Boomers

For U.S. Baby Boomers Today, Iceland Has An Authentic Allure Reminiscent of Europe in the 1970s.

Back in 1969 over half-a-million Baby Boomers traveled to Europe, sometimes for extended expeditions through exotic cultures and other times in search of new identities. That was the beginning of a tidal wave of Boomers traveling to Europe that grew throughout the 1970s.

I predict that Boomers, especially Americans, will now travel in accelerating numbers to and through a mystifying land of fire and ice. The next chapter of the generation’s zeitgeist includes Iceland as a leading travel attraction.

Here’s why:  

We are standing on a viewing platform four stories above Oskjuhlid hill, beholding a 360-degree panoramic view of Reykjavik, Iceland. Called The Pearl, this popular attraction consists of a glass dome resting on five mammoth tanks where the city stores natural hot water for heating the tightly woven community of 118,000 residents.

To the southeast I see the sun just reaching apogee perhaps 20 degrees above the horizon even though it is noon on a mid-October day.

Across the bay of Faxaflói to the northwest, I see Snæfellsjökull, a 700,000 year old stratovolcano with a glacier covering its summit. Commanding the tip of Snæfellsnes Peninsula 75 miles directly across this bay, the ancient volcano towers above the landscape, stoic and mildly threatening though it last erupted in 200 AD. This view connects me with Jules Verne who in 1864 employed Iceland’s most famous landmark as the entry passageway to begin his “A Journey to the Center of the Earth.”

Within The Pearl’s massive glass dome and casual café, we have eaten our fill of Iceland’s traditional meat soup, a lamb stew brimming with rutabagas and carrots to add bright flavor and color. Having been fueled by this robust lunch, a small harbor city with a big persona awaits our further exploration throughout the afternoon.

Ahead of us will come adventurous days traveling to geysers, waterfalls, lava flows, glaciers and quaint agricultural communities.

We will tour the Hellisheiði Geothermal Plant situated above an active volcanic ridge in southwest Iceland, which produces 303 megawatts of electricity and 133 megawatts of thermal energy. Eighty percent of Iceland’s energy comes from geothermal sources—a striking example of how non-polluting geothermal energy is being harnessed in a sustainable manner.

On the aforementioned Snæfellsnes Peninsula, we will trek along a hiking trail above black lava beaches connecting Hellnar and Arnarstapi, stopping to linger over a steaming bowl of fish stew at a small cottage tucked in a cove above jagged lava cliffs. The young Iceland woman who prepares our lunch from the day’s catch is typically friendly, fluent in English and most welcoming.

Iceland is a land of powerful contrasts:  between modern and primitive, high-tech and high-touch, natural landscapes and inspired human engineering—between a distinctly idiosyncratic Nordic tongue and the universal language of the hippest rock music today. Iceland is wild spaces softened by gentle, rugged people fiercely proud of their island’s heritage. It is technically a European country geographically isolated from all the hubbub of the mainland to the east.

Now Iceland calls to a generation.

Boomers will go to Iceland because McDonald’s failed there, unable to muster profitable retail support from a country proud of its slow food traditions. Boomers will set out to sample rich espresso coffees where Starbuck’s has yet to gain a foothold.

 

Many will take an odyssey more than a vacation because Iceland asks for introspection and engagement: to consider the toughness of a Scandinavian people who have quietly built a modern nation, unbowed by economic hardships from the Great Recession; and then to touch lava flows of antiquity and smell sulfurous air misting up from bubbling cauldrons of super-heated water.

They will set out because one of their generation’s musical heroes lived and died for peace, and his most cherished value has been enshrined by Yoko Ono on the island of Videy, a short ferry ride from Reykjavik. John Lennon’s wife and spiritual partner annually ignites her artistic tribute—Imagine Peace Tower—piercing the night sky from October 9th (John Lennon’s birth date) to December 8th (the date of his assassination in 1980).

