Goodbye
Monday, June 2, 2008 at 05:12AM in blue "Oh, Melancholy."
"Blue?"
"Oh, Melancholy. Why are you so angry all the time?"
"Blue, how did you get this number?"
"They took down your post in the Observer,* you know."
"I saw that."
"What do the baby boomers have to do with Hillary Clinton?"
"Blue, seriously. How did you get this number?"
"Don't you want people to take you seriously?"
(silence)
"Oh, Melancholy. What's happening to you? What did Felicity say when she left?"
(silence)
"You never call anymore. At least you used to call. I thought now that Felicity was gone, we could..."
"Blue."
"Oh, Melancholy."
***
To the editors of the New York Observer:
The bitterness of the Hill-Billy and her supporters has been awesome to behold. Hell hath no fury like a baby boomer scorned, I guess.
Saying goodbye is hard to do, but think of this as practice for that ultimate goodbye, which your narcissism and feelings of entitlement, no matter how deeply felt or stridently expressed, will not make less inevitable.
Thanks for ending the war in Vietnam and for volunteering in the Civil Rights movement. You helped America "progress." The price was high, but that didn’t stop you, because whatever you wanted, you always took.
With your protests, you wrecked our universities, and with your lack of restraint, you coarsened the public discourse. You ushered in many, many "revolutions"--in social relations, mores, culture, and taste--each one making our lives more "free" and our country more "equitable," while putting to the guillotine the "out-dated" ideas of gentility, honor, and nobility. You eliminated welfare and poured contempt on chivalry. You gloried in the destruction of the Establishment, and gave us in its place an ever-expanding army of bureaucratic drones who "establish guidelines" for how we ought to live our lives--whether in educating our children, cleaning the environment, or "securing the homeland."
But the greatest of all your triumphs was this: despite your youthful protests against the Man--and how loudly you declaimed you were different, talking about the generation Gap while groovin' to the liberating beats of your so-called "music," how loudly you said, in front of all your classmates and Senator Brooke that "there are some things we feel, feeling that our prevailing, acquisitive, and competitive corporate life, including tragically the universities, is not the way of life for us. We're searching for a more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating mode of living,"--yet, yet, in the end, so lucky for you, how mightily you profited from His corporate excretions, your noses nestled so carefully against His a** they looked like pig snouts stuck in troughs.
I confess, when I look around the table of the Wal-Mart boardroom, I have difficulty distinguishing the (wo)men from the pigs.
You certainly were an unforgettable generation. Your leaders, Slick and the Idiot Son, well, what can we say? America will never be the same after you. Your children thank you for your service.
Enjoy Florida. We'll try to remember to call.