Via Daniel Rubin, I got quite a chuckle out of Instapunk's reappraisal of the 60th Hiroshima reappraisal by the new 60-something generation:

The history may not be so important anymore, because nobody cares about history since the baby boomers reduced it to a pulpy list of crimes against political correctness. What is important is what happens now that the most narcissistic and self-indulgent generation in American history embarks on the great adventure of aging. It's not going to be pretty. The same folks who demanded that the world be remade in their image when they got to college in the '60s will insist -- just as they have in every other tedious phase and fad of the past 40 years -- that meeting their needs is all that matters. Look for the country to be transformed into some kind of senior citizen's amusement park, a 50-state implementation of St. Petersburg, Florida, with a wheelchair ramp at every strip club and free bus transportation to every reunion of septuagenarian Deadheads.

As for the rest of you, get ready to pay some real taxes in years to come. The baby boomers' appetite for drugs has always been legendary, and they're going to need pills for blood pressure, and body aches, and the pain of post-cosmetic surgery, and erections, and depression, and all the new syndromes that will be invented by a population of sissies who are growing old without ever having grown up. And they're going to want it all for free.

This is also a special day for the brat kids the baby boomers brought into being without actually raising them. The long cushy ride is over as of now. Your job is to drop whatever you're doing and make sure that mom and dad get the attention they've always always wanted and just can't get anymore from shopping, and showing off, and chasing the coolest new trends. They won't have the energy for all that. So they'll sit there, and complain, and demand something, anything, from you to divert them one more time from the emptiness inside.

I feel even less responsibility to subsidize that portion of the 1960s generation Instapunk describes -- people I remember mostly for having a holier than thou attitude, and an ability to deliver endless moralistic scoldings because they were "at the front lines" in the demonstrations against the Vietnam War. But whether I want to pay anything doesn't change the fact that there's this ugly thing called an entitlement. And they're more entitled than their kids, simply because they're hitting that phony "age of retirement."

No wonder so many of them like socialism. Look what's in it for them.

As I say this, I realize that I am guilty of bashing an entire generation for the mindset not exhibited by all.

The people who bragged of being on the front lines against the war, for example, often overlook the fact that others in their generation not only supported the war, but were in the actual front lines of that war. This latter group was not treated as well by their fellow Americans who brag they "ended" the war. Yet all share the same public entitlement. Neither group is more "deserving" -- even if the ones who fought against the war are more prone to brag about their self sacrificing behavior (despite evidence that their behavior prolonged the war) than the ones who fought in it.

Who ever said socialism was fair?