One generation above all others has felt it “owned” the American century. A legendary demographic blip that emerged with new suburban families after the Second World War has come to encompass those born between the mid-1940s and 1960. Boomers experienced and participated in civil rights, gendered and sexual revolutions, as well as the national traumas of Vietnam and Watergate. Later, they personified the yuppie successes/ excesses of the 1980s, although many were left behind. At the end of the twentieth century aging boomers focused more on childcare and health issues, ranging from hair loss and Viagra to cancer, heart disease and AIDS. They also threaten Social Security as the wave surfs into old age in 2010.

Despite the youthful Kennedy imagery that shaped their coming of age, boomers did not gain control of the White House until Clinton’s election. His presidency epitomized the uneasy changes of the generation, from gays to war to adultery. Still, as boomer taste and dollars have dominated mass media, subsequent generations were defined as children or alternatives (Generation X). In the 1990s, baby-boom culture was recycled (sometimes ironically) by mass media in Hollywood, popular music and fashion.