They will visit other chapters of their shared 20th century history when, for example, U.S. President Ronald Reagan and General Secretary of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev held a summit that eventually resulted in the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. They will discover the mental battleground where two strategic titans clashed for international domination: the 1972 victory by world chess champion Bobby Fischer over Boris Spassky at the height of the Cold War.

Boomers will go there because Iceland lures the adventurous and peripatetic with the ultimate rock ‘n’ roll road trip: a circumnavigation of the island on Highway 1, a lava asphalt byway also known as Ring Road, all 830 miles of it. This adventure through time and geology will tap into their quixotic and youthful feelings about the American west that many first discovered on western television shows and movies from the 1950’s.

Along this circuitous highway they will pass through landscapes similar to Nevada’s dry and barren red-rock expanses; California’s magical central coast, punctuated by Edward Weston’s towering cliffs hanging over Big Sur’s splashing waves; Alaska’s white capped mountains and blue-ice glaciers; and, Yellowstone’s bubbling mud pots and furious spewing geysers.

 

Boomers will be lured to Iceland in some ways similar to how so many once were compelled to visit Europe during the countercultural psychodramas of the 1960s and 70s. They will come in search of adventure, ephemera and meaning and maybe a couple of all-nighters in Reykjavik’s harbor bars that finish late-late happy hours near midnight to launch the main drinking events, sometimes coinciding with the northern lights, the mother of all natural hallucinations.

They will soak their hangovers in The Blue Lagoon, a man-made public bath carved from lava and filled with iridescent, milky-blue waters. Here Icelanders have demonstrated great creativity and technical know-how by generating power geothermally then recapturing that steam as soothing bathwater. In this otherworldly place, Boomers can soak away the stresses of their hectic lives while exploring steam caves, saunas and hot pots, and smearing their age-creased faces with gray silica, a natural product reputed for its skin restorative promises.

Speaking with Líney Inga Arnórsdóttir, the North American marketing manager for Promote Island and Inspired by Iceland, I learned that Iceland’s tourism leaders comprehend the vast visitor potential that will soon arrive from North America. 

She nodded when I shared my observations about the volume of post-50 travelers that I had just encountered during our own guided and unguided adventures. Tourism is the third most valuable industry, exceeded only by fishing and industrial manufacturing. Attracting more travelers won’t be their greatest challenge; accommodating them will be, especially along the Ring Road’s most secluded outposts. High tourist season, from June through August, stretches the limits of a country that has not been included on many “bucket lists”—until now.

Thus, for those Boomers who are also looking into investments that can integrate core values with personal fulfillment, this mysterious land where the aurora borealis dances across the night sky is in need of sustainable and creative accommodations and everything that comes with the growth of a nation’s visitor industry. Opportunities to profit from adventure travel, eco-tourism, heritage tourism and cultural tourism await the entrepreneurs of this generation.

Thanks to the creative work of Líney Arnórsdóttir and her team, here’s another way of perceiving the possibilities of Iceland, post-50:

Inspired by Iceland from MaddMultimedia.com on Vimeo.

All photography in this blog post copyright 2016, Brent Green & Associates, Inc. All rights reserved.

Baby Boomers' Woodstock in 1969 Is A Public Dream Of National Unity So Needed In 2022

The Woodstock Music and Art Fair has been described as a watershed, seminal, formative, game changing, and with dozens of superlatives. Those who’ve attempted to contain the Baby Boomer generation in a tidy sociological package have pointed at Woodstock in summary, sometimes with derision for the Bacchanalian overtones this word can represent.

Scheduled over three days on a dairy farm in New York from August 15 to 17, 1969, Woodstock means little until you place it in larger context of a society unraveling around the newest generation of young adults, a dominant and dominating cohort of malcontents. From their parents’ generation they had absorbed rich idealism for time-honored principles of social and economic justice.

From the world they were inheriting, they had discovered unbearable discontinuities and hypocrisies. From romanticized western archetypes, the first generation to grow up with television had learned to stare down orthodoxy.

