Glenn Beck was hosting a psychiatrist, and the two were grappling intelligently with why someone as vacuous as Paris held the public’s fascination. The psychiatrist explained that there is a popular backlash against introspection in our society. It is no longer in vogue to plumb one’s soul to seek the cause of one’s flaws and missteps. In fact, it’s no longer in vogue to even admit to flaws and missteps—witness Paris’s confessions that the one thing she’d improve about herself is to keep her voice from going into the higher ranges when nervous. (It didn’t occur to Larry King, by the way, to inquire as to what makes her nervous—that would have been some kind of taboo but satisfying psychic violation of our swing towards the superficial…)

And more: nothing from Paris about the how or why of her driving drunk, nothing about being so out of the loop she didn’t know her license was still suspended, nothing about having played into to the “false” perception that she has abused drugs (and/or alternately that she is lying about ever having even tried drugs…).

And then, there’s the question that was on everybody’s lips. Who are that girl’s parents?

I’ll tell you who they are. Boomers. And while I can’t speak to her specific family’s contributions to the backlash, I can speak to the backlash against introspection in our society, as a whole. Again, Boomers.

For better or worse, we were the first generation who had ready access to the spiritual literature of multiples ages, traditions and religions. We not only explored culturally, but through the assistance of LSD (“It was legal then”, we tell our kids…) inner realms of consciousness. We were seeking meaning—depth, perspective, clues to the mystery. (Paris, on the other hand, when asked about her renewed relationship with reading her Bible, couldn’t name a single favorite passage. Could the Bible bit have been all, gasp, image? As superficial as all that?)

When we boomers supposedly left our cosmic, introspective hippy days behind to start families and go work for utilities and stock brokerages, our inward gaze snuck through between the cracks. As our kids grew into childhood, through adolescence and into young adulthood, we showered our offspring with positive affirmations, regardless of their behavior, seeking the cause for any misdeeds in our own psyches.

A whole generation of Jills and Johnnies faced not the corner with a dunce cap, but a parental/therapist who spoke about dysfunctional family systems. Perhaps Paris, like some of my own children at certain points of their lives, would have preferred—and benefited from—something as simple and straightforward as a good spanking, rather than an Oprah-sized dose of parental guilt and a lecture on cognitive dissonance.

So boomers still want to know the how and the why (which may explain why a boomer was watching two boomers on television discussing Paris…) While Paris, entitled, willfully clueless, speaks for many in her generation—the offspring of boomers—who, like Gertrude Stein once would have said—sometimes a Bible is just a, well, a Bible.

Carol Orsborn