All I can say about this is that I am a Gen X'er.
kelly
Taking Stock of Gen X: It's Fallen Sharply
By Stephen Lynch
Orange County Register
Wednesday, April 25, 2001; Page C08
One recent evening, as I flipped between screaming teens on MTV and a
dot-com wake on CNBC, reality smacked me across the face so hard I
dropped my latte. My generation, I realized, is so over.
The death of every e-commerce this and i-content that may signal a
recession. But its effect on those of a certain age -- I speak of the
quaintly named Generation X -- is a great depression. We already ceded
popular culture to the virgin hordes in midriffs. Now that our Net
fortunes have a zero gross, never again will anyone pay attention to
us. This was our shot, and we blew it.
Some background: At 28, I am part of a demographic hiccup, 50 million
souls born in 1963-81. It was our ill fortune to arrive after the
largest testament to American virility on record, the baby boom.
Following us are the boomers' kids, who are, if it's possible, even
more self-righteous than their parents. Check out a birthrate chart
for the 20th century, and we're the trough, trapped between mountains
of Debbies and Madisons.
But it's more than just numbers. To hear the boomers tell it, they
invented social reform, rock-and-roll, women's rights, abstract art,
the miniseries, leveraged buyouts, yoga, drug use and sex. They're so
big and self-centered that every social and political issue orbits
around their needs: The boomers are having a midlife crisis, they need
a new BMW. The boomers are getting old, they need a new pill for
erectile dysfunction. The boomers are feeling nostalgic, let's have
another special on the '60s.
When boomers were soccer moms, soccer moms were the voters politicians
wanted. Now that boomers are aging, Social Security is the thing to
protect. Looking for easy cash? Try releasing another compilation of
the most important band ever -- if you ask boomers, that is -- the
Beatles.
Recently, the boomers invented parenting, and suddenly all those
abstract problems like youth crime and teenage pregnancy that we
feared in the 1980s, well, they need addressing. After all, it's their
kids we're talking about. The only person boomers will give up the
cover of Time magazine for is one of their children. Simply put: No
other generation matters.
For one brief, shining moment, however, the trough rose up. In 1991, a
man named Douglas Coupland wrote a book called "Generation X: Tales
for an Accelerated Culture," and even the boomer editors at Time
couldn't ignore it. Then a musician named Kurt Cobain captured the
imagination of people my age. He kind of reminded boomers of Hendrix
or Morrison -- not as good, of course -- so they gave him some
coverage, too. America "discovered" this generation in its midst, like
a lost Stone Age tribe.
Journalists were quick to label this strange species. The "X" in
Coupland's book constituted an enigma, an unknown quantity in a
demographic equation. Yet movies and magazines knew exactly how to
define us: slackers, overgrown adolescents whose impressive intake of
caffeine did little to spur our ambition.
Funny, but no one rushed to correct that stereotype when, four years
later, companies founded mainly by people in their twenties and early
thirties jump-started the economy and developed a whole new system for
communication, education and commerce. We moved from the feature
section to the financial pages. Generation X, so long dismissed and
dissed, had something to crow about, and not even boomers could deny
it -- especially if they bought Yahoo early.
Which brings me back to the Nasdaq. To you, the dashed hopes of
dot-coms means shifting around your 401(k) or losing a favorite Web
site. To me, it means the brief decade of Generation X is over
(1991-2001, rest in peace). After CNBC leaves us, there's nothing
left.
Generation Hexed
Sure I'm bitter. And with good reason. Boomers will dismiss this as
self-indulgent claptrap, but for its entire history Generation X has
gotten the shaft.
We are latchkey kids, children of divorce, a generation raised in a
time of rising crime and a widening gap between rich and poor. Far
worse is the belittling we've endured along the way.
In 1983, when everyone thought Japan was going to buy up America and
ship it, in tiny boxes, across the Pacific, the Department of
Education published a report called "A Nation at Risk." This was no
stale bureaucratic missive -- it was a manifesto. It said, basically,
that the children of the '80s were idiots.
"The educational foundations of our society are presently being eroded
by a rising tide of mediocrity that threatens our very future as a
nation and a people," the report said. Later in the report,
educational researcher Paul Hurd concluded that within the context of
the modern scientific revolution, "we are raising a new generation of
Americans that is scientifically and technologically illiterate."
Somewhere, if there is any justice, Paul Hurd is digging into a big
bowl of shredded "Nation at Risk" reports for breakfast.
Think things have changed? Right. In 1998, American 12th-graders still
ranked 19th out of 21 industrialized countries in mathematics. That's
the same position they were in 1983, but would anyone be taken
seriously by claiming that the Pokemon preteens are "scientifically
and technologically illiterate"?