Woodstock was just one major event with national impact that blasted through 1969. The final year of the tumultuous sixties included discordant Richard Milhous Nixon succeeding Lyndon Baines Johnson as 37th president of the United States. US troops stationed in Vietnam crested at 543,000.

Three hundred students stormed and occupied Harvard University’s administration building in a spellbinding demonstration of street theater. Charles Manson’s LSD-crazed cult executed actress Sharon Tate and seven others, including Tate’s unborn child. And this was all before a turbulent autumn featuring the largest peaceful protest in US history on October 15, the first Vietnam War Moratorium. And that’s not even close to half of it.

Woodstock was not merely a rock concert showcasing some of the best rock ‘n’ roll bands of the sixties. It was an interlude arriving in the context of more social and political upheaval than most Americans had witnessed. It was a chaotic but peaceful prelude to forthcoming breakdown between government and governed when combined will would end an unpopular war.

Denver gave a nod to Woodstock six weeks beforehand, from June 27 to June 29 at Mile High Stadium. A three-day concert featured forthcoming Woodstock headliners including Joe Cocker, Credence Clearwater Revival, Johnny Winter, and Jimi Hendrix.

The Mile High City also served as a major waypoint where hitchhiking and ride-sharing hippies passed through in droves on their way to a chimerical instant city plopped in the middle of Max Yasgur’s dairy farm.

I did not attend the concert although, like many of my peers, I gave the odyssey passing consideration. When “Butch” Barger asked me if I wanted to drive across country with him to upstate New York, I barely had a clue what he was talking about. Prospects for this road trip sounded interesting but indefinite.

In retrospect, I’m glad I didn’t go because mud and unsanitary conditions would not have enlivened me even at 19. I’m better suited to experiencing Woodstock cinematically from a home theater, shower and comfy bed nearby.

To become embroiled in the turmoil and idealism this festival represented did not require attendance. Political upheaval, disintegrating racial relations, burgeoning feminism, environmental degradation, and rock ‘n’ roll culture enveloped a generation, inundating us, forging strident collective mentalities.

From Alaska to Colorado to New York, young people crossed the country for peace and love in a time of rage and resentment. They wanted to do the right thing, and to them this meant standing firm against received authority. Woodstock at once represented the improbable and the possible: just three spins of the globe, three short days — an interruption of business-as-usual that persists even in this new century.

I saw remnants of Woodstock as young protesters clamored along downtown Denver's 16th Street Mall during the Democratic National Convention in August 2008, their faces lit up with passion and high purposes. I felt reassuring presence of shared citizenship in Civic Center Park in October of that same year when more than 100,000 gathered peacefully to hear words of hope from their next president, improbably an African-American man.

I saw the teenagers of Woodstock with wizened faces filling Red Rocks Amphitheater for the 40th anniversary of sixties’ super-group Jethro Tull.

I think of Woodstock-era uproar when watching media reports of roiling public protests against the overturn of Roe v Wade, the 2022 Supreme Court decision to outlaw women's right to choose keeping or terminating pregnancies. Or in the faces of impassioned young protesters confronting a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.

The 53rd anniversary of Woodstock was virtually meaningless if nothing meaningful survives. But when we peer through those throngs of tie-dyed t-shirts and tribal costumes into the present, we see an extraordinarily different America over five decades later: arguably, a better America, but nevertheless still beset by division and divisiveness.

How to remember and honor those who have died from Covid-19

When we depart this life, must the stories of our existence fade within the passing of a few years? That has been the fate of billions of mortals who have preceded today’s living.

Since the beginning of human history around 50,000 B.C., 108 billion humans have been born. Just over seven billion are living now, or 6.5 percent of all those ever born are still breathing—a tiny fraction when we consider the meteoric growth of world population today.

How much do we know of the 101 billion humans who have preceded us? The majority are nameless, forgotten as if they never lived, merely dust in the wind.

