and 70s too, but they were fostered by the state themselves to harness the activism of the heavily politicised, permanent adolescents of the emerging Boomer generation. All the music on the radio was against The Old World, all the movies and television were too. Without those authoritative ‘counter culture’ voices, which were really the prevailing culture, you end up with a figure like Q-Anon and you end up “trusting the plan.” To them, Q-Anon is just the newest wave of counter culture, and through their unfocused outpouring of gibberish you can see just how ineffectual 1960s style activism is without a power centre there to do all the heavy lifting for you.

Trust The Plan is possibly the most deleterious slogan to come out of the whole affair, it can be applied in any situation and can explain any incongruity. There are many who thought Trump was secretly president well into 2021 and that a round-up of Civil Rights era America’s enemies was just around the corner. Once again, it is an outgrowth of a linear and deterministic view of history that moves every upwards and where “the good guys always win.”

For many Boomer Republicans, Q-Anon is their security blanket in the wake of the postwar myths breaking down under their own weight: when you have “trusted the plan” of The Boomer Truth Regime your entire life, the void left by it must be filled with something. Without an authoritative voice you trust to give you your worldview, you are left groping around in the dark for answers. The Boomers turned to The Internet, an environment they are ill equipped to deal with at the best of times, and ended up on 4Chan. Being a remnant of a higher trust America, they simply assumed the mix of schizophrenics and federal agents that was 4Chan during the 2016 election cycle could be trusted—at least more than CNN and the RINOs at Fox News. The informational environment younger dissidents have adapted to exist in quite happily melted their Boomer Truth addled minds. They went from 0 to 100.

As faith in insinuations and especially media collapsed, some of these people began to take to places like Facebook—who have been an enthusiastic partner to the US security state—along with wider social media. Q-Anon has since somewhat fused with the Anti-Woke movement, which has created the ubiquity of vague real life chatter regarding a New World Order in places like Florida.

In Reality, any reading of history acknowledges a New World Order was enacted in 1945 and we have lived within its narratives ever since. This makes the Boomer obsession with Q so painfully ironic: they believe a shadowy force is going to destroy their world, and replace it with a New World—populated by dead eyed activists whose hatred for The Old World is only exceeded by their hatred for their elderly relatives who uphold it. In actuality, this is the role the Baby Boomers themselves played in the late 1960s and 1970s as agents of a new, wholly materialist, America of mass consumption.

No matter how much the millennials hate their boomer parents, it is nothing compared to the animosity shown towards older generations by the boomers themselves. “Don’t trust anyone over 30” was the cliche by 1970, as the hippy movement sputtered out, dumping its cohort of failed seekers into a world of racial violence and urban decay—but also of easy employment and socialist safety nets. Their parents represented The Old World—a world of racism and sexism—and are too stupid and small minded to understand their new, colourful world of extended childhood via university and welfare programs.

Something incredibly important is missed in most tellings of The Boomer Story: what is aptly described as The Boomer Truth Regime was not enacted by the boomers themselves, it was put in place by their Greatest Generation parents, by their Lost Generation grandparents and enacted fully with the assistance of their Silent Generation older brothers, The generations who grew up at the turn of the century, and who experienced the transition into the age of mechanisation, were the main architects of The Boomer Truth Regime. They were the last people to remember The Old World they had done away with, a world that existed before the next wave of The Revolution of Mass and Scale, before full tilt managerialism had hegemony.

The generational villains of the 60s were the generational heroes of the 1940s: the people who stormed the beaches at normandy were 80% in favour of a racially segregated US Army for example. but this was unpalatable two decades later. The same elite of World War 2 invented the framing that made the 1960s possible, a framing which weaponised the children of this newly minted mass-man against their “War Hero” parents in order to kill any romance for The Old World. The myth of the 60s celebrates the total defeat of those who thought some vestige of tradition could be held onto. All of this was of course done whilst the baby boomers were young children and teenagers: unless you are genuinely historically illiterate you cannot believe that events in say 1965 were driven by the baby boomers, the oldest wave of which had just turned 20.

We must always remind ourselves that change is top-down, never bottom up. The Boomers didn’t create the postwar world and its associated, rigidly enforced myths—they are products of it. The Boomer Truth Regime is what made the Baby Boomers possible, not the other way around. They were given a plan. and they trusted it, because it was what they had always known. They are the product of the New World of 1945 at its apex: its main material beneficiary before it quickly went into terminal decline.

As The Boomers collectively shuffle off to the great retirement home in the sky, it is worth investigating the idea that we think of them as a cohesive collective at all.

Fundamentally life in western nations was more stable before 1900 and therefore 20th century generational theses are not applicable to them. Karl Mannheim, the Hungarian-Jewish sociologist who codified the modern thinking of generations stresses the rapidity of social change and the necessity of a shared but distinct experience. Indeed, it could be said that The Baby Boomers were an exercise in creating generational conflict, with the 1950s & 60s seeing the invention of the extended adolescence that has come to define growing up in the postwar world.

