What I noticed most about David Brooks’s report card for the Baby Boomer cohort in his latest New York Times column was the “extra credit” question at the end:
Special Bonus Question: Who is the quintessential boomer and what does he or she say about the generation?
Here are the nominees:
- Bill Clinton: Hugely talented, high achieving, sometimes self-indulgent.
- Steve Jobs: Design genius; lacked some interpersonal skills.
- Madonna: Scraped her way to the top; became the emblem of self-reinvention.
- Bob Dylan: Entered the stage with a burst of genius that seemed as if it was going to change everything, but somehow didn’t.
- Steven Spielberg: Preserved human values in an age of technology; looked back admiringly to earlier generations.
- Donald Trump.
Bob Dylan was born in 1941. He’s not a Baby Boomer at all. Bill Clinton and Donald Trump were both born in 1946—they’re just barely Baby Boomers and actually have a lot more in common with the Silent Generation than with Baby Boomers.
It’s not as though there weren’t many more figures who were solidly Baby Boomers to consider including Barack Obama, David Letterman, Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, Jamie Dimon or any of the others?
Madonna.
Constant reinvention, attention grabbing, a sense of confidence.