A few Ann Arbor expats gathered in my apartment in the Fillmore district of San Francisco in the early '70s.
I was born in Detroit two years after the end of World War II. My family moved into one of the city’s expanding suburbs, Royal Oak, amidst a cluster of other families that consisted of returning soldiers, wives and boys and girls named David, Susan, Bill, Bob, Jim, Mark, Bonnie, Nancy, Kathy, Fred, Peter, Carole, Paul, Diane, Mary, John, and so on and so forth.
We were the leading edge of the Baby Boom generation -- a cohort so large that we broke every institution we encountered. When we got to school, there were never enough classrooms, chairs, desks, books, or other resources. Teachers suddenly had to handle many more students at once than had previously been the case.
When we reached our teens, there simply was not enough overt passion in the music that our parents and older siblings enjoyed. Thus, the mass market for rock and roll was born.
Meanwhile, the political economy of the nation newly victorious in the second war of wars dictated that America become an empire, as all conquerors since time immemorial have done.
As we grew up, America's capitalist empire -- imperialistic, arrogant, and consumed by fear of communism -- spread globally.
We were served books like "Our Friend the Atom," a distinctly propagandistic reader that was our government's attempt to convince us, years before we could vote, of the rightness of its policy to develop nuclear power plants while stockpiling WMD's to protect us from the Russians, Chinese, and other socialistic foreigners.
Much of the rest of my generation's story is written contemporaneously in music, in poetry, in film, and in our collective memory. Confronted with the worldview that our fate was to conquer the world, many of us rebelled, begging to differ.
We opposed the war in Vietnam. We marched in support of the civil rights movement. We launched the modern women's liberation movement and the gay liberation movement. We smoked dope and dropped acid and danced in the streets.
We were environmentalists and self-help advocates, idealists and cynics, hippies and radicals. For our guides, we had Dylan and the Beatles, the Stones, and so many more. One of our earliest heroes, when we were still kids, was Elvis. The music always reflected us as the ragged edges of a churning chainsaw that sliced our way through society trying to establish a new way of being.
Did we succeed in doing that? The culture wars persist to this day, so I guess not. But some of us are still trying.
(I published an early version of this essay in 2006.)
LINKS:
US will help train Ukraine fighters on F-16 jets, Biden tells G7 (Financial Times)
G7 summit: Zelensky accuses some Arab leaders of 'blind eye' to war ahead of Japan trip (BBC)
“China’s Navy has expanded dramatically over the last two decades”—closing the military gap (Economist)
World watches in disbelief and horror as U.S. nears possible default (WP)
An LGTBQ+ pride event usually held in Tampa, Florida, has been canceled after Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) signed a bevy of anti-LGBTQ+ bills into law this week. “In the end, we didn’t want to take any chances," the city's Pride president said. [HuffPost]
Anti-Trump Republicans increasingly desperate to shake up race (The Hill)
Fearing leaks, Apple restricts its employees from using ChatGPT and AI tools (Ars Technica)
OpenAI launches a free ChatGPT app for iOS (CNN)
ChatGPT Is Already Obsolete — The next generation of AI is leaving behind the viral chatbot. (Atlantic)
Striking Hollywood scribes ponder AI in the writer's room (NPR)
Meta and Google news adds fuel to the open-source AI fire (Venture Beat)
I Finally Bought a ChatGPT Plus Subscription—and It’s Worth It (Wired)
With ChatGPT, Honeycomb Users Simply Say What They’re Looking for (New Stack)
The Birth of the Personal Computer (New Yorker)
Google Is Spared a Search-Engine Switch by a Major Partner (WSJ)
Uber will lease out entire office building in San Francisco (SFGate)
Georgia prosecutor clears decks for possible Trump charges (The Hill)
Human-evolution story rewritten by fresh data and more computing power (Nature)
The world’s largest lakes are shrinking dramatically, and scientists say they have figured out why (CNN)
New York City is sinking due to weight of its skyscrapers, new research finds (Guardian)
Floridians Demand to Know Where Disney Is Going so They Can Come With (New Yorker)
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