Commenter Of The Day: "You Know Billy, We Blew It" Edition

Has the time come to start writing the retrospectives of the Baby Boomers, comparing what they thought of themselves to what they actually accomplished? Maybe we lead off with Dennis Hopper hawking retirement planning to perhaps the last generation of American workers who may be financially secure enough to enjoy the final years of their lives. Whether the actual Captain America bike went up in an Austin fire, Scoutch says the attention paid to the "Easy Rider" generation got him fired up:

I'm going to say some really negative things in the following paragraphs. I know this is out of character for me, but this is something I've been boiling about for a long time. Like, since 1980.

Still reading? Okay, that's your choice. Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Grizzly fucking Adams and pretty much the entire goddamned Baby Boom Generation can go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut, okay? Take your Hell's Angels, your Rolling Stones, your gaudy incompetent motorcycles, and whatever rusty piss pot you boiled up "Orange County Choppers" in and throw them on the fire too. Burn it all down. Throw Steve McQueen's dick on there while you're at it.

My generation had to grow up under the sanctimonious, egocentric, wrong-headed tutelage of the Boomers telling us they saved the fucking human race by making homemade hats out of beer cans and store bought yarn, taking drugs and groping each other in muddy fields. Now everybody was free because of them, and they'd never let you forget it. To me, the end of that movie? One ignorant self absorbed prick shooting another ignorant self absorbed prick in the face.

"A generation that defied convention". Oh like we never heard of one of those before? And you followed that up by replacing the objects you knocked off the pedestals with your own holy objects. Real progressive.

It's just a fucking movie prop. From a stupid and embarrassing movie, made by a ridiculous generation, about something that never really happened. (And evidently this prop was lovingly restored, by some third rate TV actor. I can see him, monkish, "If I can put the bike back together, at least something will look like something that reminds me of something that I can't quite remember...", like some illuminated manuscript.) Yes, I understand it dates from the days when you had to make your own custom parts, but there's plenty of those around. What do they do? Sit on pedestals.

You can see this bike whenever you want, in the theater in which it was built to perform. On screen. As a prop. (Oh, and the movie has a few things to say about American culture in the '60s.)