Word: boom
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sense of mischief, but in between all the sound effects, he tells you something you didn't know. "When Reagan got shot, they had this doctor on TV, and he explained the surgical procedure with a diagram. This thing goes in here, that thing goes in there. The blood . . . boom, bam. I thought, 'Yeah, I get it. I understand.' You can't simplify complicated things, but you can make them understandable...
...heroes. The old Then meant an American exceptionalism, the divine dispensation that the nation thought it enjoyed in the world. In 1968 the American exceptionalism perished, but it was reborn in a generational exceptionalism -- the divine dispensation thought to be granted to the children of the great baby boom. The young were special, even sacred, in the way that America once was special and sacred. American innocence and virtue found new forms, new skins...
...great size of the baby boom generation also encouraged a sort of subliminal illusion. When time flows from father to son, from past through present into future, the generations have their orderly procession, moving vertically through time. But it was a metaphysical conceit of the baby boomers that the present expanded horizontally, into a kind of earthly eternity. "We want the world, and we want it now!" In the great collision of the generations, the young created their own world, a "counter culture" as Historian Theodore Roszak first called it, and endowed it with the significances and pseudo profundities...
Anthropologists speak of the origin myths of tribes. The children of the post-World War II baby boom, 76 million of them, were -- and in ways, still are -- an enormous tribe. The year 1968 represents the origin myth of that tribe...
...Hoffman hypothesis of atomic aging, the world was about 22 years old. The baby-boom generation, not only in America but in much of the rest of the world, grew up not merely in the shadow of the Bomb but also in an envelope of common experiences. Television gave them a collective memory -- of Howdy Doody and Beaver Cleaver, of public events (most vividly and traumatically, the assassination of President John Kennedy). Then, in the mid- and later '60s, the young endlessly enriched and elaborated their culture, through music mainly and through drugs and costume and linguistic style (groovy...