It’s a happy day in JimmyC land because a missive has arrived from my oldest friend, Hubartos vanDrehl, the Prince of Paonia…Colorado, that is.
If you’ll recall, when last we heard from vanDrehl (see June 18 blog), he was inveighing against Buttcrack Nation and other discomfitting societal situations. I invited vanDrehl to write another blog entry soon. But I guess when you’re the mystic of the mountains, time is irrelevant. And, besides, in vanDrehl’s mysterious realm perhaps six weeks qualifies as soon.
At any rate, yesterday’s entry about last Saturday’s Paul McCartney concert sparked vanDrehl’s creative juices, and here are his words of…well, I would like to say “wisdom,” but I’ll let you be the judge.
P.S. Before we launch, I must make a correction. In the June 18 blog, I offered an incorrect pronunciation of vanDrehl’s name. Like I say, he’s my oldest friend, and sometimes you forget small things like that. For the record, it’s pronounced van-drell, as in Archie Bell and the Drells. (I need to tighten up, don’t you know?)
*****
My Dear JimmyC,
Interesting. Interesting that you would wax nostalgic about a pale 70s version of an over-produced and over-hyped quartet of charming 60s mop tops that is still being shoved down the throats of people not yet born when the Bee’uls roamed the earth.
Also interesting is that I distinctly remember your dazed, confused and offended feelings about that disheveled time in the Sixties when a lot of us spoiled, pampered and indulged Boomers were feeling frisky.
I think the Seventies were your decade of choice, after having escaped the suffocating clutches of our hometown in order to breathe and grow. Being overly nostalgic about our Catholic-Boys’ education and paltry social life would be like laughing and telling funny stories about service in an ugly war. Being angry about our terrorized upbringing under the thumb of Holy Mother Church is like being angry at an ancient Nazi death-camp guard on trial and life support.
The 60s and 70s died with Lennon in 1980, when he took a bullet for fame. You remember him? He was the best and brightest Bee’ul, with tons more brains and talent than Cutie-Pie Paul. I believe it was Satchel Paige who said, “Don’t look back, something might be gaining on you.”
We were born in 1946, the first of the Boomers, and we’ve been making them pay attention to, and pay for, our sins ever since. Having turned this country into a spiritually, culturally, creatively, morally and financially bankrupt wasteland that produces nothing, stands for nothing and consumes everything with the help of 60 years of television and other types of useless information that oozes from pixel-ated surfaces, the Boomers should repair to the barn. Had I been your date the other night for the “Tour Down Memory Lane,” I would have stayed in the bathroom like your long-ago candidate for date rape. You owe her a civil apology and a night on the town if you can find your walker.
Like the old song says, these are the good old days. And like the yogis say, be here now. Yes, these are the good old days, JimmyC. Have a good one on me: The tab’s actually being picked up by the next generation(s). Boomers ride free.
I Remain,
A Detached Observer Somewhere On the Western Slope of Colorado,
Hubartos vanDrehl
JimmyCsays: At the juncture of journalism and daily life in KC 
Whoa. Serious trash talking. One funny fellow.
Our parents, the so called greatest generation, survived the Depression, won World War II and left a legacy of racism and sexism.
We boomers inherited a divided nation and enlarged the melting pot to include many once scorned and excluded. We helped to upend the rigid social norms of the 50s and challenge centuries of entrenched racism. What women are able to do today would have been unimaginable 50 years ago. In our g-g-generation, environmental protection has become the norm. Toxic runnoffs are no longer tolerated, even if they take two months to fix.
Bill Gates and Steve Jobs are boomers; they have left some sort of positive legacy. Boomers built the Hubble Space telescope and the International Space Station and have completely revolutionized our vision of the universe. Did I mention the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland?
Personal freedom, tolerance, openness, transparency and equality—these are the values of the Baby Boom era, and we live them daily at home, work, school and in our many relationships.
Yeah, many of us are insufferable navel gazers and greedy libertarians. There were deserters and cowards in WWII too.
I like the guy’s blog. He seems a little jaded, but that’s OK; he brings it off well with lots of good stuff. Lots of Catholic-educated people seem to rail about the over-supervision and guidance from their school days, don’t they?
Archie Bell and the Drells from Houston Texas….very, very cool how they got their name into the lyrics of that hit song. I don’t think they ever came close to charting another record.
I remember watching the Beatles on Ed Sullivan the first time they appeared and could hardly believe my eyes as I sat there with the shortest Princeton haircut you could possibly get, while still having some vague semblance of a part (to be worked with your 59-cent, Ace unbreakable comb). I stuck with them all the way through Sgt. Pepper and wore out an 8-track tape of that album, playing it almost continually until the bearings in the plastic case started squealing so loud that you couldn’t hear the music.
In those “wild and rebellious” days, you gave a worn-out tape a proper funeral by tossing it out the car window as you blazed down Ward Parkway or Southwest Boulevard, watching in the rear view mirror as the cars behind you finished it off into plastic splinters and unrolled tape. Kids today seem to do the same thing, as I see CD’s at curbside all the time. But it’s not the same.
The next Beatles song I remember after Sgt. was “Come Together,” and I didn’t really know what to think of it. I was in the Army by then, and much more interested in the Isley Brothers and newcomers Creedence Clearwater Revival. I think rock&roll and soul music were waking up again, and the Brits had returned to England.
My Dear JimmyC,
Your latest blurb is two days old and like old newspapers, seldom revisited. However, I’d like to point out to Mr. Elmore that the leaders of the women’s movement of the 60s and 70s were all born well before WWII and were not Boomers.
The Good Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King would be about 85 had he lived, but now the black community is saddled with the likes of the booming, flaming Revs. Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson. Crack cocaine completes the triple threat to all the courageous work of Rev. MLK. Wealthy black businessmen are joining the Republican Party in disgusted droves.
I personally haven’t had much use for party politics since we were served up Hubert Horatio Humphrey and Richard Milhouse Nixon in ’68 and I wouldn’t touch the Libertarian Party with a stick. Ralph Nader and the Greens gave us Bush, The Retard, and THE DICK, Cheney. If you thought Humphrey was all right, you should read what Hunter Thompson had to say about him.
Boomers were somewhat involved in stopping our little police action in Southeast Asia, but at last count, how many wars are we currently in?
And, boy, am I glad the environment’s all spiffed up again as are the good people on the Gulf Coast as well as the denizens of our cities who are breathing squeaky-clean air.
I don’t mean to totally condemn my generation, I’m just tired of putting up with the cultural wasteland of the Sixties being crammed down our throats by a generation on the way out and whose time has past. Boomers gave it their best shot. Adios.
Let a smile and a belly laugh be your umbrellas in these rainy, rainy days.
I Remain,
Hubartos vanDrehl