Except for a relative handful of kings, queens, heroes, political leaders, scientists, artists, writers, intellectuals, athletes, and celebrities who have been held in perpetuity through their works or historical documentation by others, the clear majority of human stories have just perished. We know nothing of those masses who have lived and passed on. Most of us do not know anything about the lives and times of our great-great-great grandparents, if even their names.

The First Immortal

Five thousand years ago, in Mesopotamia, the ancient lands between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers now called Iraq, something miraculous happened in the evolution of our species and its ceaseless battle against temporality. Humans discovered how to write.

Death could no longer silence people after departing their mortal bodies. The written word gave our species the power to reach through millennia and speak inside the heads of those living in the distant future.

Then something else happened, another miracle of self-preservation. Enheduanna, daughter of the first emperor in history, was also the first person known to sign her name to a literary creation.

She lived 4300 years ago, and her gift to humanity was the possibility of immortality that can be bestowed by the written word when assigned to a single visionary author. The writing was no longer nameless, codified thought but personal ownership in the future.

Enheduanna’s name means “Lady Ornament of the Sky.” For centuries after her death, the first author continued to set standards for culture, literature, liturgy hymns, poetry, and religion. Her legacy includes an extensive body of creative output, including forty-two poems, psalms, and prayers that have served as a template for poets, priests, and scribes throughout history.

We know that she existed at a certain point in time. We know what she dreamed. We are aware of her fearlessness and prescience. We know she was a great author, composer, poet, and High Priestess of the ancient Moon God Nanna at temples in the Mesopotamian city-states of Ur and Uruk (Iraq).

Enheduanna lives today, four-and-a-third millennia after she exhaled her final breath. She speaks to us through her creations—and when combined into a complete archive, we have her time capsule filled with revelations that we can contemplate at will.

Permanent Acclaim

A generation ago most unexceptional people, removed from the public eye, could not hope to persist beyond death, except perhaps as represented by a deteriorating marker bearing an irrelevant name, lost somewhere in a cemetery or mausoleum. Without notable personal achievements that would become written documents or audio or video recordings, it was not possible for the majority to survive beyond the grave.

With the advent of the digital age and the extraordinary power and memory of the internet, it is now possible for anyone to write and record their thoughts, dreams, and values for others to read, see, and hear—and with archival preservation, for thousands of years from now. Today, for the first time in human history, anybody can paddle beyond the grave, aiming for the distant shores of time.

Questions to contemplate about your “Immortality Narrative”

• Which of your life lessons are most important to share with your children or other young people in your life?
• Have you been inspired by classic children’s book characters, and, if so, which characters had the most impact on your views and values?
• Who would you most like to attend your last lecture and why are these people most important?
• If you were to be diagnosed with a terminal disease, such as pancreatic cancer, how would you prefer to spend your final months of “functional health,” if granted this time for closure? What would be your priorities?
• What tangible memories about you would you like to leave for future generations, and in what form would these memories be encapsulated? A book or other writing? A video? Artwork? A legacy website?

Excerpted from Questions of the Spirit: The Quest for Understanding at a Time of Loss by Brent Green, Copyright 2017. All Rights Reserved.

A beautiful hit song by Kansas, a progressive rock super-group, helps drive home the point of this blog post. Kerry Livgren, the song's writer and guitarist, was my high school classmate. Kerry has recently published his memoir entitled Miracles Out of Somewhere.

 

To order your copy of Questions of the Spirit, visit the book's Amazon page.

Why those who oppose the word "generation" and reject "generational framing" do not understand or practice modern marketing

Louis Menand, a staff writer at The New Yorker and professor with Harvard University, wrote a combative article entitled: It’s Time to Stop Talking About “Generations.” His subtitle then draws a line in the sand: From Boomers to Zoomers, the concept gets social history all wrong.

