Describing WDStF as a “lengthy list of no-longer-current-events for which the Boomers claim no culpability” sounds rather obsessively hostile, not to mention inaccurate, given it starts from 1949 which is the year Billy Joel was born. Half the song is about things that his generation had no input into!
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I think it’s meant to be a list of things boomers experienced, from a distance, and had no real hand in shaping… the chorus is “we didn’t start the fire” of course, so yeah, it could be argued that it’s about claiming no culpability for events in history. It’s denying that Boomers - who was the largest cohort in history, and still retain an outsized amount of political and cultural power in our society due to that - have any agency in shaping world events. Plenty of boomers would disagree with that, given how a subset of them actively worked to improve the world.
At it’s heart, it’s a song that misleads about history - that is something that “happens” to you, as opposed to something that you play an active role in. So, in that light, I can see that argument, and I think it’s one that many boomers who were active in social movements would agree with.
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“We couldn’t do anything about it,” is totally the vibe it gives me.
Followed by, “But we could afford front row seats to see Billy Joel at Madison Square Garden, so it all worked out in the end.
For us.”
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If you look at the lyrics of the original, there was some attempt at clever word play with rhyme and meter.
Looking at the lyrics of the update, it seems more like a listicle you might find on Buzzfeed.
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It would have been more impressive if they bothered to make it chronological like the original. This strikes me more as just a list of random words than anything. Half of it doesn’t even rhyme. I’m no fan of the Joel original. I think it’s a bunch of pretentious crap, but at least it’s cleverly written.
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Minor quibble, but it wasn’t about absolving from blame as an answer to a kid saying “yeah, but nothing happened when you were a kid”. Rattling off the top of his head all the stuff that was going on in that supposed prehistoric time.
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I just remember the version we sang on the playground as kids:
I didn’t fart, you liar
You’re the one who smelt it,
Which means you dealt it
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“No we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it” 
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I read that as a direct response to @t3knomanser, and that makes it all the better.
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