I’m a tad disappointed in Gen Y. That’s in my capacity as a bonafide Baby Boomer and not in my capacity as a professor to said Gen Ys. Professorially I’m not the slightest bit let down by today’s college types and 20-somethings. I think they’re just dandy. They have it more together than we did, that’s for sure. They’re more serious than we were, more focused, more directed, better dressed, and oceans more polite.
It’s the flinty and fringe Gen Y-ers that are proving to be such a letdown. It has nothing to do with their being grubby, grungy, or skanky. That’s small potatoes. Nor do I refer to the snide insolence that they take such pains to cultivate. The morose little dears can wax as contre-soigné as they want, attempt any amount of outré angst, stare straight ahead as stonily as they dare. That’s par for the course, the standard smoke screen to hide the galloping insecurity that lies barely below the surface of the very young.
But why do they have to copy us? Today’s bedraggled Gen Y types are slouching around in tie-dye, for pete’s sake. Guys have poodle-dog hair or waist-length ponytails or meticulously unwashed mops. Many go in for downright Edwardian levels of facial hair. They wear sandals and jeans and shades and none-too-clean cotton tops. And they think this makes them look hip? Not to gentlemen of a certain age, that’s for sure. We cultivated precisely that same look when we were in our 20s. And now there they are: quaint, kind of cute really, old-fashioned and endearing in an exasperating sort of way. Sure, it’s flattering, if misguided, but it doesn’t work worth a tinker’s damn. We Boomers thought we looked cool, but we just looked silly to our elders, who typically beheld us with oddly strained expressions that I now recognize as barely-suppressed chortling.
But I can also tell you that, ridiculous or not, we didn’t look like carbon copies of our parents when they were our age. I’ll admit that perhaps my Dad’s generation isn’t the best yardstick for measuring juvenile fashion folly. Folks born in the 1920s went directly from threadbare Depression togs into uniform, after all. Then they came home and donned white shirts and string ties and wingtip shoes and started downing rivers of chilled martinis. Hawaiian shirts on the weekends, maybe. So it’s not surprising that their fashion sense had a certain rigidity to it. When we Boomers came along, we went for technicolor, loose fabrics, long hair, jewelry, sandals, and copious grunge. It annoyed the hell out of the parental units, which was precisely the idea.
And that’s the problem with today’s Gen Y skank-wannabees. They don’t look annoying. They don’t look experimental. They don’t look outrageous. They just look been-there, seen-that, done-that, unimaginative and uncreative and blah.
Some come on, kids. Offend me. You can’t do that by looking like twenty-year-old me. I’ll allow that you’ve made a start with the tattoos and piercings. You’ll be delighted to know that they make you look like trailer trash to me. In my day only criminals had tattoos, remember. I am a bit concerned about those tattoos, however. We could cut our hair, shave our beards, drop the granny glasses and headbands and tie-dye into the St. Vincent de Paul box, and take a bath. But what are you going to do when tattoos have become as passé as bustles and bustiers? Because that’s going to happen, you know, and sooner than you think.
Today I rode the 33 bus back home from the corner of Haight and Stanyan. In my immediate vicinity were three guys who could have stepped right out of 1972. The hair, the sideburns, the clothes, the studiedly stony expressions—all right to script. I almost felt like flashing them a peace sign and muttering US out of Vietnam, man. Maybe they were tourists just trying to fit in to the Haight-Ashbury, unaware that the Haight-Ashbury hasn’t fit in to the Haight-Ashbury in, oh, thirty years. As of 2012 it’s just a remote Mission District outpost, albeit lacking tacquerias and Hindu take-out joints. But my radar said home-grown, not imported. Such quaintness has become fairly common.
But I’ll tell you this: if you all start loafing around in public plazas, smoking joints while you strum guitars and sing Cum-bay-ya, I intend to take legal action for copyright infringement. Enough’s enough, after all.