Greedy, trivial, venal, cosseted . . . The postwar generation of children grew up protected by cosy routine

We thought we were safe. But we made two mistakes. Even as we railed against the suburban horror show of Thatcherite economics, we believed the intrusions of municipal statism were being rolled back; but we didn't foresee what would take its place. And even as we delightedly played with our new PCs, we did not foresee the combination of networked computing, on the one hand, and the terrible, infantilising collusion between Baby Boomer politicians and global cor poratism, on the other.

SHOOT: The Baby Boomers also invented the concept of 'the consumer', and all the manipulations and chicanery associated with that. All this with alternately fading and sharpening shadows of mushroom clouds bubbling in the background.

clipped from www.newstatesman.com In other words, the defining experience of the Baby Boomers was that they - we - were formed with a sort of inbuilt, ineluctable cognitive dissonance; and the consequence was what the Portuguese, who know a thing or two about losing power, call saudade: a lament for the loss of something you never actually had. Rejecting the stability of our early years, unable to precipitate, to crystallise, the perpetual change of what came next, the Baby Boomers had to make it up as we went along. And there are none so scared, so minatory, so authoritarian and yet so rejecting of authority as the self-invented who briefly glimpsed a golden age against a backdrop of danger and turmoil. Our lives are played on air guitar. And into the space left by the Baby Boomers' missing authenticity flood chimeras, visions, turnip ghosts; life shrunk to images on a screen, identity-conferring products, the hope of branding on the one hand and fundamentalism on the other.