His op-ed piece denouncing the construct of “generation” mirrors articles by other pundits and social critics, including anti-ageism author and activist Ashton Applewhite and sociology professor Philip Cohen for The Washington Post.

Menand may be a brilliant writer and Harvard professor — even the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize — but he is not a marketer who has conceived and executed generational marketing programs with measured results for 40 years.

Case studies back up my claim that he is shortsighted.

First, a little background about direct mail testing. What does it takes to "beat a control" subscription pitch for a major magazine or newspaper? Once a publisher discovers a winner, their control direct mailers get tested against all the time, and challengers often fail. A direct mail pitch for the Wall Street Journal remained unbeaten for over 25 years. Martin Conroy, who created the famous control mailer and mentored me, brought in a staggering $2 billion in subscription sales for the newspaper, mainly because his captivating publisher letter was pitch-perfect and motivating.

Here are two control-breaking direct mail packages that I conceived and wrote by applying knowledge of generational sociology:

1. A direct mail campaign for Natural Home magazine specifically targeted Baby Boomer women, beating the client’s control mailer and gaining a profitable volume of new subscribers while giving content editors and article writers fresh strategic insights: https://bgassociates.com/marketing-baby-boomers/boomer-marketing-case-studies/natural-home/
2. A Men’s Fitness magazine campaign for Weider Publications targeted Millennial men, when they were in their late teens and twenties, and beat the long-term circulation direct mail package: https://bgassociates.com/b-2-c-3/fitness-magazine/

My firm's case studies are as close to hard science as social science gets because we measure human behavioral responses to emotional triggers presented through advertising, including timing, subscriptions, source lists, demographics, renewals, and cross-promotional activities.

When critics, such as Menand and Cohen, declare that generational constructs are irrelevant and ineffective in the marketplace where the rubber meets the road, I say: “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

One does not even need to use a generational label to create effective cohort-sensitive advertising and direct mail programs. One merely needs to understand and communicate deeper “collective mentalities” inculcated by membership in a distinct generational cohort. Generational research from significant companies such as Pew Research Center can inspire profound insights into dominant and dynamic shared values. These insights can be transformed into subscriptions and sales.

What about Menand's denunciation of accepted Baby Boomer social history? The professor declares: “Most young people in the sixties did not practice free love, take drugs, or protest the war in Vietnam.” He asserts: “In a poll taken in 1967, when people were asked whether couples should wait to have sex until they were married, sixty-three percent of those in their twenties said yes, virtually the same as in the general population. In 1969, when people aged twenty-one to twenty-nine were asked whether they had ever used marijuana, eighty-eight percent said no. When the same group was asked whether the United States should withdraw immediately from Vietnam, three-quarters said no, about the same as in the general population.”

Aside from the fact that I was in college during those years with observations that contradict his poll summary, I would ask the professor: “So when did you come to believe that people respond truthfully to poll questions that are potentially incriminating and uncomfortable to answer?” Or “Why would you expect Boomer respondents to be candid about personal beliefs and behaviors during a time they had deep suspicions of authority figures, including researchers?”

Menand does not get a pass from me as merely a “sociology pundit.” He asks: “Are they (generations) a helpful way to understand anything?” I have answered his question.

Marketing is what makes everything in society prosper, including Harvard University, The Washington Post, and The New Yorker. If we eliminate the construct of generation from our lexicon in the name of social equity, why don't we also eliminate imprecise descriptors such as women, African Americans, adolescents, and college professors?

My counterarguments aren't mere opinions borne from a well of righteous indignation. My conclusions are straightforward: consumer cohorts (a.k.a. generations) have collective mentalities instilled during adolescence and early adult years, and, when presented with creative and impactful interpretations of those shared worldviews, they respond by subscribing, buying, joining, giving, and investing, etc. Generational collective mentalities are salient and can trigger desired economic behaviors.

In conclusion, Menand thrums his rhetorical question as if a dare: “Are they (generations) a helpful way to understand anything?” My answer is yes. Generational sociology helps marketers understand how to communicate with and trigger desirable responses from targeted cohorts.

