Forest Gump. It's come to this. I'm not going to argue whether this is a war film. Let's take it as red.

I'm not even going to use this intro as a chance to dump on baby boomers because I'm confident

that history will handle that task and there's no point in us piling on.

No, what amazes me about this film, this Forest Gump, is how big a movie it was. Like American Beauty, this

movie inexplicably took the world by storm. Why are the middle-brow people of the world so

susceptible to this trash?

What collective need is fulfilled by languishing in this my asthma of toxic sentimentality?

Well, let's interrogate it.

Here we have a film where a disability was played for laughs.

Gump's slowness is meant to stand in for our simpler natures.

Untrammeled and untroubled by irony or sex or remorse or really any kind of human empathy beyond confused

sadness that everyone isn't happy.

It's a Vietnam story.

Tragic in the way we prefer our Vietnam stories, which is to say, small scale and personal.

We're fine watching some boys slug it out, even fine, ruining the senselessness of it all.

But for the love of God, don't make us think about what we did and what it means.

Please, can we just take a dumb giggle ride through a Newsweek highlights timeline of the

boomer half century and conclude that it was just troubling enough to make us deep and soulful without convicting us of mind crimes and the rape of the world.

Damn it, I was trying not to slam the boomers, but I can't help it.

This movie marks the true turning point in their evolution,

where they finally renounced the counterculture and regained their innocence in the form of the true antihero,

Shramp millionaire and early Apple investor the Gumpster, the Gumpmeister, The Gumpinator.

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