Over their lifetime the decline of the multi generational household has been dramatic, this partly an outgrowth of the materialist individualism instilled within the Baby Boomers and the artificial plenty they grew up experiencing—especially in America. The Boomers hated their Greatest Generation parents so much they were the first to mass institutionalise them, rather than look after them within a multi generational household; which was seen as low status, a sign of poverty and an undue burden. The sentiment in liberal boomer America by the 90s can be summed up as:

“My father was one of the first up Omaha beach, but he was racist last Christmas so we put him in the cheapest old people’s home money can buy.”

Boomers proactively spending their children’s inheritance on a lavish lifestyle in communities like The Villages is an inversion of this—they’re not going to let happen to them what they facilitated happening to their parents.

Perhaps the one myth we have to concede to when talking about The Boomer Truth Regime then is the myth of The Boomers as a cohesive generational force at war with the generations behind and in front of them. It could be said that the boomers were the most generational generation, having the common factors in place that they did, and also being self-aware of themselves as a “generation” like none before. This last factor is due in no small part to the rise of sociology in the popular realm in the 1950s and 60s and its expansion into media and culture. They mark the material high point of the postwar world and as such carry its torch the brightest. Labels like The Greatest Generation were applied to their parents post-hoc, they simply thought of themselves as British or Americans during the Second World War. The animosity towards older generations was far less prevalent as the differences between these pre-war generations was far smaller in terms of self perception and culture. People also quite simply hadn’t been told they should hate their parents—quite the opposite.

Generational conflict as a vector for attacking homogenous societies is under explored compared to the fostering of religious, racial and party-political animosity in modern western nations, but it is part of the vector by which traditional societies transform into mass societies.

So, then, how DO we answer The Boomer Q?

Boomer is a state of mind, Boomer is a feeling—it’s the endless adolescence of modernity. The learned helplessness of the social safety net. The emptiness of the sexual revolution. Every generation after the Baby Boomers are all cut from the same cloth, far more similar to them than the generations that preceded them. They remind us what modernity does to humanity, what it is still doing to humanity—they are The Mass Man. Those generations that came after them merely added a layer of cynicism, self awareness and irony to being a Mass Man. The Boomers disgust many of us so much because they are us, and we are them; they grimly reminds us what we as fellow children of the ashes have to look forward to in old age—a materialist pillow to smother ourselves with. Under current systems the limits of ‘social safety nets’ have already been reached, so most of us will not even get that.

We’re all in the same dung-heap, they just spent most of their lives blissfully unaware of it. Perhaps that is what irks people about communities like The Villages: they are cocoons where the Boomers can die happily thinking they created liberal paradise on earth—and that it was only squandered because of their disagreeable children and grandchildren, unable to find their bootstraps. They will pay handsomely for this illusion, this high trust society simulator. The bile and vitriol pointed towards those retirement communities is a result of the fact that we don’t think our Boomer parents and grandparents deserve to die happy—a petty sentiment indeed for a generation whose biggest sin was being born into a ghastly postwar order devoid of meaning.

It may seem odd, but the best way I could think to fully communicate the feeling that is Boomerdom was in the format of a Radio Show, the Boomer Truth Hour. FM radio was at its peak during their formative years, and the music and culture of the 1960s and 1970s communicates more about The Baby Boomers than any essay could.

I will end here how I ended my Boomer Truth in the 70s episode of Starman Radio:

“Most people under the age of 40 regard the boomer generation as the neocon, neolib, prototypical war pigs. The irony being, of course, the boomers having sung along all the anti-war anthems in the 60s and 70s. The narrative goes that these were the people who voted for extreme socialism when they needed a leg up in the 70s, and hard Thatcherism and Reaganism in the 80s once they got that leg up. They are the Bill Clinton generation as exemplified by Fleetwood Mac’s “Don't Stop (Thinking About Tomorrow)” featuring so heavily in his campaign. They're the Bush-Blair generation once their generation got fully into the positions of power in the late 90s and early 2000s. They've overseen an undeniable decline in safety and quality of life in the Western world.

The only problem with that narrative is that it buys wholly into the boomer truth regime's myths and the delusions of populism. The boomers never did any of that.

They were merely bystanders to the machinations of their own elite class. This is not something we can really blame on them, as we are still passengers on the post-war political train, a civilization still on rails. The media they consume and the consumer culture that pacified them is a testament to this, and that's why I'm making these, studying really the media of the time, its usages, its co-options, and it’s later folding into the mythology of the boomers at a generation.

As the boomers pass on and die, it's easier and easier to denounce them, make fun of them and turn them into caricatures, like Grandpa Simpson, the portrayal of the greatest generation in the 1990s.Eventually, you're just an old man, too weak to defend himself, who people will kick the cane out from under for fun.

The very idea of intergenerational conflict is a relatively new one and they only really took hold within the public consciousness in the 1960s with the rise of popular psychology and sociology.Perhaps the greatest trick of the Boomer Truth regime is making us believe boomers are anything other than our fathers, uncles, grandfathers, neighbours and countrymen: and as these people pass on, as this generation fades away, we think we will celebrate, but once they're gone, I think we'll just wish the ones we cared about, were still here.”

Did they get you to trade
Your heroes for ghosts?
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
Did you exchange
A walk-on part in the war
For a lead role in a cage?

Donate: https://ko-fi.com/scrumpmonkey

Our Telegram: https://t.me/EvScr123

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@scrumpmonkey

Thanks to PlasmaRob for helping me put the final touches to this piece.