I'm willing to look at other perspectives about the validity and usefulness of “generation,” but contrarian views need to be tied to equally rigorous experimentation rather than stand unchallenged as asserted opinions, no matter how fervent and articulate the messengers.

A Gift for the Boomers in Your Life

Much of today's successful citizen engagement has been influenced by the late-1960s and early-1970s. Fifty years ago, motivated college and university students from the Boomer generation molded the strategies and tactics of modern democratic mobilization.

Cause-related activism and protest demonstrations are fundamental to the success of The American Story. Citizens have been assembling and speaking truth to power for over 244 years. Promoting constructive change is central to the nation’s DNA. Boomers added their passionate voices to the refrain for “a more perfect union,” a chorus that rings especially true in the context of a complicated and deadly 2020.

Noble Chaos: A Novel by Brent Green reveals deeper insights into the struggles and successes of impassioned young people. Set at the University of Kansas in 1969 and 1970, a riveting story begins when a firebomb demolishes the student center, inciting campus unrest and a deadly confrontation between protesters and authorities over the Vietnam War.

Interesting characters amplify the struggles and victories of a youth cohort encountering extraordinary pressures to conform and yet to resist conformity.

This book taps into the generation’s nostalgic reflections as well as their unprecedented experiences of reaching young adulthood during the most unpopular foreign war in the nation’s history.

Noble Chaos showcases how members of the Boomer generation constructively improved the nation, bringing their lived realities more in synch with the nation’s most coveted values for freedom, peaceful coexistence, and inclusion.

This coming-of-age novel is available in print, for Kindle, and as an audiobook on Audible. Last-minute shoppers may order digital versions with instantaneous delivery.

Your favorite Boomer could be taking a trip back to 1969 tonight.

 

The Limits and Opportunities of Generational Understanding

Do younger generations understand the events leading up to the unusual happenings of the 60s and 70s?

A good question, inviting a rhetorical question.

How much do you understand about the Civil War?

Do you recall the significant battles, major turning points, and the commanding personalities who influenced the outcome? Probably you know a lot if you’re a history buff, but you’ll never understand that war the same way that those who lived through it did.

This is an underlying thesis of generational sociology. Concerning major historical events occurring before our youth and maturation, we “appropriate memories,” meaning we learn memories secondhand through books, movies, television, teachers, parents, and online. For those historical periods we personally experience during youth, we “acquire memories.” Mediated and elaborated by our generational peers, acquired memories are much more powerful and enduring in formation of “collective values” and a sense of shared “defining moments” with generational peers.

Younger generations can, through scholarship, become well versed in the events and personalities of the 60′s and 70′s, but they can never understand the full panoply of emotional meaning and content that influence those who lived through the era as teenagers and young adults.

It’s one thing to read the transcript of a speech from Martin Luther King Jr., or watch a YouTube video, it’s quite another to have stood in a crowd in Washington D.C. with hundreds of thousands of impassioned people and absorbed the message of “I Have a Dream” for the first time it was ever uttered by a legendary Civil Rights leader.

Generations share common values through “intergenerational continuity,” but each generation forms unique values based on common and shared experiences during the formative years between the ages of about 12 through 25.

For those interested in gaining a deeper, more nuanced understanding of 1969 and 1970, I invite you to check out Noble Chaos: A Novel, my literary novel. The book is available in softcover, Kindle and Audible formats. 

Check out this link to listen to a five-minute sample of the audiobook.

 

Historical Revisionism Vs. Truth ... Understanding How the Past Influences the Present

Two very different chapters of history have recently occupied my mind.

In an interesting TIME magazine article about The Civil War, 150 Years After Fort Sumter: Why We're Still Fighting the Civil War, author David Von Drehle develops cogent arguments for the idea that this horrific war began five years before Fort Sumter with a massacre of abolitionists in Lawrence, Kansas, in May 1856. People died because they preferred to live in a “free state.” I attended the University of Kansas and did not know this sobering fact about the home of my Alma mater.

