Having gotten angst-ed up over their selfish response to their teenage years (the hippie generation), then over their selfish response to early adulthood (the "me" decade of the 70s), then over their own children's equally self-involved narcissism as they grew up (the yuppie and soccer-mom riven 80s and 90s), boomers now seem to have moved smartly on into self-obsessed grand-parenthood:

The new G-Mother -- that's a hipper moniker, don't you think? -- has short red hair, a Mini Cooper, frequent-flier miles, and an iPod in her Kate Spade bag. The average age of a first-time grandparent today is 47, which was, incidentally, the average life expectancy just a century ago. We are the same age our grandmothers were, but we're in the middle of our lives, not at the end.
...
Look, I'd love to nip over and whisper secrets into 1-month-old Maggie's ears, or to dress 2-year-old Ryan in the black leather jacket I bought her recently and take her to look for late blackberries in Golden Gate Park on my bike (with its deluxe new kid seat). But I have a job. I'm a reporter, I have two books to write, a husband who wants to go to France, and I just bought an investment property in Portland, Oregon. I love my grandchildren, but being a grandmother got added to my to-do list.

The crass materialism, let alone the staggering self-involvement, would be funny if it weren't quite obvious the author is deadly serious.

I think the whole thing is more about who a very wealthy woman in her fifties living in San Francisco associates with than it is any sort of generalization about her generation at large. Suzanne is ... ahem ... around that age and is quite enthusiastic about being a grandmother. Her older sister is just tickled about being a great aunt. My own mom, who technically isn't a boomer but can definitely see them from there, is fairly nuts about both her grandkids.

So why my own broadside at the start of this article? Keep in mind it's people like this, people who have to "place limits" on their grandparent duties, who by and large are chronicling their generation's progress through history. The boomers seem like narcissists with their lips superglued to the mirror because the people who write about them are narcissists with their lips superglued to the mirror.

Which I guess is to say, NORMAL PEOPLE OF AMERICA BORN BETWEEN 1946 AND 1964: GET OFF YOUR BUTTS AND START WRITING BOOKS BEFORE MS. ADAIR LARA AND HER ILK RUIN YOUR GENERATION FOR ALL TIME!

Thank you, thank you. We'll be here all week. Try the veal!

Via Dr. Helen