No one says kids are stupid anymore. Try telling boomer parents that
their children are stricken by a "rising tide of mediocrity." They'll
run you over with an SUV.
And I don't believe it's too great a leap to speculate that, had
Columbine happened in 1985, the nation would moan: "What's wrong with
kids today, and how can we lock them up?" Now it's: "What's wrong with
kids today, and how can we help them?"
Generation X "grew up during a time of negativism toward children,"
says William Strauss, co-author of "13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore,
Fail?" He adds that the depiction of kids in popular culture was
either as evil ("Rosemary's Baby") or inconvenient ("Kramer vs.
Kramer"). As violent crime and drug use skyrocketed (fueled,
incidentally, by adults, not teens), the nation kept telling youth
that they were the problem.
Look at it this way: Most generations come of age, culturally at
least, in their youth. Yet while Generation X was watching films such
as "The Breakfast Club" and listening to Madonna in the '80s, the
boomers elbowed them out of the way with "thirtysomething" and "Wall
Street." We didn't even get good cartoons.
"Their decade should have been the '80s, but it wasn't," Strauss says.
"The boomers held on."
Cybersunk
The boomers tried holding on during the '90s, too, mostly by brushing
off my generation's icons and accomplishments. Cobain was derivative
and whiny, they said. The protests in Seattle, against the very real
global threats against workers and the environment, didn't matter. We
weren't fighting Vietnam or Nixon, after all.
That the dope-smoking, give-peace-a-chance generation turned into
"just say no" preaching suburbanites who are shocked, shocked that
anyone would clash with the police is the height of hypocrisy.
In the April 16 issue of Newsweek, George Will takes aim at the
Internet. Oil, he writes, "that was something new, and it led to a lot
of new things, including . . . petroleum and vulcanized rubber." The
online world hardly stacks up. Yeah, and what about the wheel and
fire, Will? You were around for those, too, right?
The only reason this boomer backlash didn't come sooner is that
e-commerce IPOs seemed like a good excuse to cut taxes. With the
dot-com crash, boomers are rushing to rewrite the last five years of
history as a speculative bubble inflated by arrogant layabouts. We
went from slackers to saviors to charlatans.
This would all be easier to take if it weren't partly true.
As I mentioned before, we blew it. Perhaps because we were sick of
being called "slackers," we overhyped the Internet "revolution." Not
only were we founding companies, we were making "old media" obsolete
-- and creating new economic models. Baloney. Web sites devoted to
Matchbox cars and the ability to buy talking fish online does not a
revolution make. This isn't Marx or "The Wealth of Nations." The
promise of the age was buried under exaggeration.
Dan Egger, 27, writes about video games and popular culture for a Web
site called Daily Radar. He says one of the main problems is that many
Internet sites were developed by Gen X-ers for Gen X-ers. It was a
self-referential medium.
"The Internet is ours -- it's dedicated to all the geeky, weird, goofy
stuff that we like," Egger says. "When we're gone, all that will be
left is the Internet, to our eternal embarrassment."
Will fails to note how the Internet fueled the greatest dissemination
of knowledge and information since the invention of the printing
press. But in his defense, that's easy to miss, when most of the
attention is paid to Hot or Not or eToys. If Generation X had spent
its time building companies that made money, looking at this new
economy realistically, we might have continued as the captains of
industry. Instead . . .
" . . . we have to grow up," Egger concedes.
Generation Next
So why the rant?
To prevent the whitewash. The decade of Generation X was a significant
cultural period, and members of my generation are still relevant,
despite the best effort of boomers and Gen Y -- there, I said it -- to
write us off as a mistake. Nirvana and Smashing Pumpkins were better
than any of that rap-rock Limp Bizkit churns out. The Beatles, to risk
the wrath of my elders, were not the end-all, be-all. And don't even
get me started on the Backstreet Boys. The best musicians out there
today -- from Radiohead to Moby -- are all Gen X-ers.
Authors from my generation include David Foster Wallace, Michael
Chabon and the offbeat ramblings of the staffs of the magazines Might
and McSweeney's. We produced edgy entertainment such as "Pulp Fiction"
and "The Matrix." And I'll take the sarcastic, sardonic cynicism that
characterizes people my age over the sappy earnestness of either the
hippies or their kids any day.
But the Internet, the cause of our glory and our humbling, will remain
our finest legacy. Despite the dismissing of commentators and our own
failings, the world really is shrinking -- and changing -- because of
these wired networks. Knowledge is truly at our fingertips. Creativity
has a new outlet. When it all takes off again, watch the echo boom try
to take all the credit.
Through demographic chance, Generation X will spend most of its life
disenfranchised. At least now, however, it can point to a decade and
say, "We did that, and, no matter what you say, it was good." Not bad
for scientifically and technologically illiterate slackers.
© 2001 The Washington Post Company
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