The Naughtie Aughties

If you’re going to start analysing the decade, you might as well do it from the perspective of an American Baby Boomer.

Try as we might to acknowledge that Canadian culture is slightly different than that of our Southern neighbour, or that we and most people we like were actually born in the mid 1980s, it really doesn’t matter. The vast majority of our culture’s influence is from the perspective of a white, middle class American man born sometime in the winter of 1947. And like it or not, this is his story.

Our protagonist knew a simple, homey life within the 1950s. This era will remain synonymous with the good old days and the American dream - mostly because our baby boomer was too young to observe the nuances of domestic conflict, rising feminism, and racial inequities which were rampant and rising. He remembers a slightly hazy, very comforting time. He remembers his parents and they seemed happy. Milkshakes...I remember milkshakes. They had cherries on top. That sort of thing.

Along with the development of our baby-boomers brain came the rise of his hormones and the experience of social awareness, conflict, and rebellion. This was the sixties. Our baby boomer kissed a girl, smoked some pot, went to college and felt that he was smarter than everyone he had ever met back home. He railed against injustice. He argued about Vietnam. He did not grasp the concept of gentrification, or the hypocrisy of berating the establishment of his parents while simultaneously eating their food and making daisy-necklaces on their lawn. Those were judgements reserved for a different time...fucking hipsters. This was a time of passion, truth, and ideals.

Eventually, our baby boomer stopped smoking so much pot and got a job. And while we’re still pretty vague as to what, exactly, happened during the 70s, by the 80s things were going well. There was excess enough for hairspray and globular lipstick. And by the 1990s, our baby boomer had risen through the ranks of his respective career and found himself to be established, secure, and indomitable. He had money. He had power. He was, in his own way, ‘the man.’ And being the man, it turns our, is generally a kickass thing to be.

Which isn’t to say that he flaunted his power, or entirely forgot his impassioned, pot-smoking days. He gave to charity. He rallied for AIDS. He has treated his own children, now young adults, in a manner which would have been unheard of within his father’s belt-whipping heyday. (And herein we learn that our baby boomer, likely, has some very deep seeded psychological issues.) And generally, there is no question that The Man is, for all of his prestige, a pretty great, down-to-earth guy.

Enter the aughties, step into the 00's.

Think what you may of the preamble, the causes, and the specific acts and consequences, but at some point or another, our baby boomer, and the North American, middle-aged, middle-class society he represents, was complacent in some of the following: the invasion of Afghanistan, the invasion of Iraq, the election and re-election of President Bush (or if you’re Canadian, Stephen Harper), Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, unprecedented greed, unprecedented profit, and the eventual collapse of Wall Street and the global economy. Did you personally rape an Iraqi teenager, insight a civil war, or take a smiling photograph of yourself in front of a pyramid of naked torture victims? Well, no. Certainly not. And yet, in another way, in the way that happens when you yourself are an intrinsic part of a society that commits unconscionable, terrible acts...you did.

(Canadian Society, don’t get smug. If you don’t think your country was complacent in torturing child soldiers, burning crops of Afghan peasants, and committing a series of acts which gall the human spirit on an equal level to our American counterparts, you’d be wrong. We’re a smaller country with a much smaller military, but considering that, we did good.)

So, the year 2010 is upon us, and our protagonist in the the verge of turning 63. The decade ahead could be a time of simpler things, of leisure, of mutual funds, of establishing his legacy as he gives up the reins and begins to think ‘retire.’ It could be many, many things.

A man who’s not as handsome or persuasive as he once was has a slightly shaky hand and greying hair when he says, “I did what I had to do. Don’t you dare judge me.” And I look at him coldly and I say that, I do. I am railing against the man that I may inevitably become. But it’s barely 1970, to me, and I still think that, this time around, anything could happen.