Tynan's Anger

Arts & Culture Commentary from a Loving Digital Skeptic

Shifting The Narrative on Generational Malaise

Posted on | March 13, 2011 | No Comments



It used to be interesting knock the Baby Boomers. As late as the 1990s, when those in their 40s and 50s still controlled most media channels, an entire media culture was built around harping on ’60s and sugarcoating the hypocrisies of a generation that thought they were enacting major change, but spent more time on drugs and self-mythologizing. The point of view that knocked the Baby Boomers seemingly longed for the attitudes of the 30s and 40s, when Americans rose out of poverty to come together and fight Hitler, a clear danger to the world, and were greeted at home with a decade’s worth of economic prosperity.

Not coincidentally, this point of view favored the grandparents and lashed out against the parents. Times have changed, and the 1990s increasingly seem like 2 decades ago. Bands are starting to sound a lot more like Nirvana, Pavement, and Neutral Milk Hotel than they were a decade ago, when they were sounding like New Order, Duran Duran, and Queen. Bill Clinton is looked back on as fondly (and misguidedly) by the Left as Reagan was on the Right in the last decade. People still seem to care who Newt Gingrich is. Furthermore, the previously powerless children of the 1990s are now in their 30s and their 40s, and thus are increasingly dominant forces in the mainstream media (and there are more media channels than in the 90s, when 56k modems were considered the pinnacles of technological progress.) You could argue that in the context of history, the current American narrative (especially among those in the Left) is the following:

Greatest Generation (white Americans born ~1918-1945): A generation raised under the auspices of the Depression and the sense that the freedoms we now take for granted had to be earned and protected with one’s life. Fighting Hitler was a cause that most World War II veterans didn’t even think twice about before knowing it was the right thing to do. Upon coming home, they experienced one of the greatest economic eras of prosperity in American history. If they failed at anything, it was due to their inability to cope with a world where there wasn’t danger, but one forged out of their earlier successes in defeating an obvious danger.

Baby Boomers (increasingly guilty white Americans born from ~1945-1964): A generation raised under the auspices of the memory of the Holocaust, and more pressingly, the threat of a Nuclear Holocaust. They used early victories in Civil Rights to make up for every later injustice and hypocrisy they saw fit. The first generation raised on TV, and therefore, self-obsessed to an unprecedented level, favoring their friends & family above all rational levels, thus making them just as inclined to nepotism and intolerance as their parents, but in ways they couldn’t imagine.

You can see this dynamic explored on cable news, blogs, and increasingly, mainstream newspapers regularly. A part of this antagonism was forged by the bleak job market for college graduates in the recession of the early 1990s, (something that objectively pales in comparison to the same job market I faced upon graduating in 2008). However, we’re getting to the point where Generation X, now as old as their mid-to-late 40s, have children who are college graduates. As a 24 year old with grandparents solidly in the early Greatest Generation period and parents in the mid-to-late Baby Boomer period (thanks, Jewish breeding patterns), I think this narrative is just as flawed as the previous one, but also one just as easily to manipulate. Through discussions with my friends in their early-to-mid 20s, who like the narrative-definers of all generations, were generally well-educated, raised in middle/upper-middle class households just outside ruling power territory, I’d argue the narrative is shifting as such:

Baby Boomers (still predominantly white people born ~1945-1963): Raised with a frustration with the status quo that they saw in a supposedly serene world, they had the courage to look at blatant injustices that serenity masked, and say “this is not right.” Led the most historically successful improvement in racial relations in over 100 years, in ways that are still taken for granted to this day. Applied the same courage in their convictions to oppose a war they found unjust and senseless, even if it meant sacrificing every level of comfort with which they were raised. If they failed at anything, it was their inability to deal with later failures in the campaign of tolerance, but one forged by their early successes (and perhaps burnout from drug use).

Generation X (slightly fewer white people born ~1963-1980) Nihilist to the point of a complete lack of compassion and sense of responsibiliy. Fears of committing the same mistakes as their parents led them to eschew any sense of personal responsibility ever. They used their changing attitudes of nearly universal (at least in theory) tolerance and early progress in Gay Rights to justify their lack of a commitment to social justice that allowed the same people they went to school with to take power and produce unprecedentedly accepted ethical corruption and occasional pure evil to diminish the very causes they wanted to defend. This  made them just as hypocritical as their parents, but in ways they couldn’t even begin to imagine.

To a large extent, all the narratives I have posited, both positive and negative, are true. While I know some people will have several objections here, these descriptions shouldn’t be upsetting to any member of groups I have just described, or in reality, anyone. Every generation and group defined, however arbitrarily, by when, where, and with whom they were raised share certain strengths and weaknesses, and those strengths and weakness can be juxtaposed favorably or negatively against any other similarly-defined group. I fully plan that the children of people my age will resent us politically and admire our parents politically, and I plan that the grandchildren of people my age will respond in kind. I fully expect there to be flaws in my generation that I can’t begin to imagine. I also think some questions I have now will become clearer: How will a generation that has more college degrees than they ever had previously deal with a job market that is flooded with college graduates unlike ever before? Can Gay Rights take hold in rural America in ways that it has with increasingly success in urban areas outside the coasts? Will America be willing to deal with an increase in taxes ever again? Will Libertarians become the new Neo-Cons or the New Tea Party?

I am not a cynical person; as someone who has spent the better part of his  adult life surrounded by graduate students and comedians; this is rarer than you’d think. I may, however, have gone beyond a healthy dose of skepticism to the point where I’m a skepticism addict. If I was Catholic I would have given up skepticism for Lent this year. But what separates even an overdose of skepticism from cynicism is that I don’t think there’s no hope, that nothing will get better and things will only get worse, and that while Mayan science/Left Behind may or may not be horseshit, the world ending in 2012 sounds like a good idea (and Gen X ignorance towards 2012 apocalypse theory mirrors their parents’ ignorance towards Y2K apocalypse theory). I haven’t defined my generation because it’s too early in the course of history to see what its narrative will be. I do know, however, that like every generation before it, my generation will lack a clear narrative until every member of it is dead. And even then some will dispute it.

 

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