THE TORCH IS PASSED -- FINALLY

The Department of Justice says we're in a New Marijuana Epidemic; at least
it's giving those who participated in the Old Marijuana Epidemic something
to share with the young folks.

"Drugs have gone all to hell," a veteran of that halcyon era of ingestion,
the 1970s, complains, his main quibbles being that they aren't as good as
they used to be, they're harder to find, and they're more expensive.

A recent college graduate sounds a similar lament about scarcity and cost,
although she can't make quality comparisons with the earlier decade's
product, because she wasn't even alive then. She has heard tales, however,
of sticky gold buds, and dark, fragrant hash, from people like the veteran,
who pass along such testimonials as proof that there once was a kind of
Periclean Age of Pot. That Age had as its hallmarks both better, cheaper
stuff and a greater public acceptance of the smoking of it, as well as
numerous other freedoms that exist now only in hearsay.

As one generation gathers around the metaphorical campfire with another,
reciting stories of memorable Mary and its brazen consumption, a kinship is
formed, and a big slice of our culture is perpetuated. Reportedly we're in
the throes of what the Department of Justice terms a New Marijuana Epidemic
fueled by the usage of teens and twentysomethings, and it's giving those
who participated in the Old Marijuana Epidemic something to share with the
young folks.

What's held in common isn't just literal pot smoking, however, but a
certain slant of sensibility which came into full flower in the 70s,
skipped over a whole group, and now seems re-emergent in our new adults.

It was at the numerous college alumni events I've attended that I became
really conscious of the passed-over people.

When I first started going to those things, I assumed that I would be able
to relate to pretty much anyone who had graduated a few years before or
after my class of 1981. What I've found is that alums who matriculated
throughout the 70s tend to have similarly insouciant attitudes and familiar
testimonials to the freewheeling student culture of that time. Alumni from
the classes of about 1983-88, however, seem like a drabber race who
inhabited a diluted place, while the 90s-and-up grads start to have a
recognizable vibe again.

This puts me in the position of relating more overall to people from
another generation than I do to some of my supposedly fellow Baby Boomers.

The Baby Boomer generation officially encompasses those of us born between
the years 1946 and 1964. In Generation Jones, Jonathan Pontell proposes
that the group be separated into two sub-sets, and the second one labeled
the name of his book's title.

I think there are actually three divisions, and appropriate designations
are the warriors, the revelers, and the reactionaries.

The first Baby Boomers did the serious work of the war, both the fighting
and the protesting of it, rallied en masse against injustice, and showed
considerable guts in challenging social convention. They swept the deck
clean of restraint for the next group, the revelers (in which I include my
age group), who made irreverent hay among the ruins of the old order.

While the warriors' intensity caused them to push their youthful pursuits,
both noble and debauched, to extremes, we revelers self-protectively
stepped back from the edge and behind irony's buffer.

The reactionaries, born in the 60s tail-end of the time span, shrank
further from all that wide-open, ill-defined space, and retreated into the
confining "isms," like consumerism and elitism, that the trailblazers and
tastemakers thought had been permanently booted to the culture's sidelines.

Who are those people?

I'm referring to the ones who were so not cool during the 80s, and who
continue to exhibit that they just don't get the drift by doing things like
having too many kids, and walking around in phone headsets, which is the
single most screechingly uncool thing you can be doing right now (although
asking for a Starbucks sleeve for its status value runs a close second).
Granted, there was a gritty, hungover, living-in-a-giant-ashtray quality to
existence at the end of the 70s, but that alone doesn't explain the
sprouting of these susceptible, irony-deficient individuals. It's as if the
Baby Boomer generation was one extended family, and its final, duller issue
was the result of blood-thinning. Perhaps they missed out on the kindred
slant because they chose binge drinking over pot smoking during their
formative years.

A fear factor could well be a crucial part of it. Even with the specter of
Vietnam looming, the earlier segments of the generation came of age
essentially unafraid, perhaps the last in our lifetimes to do so. There was
a core confidence in the warriors and revelers that we were right about a
lot of things because, well, we were, but our cockiness also came from not
yet being presented with the bill for our extended throw-down. That arrived
in various forms, including AIDS, which was first publicly noted in June
1981, one month after my class graduated. It was as if at the end of the
70s, an iridescent bubble hovering over the country's youth burst, leaving
those below slightly sticky, and scanning the darkening cultural landscape
for familiar forms of solace, such as wealth, religion, and stylized hairdos.

Yet even if the Baby Boom butt-enders were motivated to scramble for
conventional cover by fear, that still doesn't explain how the new, younger
people are evidencing cool, because they've grown up in a veritable Age of
Apprehension. No doubt they've been helped along by having warriors and
revelers as parents, and by the hip vein that courses through the
Boomer-dominated media, all the way down to the knowing shows that make up
Snick, Nickelodeon's Saturday night lineup. Maybe their skepticism and
heightened powers of absurdity-detection have come about in part from their
bombardment by all-channels, all- the-time reality, and in part from their
inclination to smoke.

The irony is that their generation is doing what ours did, possibly in even
greater numbers, and yet they're doing it in a cultural climate so much
more constrictive than the one in which we lit up that it could be on a
different planet.

They're receptive to hearing about and able to envision the past Liberty
Epoch, however, and maybe in its tales' telling lies the germ for some
version of its return. *