It’s not entirely due to my ignorance.

After the war and until the beginning of the modern civil rights movement, historians and public intellectuals typically packaged the purpose of this war for reasons other than the divide over slavery. According to the opinion of Confederate President Jefferson Davis, for example, this war was a battle for “liberty, property, honor and life.” Slavery became but a footnote if mentioned at all in the years following the war. It is only just now, 159 years after the war officially began at Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861, that the rationale and true context for the war has become fully manifest.

During one of my Generation Reinvention podcasts, I interviewed Rob Kirkpatrick, author of 1969: The Year Everything Changed. Rob has undertaken a scrupulous initiative to document many facets of a year that did, indeed, shape the nation—history he does not personally recall since he was merely two-years-old then.

For example, we discussed the Vietnam War and a deadly battle for control of Ap Bia, a 3,000 foot mountain near the Laotian border. As Rob wrote, this battle would become “a microcosm of the strategic hardships experienced by American forces in Vietnam.”

This became the first significant battle in which American soldiers openly questioned with national news media the strategic wisdom of their commanders in a battle eventually called Hamburger Hill, a raw metaphor for the human carnage, a watershed turning point in popular support of the war. Although the battle was a victory for the US, with 84 fatalities compared to over 600 North Vietnamese deaths, American media and the nation’s antiwar majority started demanding, “What are we fighting for?” This is a question that has resurfaced with every subsequent war in which the US has engaged since Vietnam.

Two very different historical chapters and their contemporary implications emphasize how critical it is that we accurately understand bygone times to avoid repeating mistakes of the past or revising the record, rendering the past mythical rather than factual. The Civil War and 1969 are too often misunderstood or misrepresented today.

Rob Kirkpatrick also shares my observations about how marketers sometimes borrow emotionally charged symbols and slogans from popular culture as a way to brand and sell consumer products, a process called co-optation. I wrote about historical revisionism and marketing co-optation in Marketing to Leading-Edge Baby Boomers:

When some media today choose to report about “the sixties,” they often derive background coverage and image positioning from distorted archival reports, thus perpetuating simplistic stereotypes and generalizations as valid truths.

The media, sometimes sympathetic to students and their political demonstrations, chose then, and often still choose, to reflect inaccurately the true context of the era. Media bias has led to distorted reification of Baby Boomers as a construct through persistent presentation of outlandish personalities and the antics of notorious celebrities connected to student demonstrations. Some journalists and news accounts actually encouraged an escalation of militancy, theatrical expression, and a turn toward revolutionary behavior.

Thomas Frank, author of The Conquest of Cool: Business Culture, Counterculture, and the Rise of Hip Consumerism, provides substantial evidence of mobilization of bias in his critique of business and the sixties. He observes that mentioning the sixties and associated images arouses in some “an astonishing amount of rage against what many still imagine to have been an era of cultural treason.”

Although the sixties’ era has been commonly positioned as a time of narcissism and social destructiveness (the popular movie character Austin Powers notwithstanding), on the contrary, most young people in my experience consciously embraced a philosophy of non-violence while opposing the horrific violence of racism, poverty, environmental assaults, and American bombardment of Vietnam.

I write from personal experience to this point: Most Boomers were going about the business of earning college degrees and/or starting careers—albeit sometimes in slow motion because of the social and cultural struggles—while playing active roles in grassroots mobilization, and they were motivated by a sense of obligation to others far more than self-gratification.

Another interesting but complex concept has played a role in manufacturing what society now thinks of as “the bad sixties.” This is the theory of co-optation or the tendency of the marketing industry to have quickly embraced the powerful iconographic images and metaphors of young Boomers, transforming them into commercial messages. Thus, the symbols of the social revolution became distilled into come-hither selling images in magazine ads and television commercials; the creative revolutionaries in the advertising industry chose to mimic and mass-produce counterculture so that their corporate clients could cash in on the youth psychographic. The more ardent proponents of this theory even claim that the co-optation process helped to nullify the revolutionary aspects of the counterculture, thereby mollifying its threat to mainstream value consensus.

