Health Care Woodstock

Forty years ago, Baby Boomers were out rocking and rolling in the mud to, as one put it, "terrify our parents in a deeply satisfying way." Now, facing Medicare, they are acting out in public again, this time over death panels that might finally put those aged begetters out of their misery.

"It’s a vivid reminder," Frank Rich observes, "that what most endures from America, 1969, is not the peace-and-love flower-power bacchanal of Woodstock legend but a certain style of political rage. The angry white folk shouting down their congressmen might be--literally in some cases--those angry white students whose protests disrupted campuses before and after the Woodstock interlude of summer vacation ’69."

Politically the Baby Boomers never did get it right. For all their idealism about race, sex, gender, war and politics, they produced only two presidents, Clinton and W, both of whom managed to dodge serving in Vietnam and went on to exemplify selfishness that marred their tenures and helped wreck the economy.

Now the first president after them is struggling to overcome, in his words, "the psychodrama of the Baby Boom generation--a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago.”

But the Boomers have migrated from campuses to town halls, turning health care reform from an issue that deserves serious, rational debate into another me-first sandbox squabble, with a little help from Obama's post-Boomer polar opposite, Sarah Palin, with what Maureen Dowd calls "her visceral talent for aerial-shooting her favorite human prey: cerebral Ivy League Democrats."

At least back in Woodstock there was music to compensate for all the madness.