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Baby boomers incompetent to write about their era

From Cathy Hansen, Ruckersville, Virginia

Re: Revolutionary Road.

Given their inane post 1960's bigotry's, stereotyping, and worn cliches it would be a plus if baby boomer elite's quit reviewing movies. Your equating mid-1950 Eisenhower (& Elvis) so-called conformity as synonymous with "emptiness of suburban life" "unrewarding work" "domestic servitude" "a cell door closing"--not to mention "the only creative outlet left to people who have given up all hope" i.e. booze and adultery ("an expression of deep despair) -- is delusional and dishonest.

Get REAL. Anyone who has ever grown up with beatniks, "free spirits", artists/actors, journalists,--or who is cognizant of the lives of adults and teens post 1960s knows damn well there has been PLENTY (if not even more) adultery, boozing, pill popping, disintegrating marriages, alienation, suicides, abortions, angst, societal dysfunction, and emptiness SINCE the 1950s.

So what is the post 60s generation's excuse? By the way, most people STILL work 9 to 5 conventional--BORING jobs. (We can't all be movie critics.)

Realty check: In Gallup and BBC reported polling the proportion of people who say they are "very happy" has dropped from 52% in 1957 to just 36% today. Polls in America and Britain concur that the decline in the "happiness factor" has been consistently DROPPING since the 1950s. In fact, polled adults of the 1950s v.s. the 2000s expressed themselves as having been more content in their marriages, their sex lives, work, religion, and as having greater emotionally stability.

It's one thing to say that "Revolutionary Road" depicted DUDs and their marriages. It's another for the phony "Camelot generation" to patronize hypocritically that the marriages exposed in "RR" defined the "Life of Despair" of the Eisenhower decade--as opposed to the glories of "Flower Child" generation that followed.

Incidentally, my 1950s "like a cell door closing" mother and aunts grew up on a small farm in Fresno, chose to acquire university degrees (UC Berekely/Stanford), and found their work in or out of the home about equally rewarding.

Roger Ebert

Roger Ebert was the film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times from 1967 until his death in 2013. In 1975, he won the Pulitzer Prize for distinguished criticism.

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