I believe, at the very least, that co-optation by the marketing industry, my industry, helped to synthesize in society’s collective memory the most superficial, unsavory, cynical, pugnacious images of the antiwar and democratic mobilization movements of the sixties and seventies. Businesses also made money through co-optation, which, by itself, is not necessarily a bad thing. When this commercially manufactured history becomes history, however, many start having a problem with the prevailing official record, as do I.

The Civil War and 1969 have little in common, other than being periods of extreme internal strife within the borders of the nation. Contemporary beliefs about what happened during both historical chapters are amorphous. History has sometimes been revised. Products and brands have been sold following symbol and slogan homogenization.

Consumer marketing sometimes takes hold of the symbols and slogans, decontextualizes and simplifies them, rendering them meaningless beyond positioning goods and services in consumers’ minds. Responsible marketing begins with respect for the true historical record. Neither consumers nor society wins when we collectively forget or fail to heed the truths and lessons of history.

I believe an optimum intersection exists between historical accuracy and marketing, and, in fact, marketing can be conceived that helps clarify the historical record so more Americans better understand their legacies and moral responsibilities going forward.

When it comes to 1969, and the sixties more broadly, an education about what happened and insights about what these events mean today can commence with Rob Kirkpatrick’s thorough exploration, 1969: The Year Everything Changed. 

I would be remiss if I failed to mention my collaborative book on the same subject: 1969: Are You Still Listening? Written with seven co-authors, all of whom experienced 1969 first hand, our book shares deeper insights into what we experienced as a generation, how the events of that year became significant formative experiences impacting us today, and what we learned from our youth revolution. 

1969: The Year That Changed A Nation, Resonates Today, 50 Years Later

"The most transformative year in U.S. history" — Rolling Stone

 

1969 stood as the final year of a tumultuous decade, shattering domestic tranquility with epic events and cultural trends. Consider Woodstock, the most famous music festival of modern times, attracting over 400,000 rock ‘n’ roll fans. Or NASA’s Apollo 11 space mission and astronaut Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. Or the October 15th Moratorium to End the War in Vietnam, the largest peaceful protest of a war in American history. Or the Beatles’ final public performance on the roof of Apple Records in London.

Then ponder impact of the gay community’s Stonewall Riots, Senator Ted Kennedy’s Chappaquiddick scandal, murderous rampages of Charles Manson’s cult family, a reviled military draft lottery, and the beginning of President Richard M. Nixon’s fragmented and disgraced presidency.

It was a year of technological achievements such as ARPANET, predecessor of the Internet; the Boeing 747 jumbo jet; and the Pontiac Firebird Trans Am. Popular culture fans crowded theaters to experience a breakaway hippie movie called Easy Rider. Elton John, David Bowie, and John Denver emerged to become music icons.

Seven professional writers collaborate with author Brent Green to share their experiences and memories of a raucous, transformative year. One question resonates throughout this book: Are You Still Listening? Joining Brent in this endeavor are Carol Orsborn, Ph.D., David Cogswell, Richard Adler, Jed Diamond Ph.D., Robert William Case, Bob Moses, and Greg Dobbs.

For those who experienced 1969 firsthand, these essays and stories may stir buried memories and invite reflection about that defining year. For those who were born later, this book invites contemplation about our social and political progress fifty years later. Do we see greater national unity? Do we hear lingering discord? Do we sense progress?

1969: Are You Still Listening? is available from Amazon.com, both in paperback and Kindle. After you read our book, we’d love to learn your reactions in the comments below.

1969: Are You Still Listening? received a 2019 National Indie Excellence Award for the category of Social/Political Change. You can discover more about the book and authors at our website.