Saturday, May 17, 2008
The Village Voice pronounces Generation X as dead as Kurt Cobain and as irrelevant as a Cheesy Poof. Plus: Alternative health stories that don't suck.
Jul 9, 1999 | Village Voice, July 7-13
"Generation Ex" by Eric Weisbard
We can all rest more easily in our media-prescribed personal identities. Just when quasi-intellectual generational think pieces seemed to be falling by the wayside -- "Teen culture! It's hot!" and "Are the '60s over? Never!" -- along comes Eric Weisbard to tell a whole generation who they are and what they mean. It's not pretty.
Weisbard bemoans his fellow Xers' alleged failure to make a mark on American pop culture that meets with his approval and decries being sandwiched between powerful baby boomers and en vogue teensters. Of course, failure is an inevitable conclusion when you base your assessment of an entire generation on Adam Sandler's last movie and the demise of Nirvana. By the time Weisbard gets to bitching about how "The game of references as quasigenerational markers never ends," he's already made approximately 57 pop cultural references (not counting the contrived appellation "Generation X"). This, not even halfway through the piece, which lurches from incoherent rant to incoherent rant without the benefit of a unifying thesis or clear definition of what Generation X means other than that group of people born between an undisclosed year in the '60s and 1973, who apparently won't be capable of making movies, writing books or anything else once they've turned 35.
Frankly, after reading this twice through, I didn't know what to make of it. Can you really sum up an entire generation's importance on the basis of a few movies, CDs and Web sites? Are my peers and I really wasting our genius on trivial pursuits, like writing media columns about other media columns instead of making the world a better place through love? Puzzled, I queried some ACTUAL GENERATION XERS about what they thought of Weisbard's cover story. Their responses were more brilliant than Weisbard seems to think us capable of, so I share them with you now.
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"The author appears to be hitting 30, realizing he hasn't learned, much less said, anything useful during the period where he was buying into generational marketing and is panicking as he watches his legitimacy waft away with each turn of the calendar. In so doing, he writes a desperate story striking the same old, wrong themes as Rock the Vote efforts, Tom Frank riffs in the Baffler and other faux concern for the soul of one's young, fragile peers: Demographics not only is destiny, but ought to be, they argue. Well, that's bullshit, facile and cheap. He's grasping because there's nothing being said but more essentialist identity politics, desperately trying to prove that, say, a Puerto Rican guy in the Army in Kosovo is in some significant way the same person as a white female lawyer in Scranton, Pa., as long as they were both born in 1970. Bah. Get this writer a job covering forest fires and tell him he can't use personal pronouns in print till he's at least 50 years old. He's blown his chance."
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"How is it that he criticizes and wallows like a pig in his own culture? He's acting like he's trapped making references to his own culture that, in his own opinion, don't mean anything. His argument is circular. He's trying to make a point about a generation he says has no point."
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"The article is itself an example of his less-
"It's total bullshit. There should be a 25-year moratorium on any attempt to sum up Xers. I don't think it's possible to define a generation via its own lexicon. It's like trying to divine the nature of a barrel of water by closing your eyes and sticking your head in."
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"This writer is way too concerned with pithy pop culture references than actually talking about Generation X. So much has come out of Generation X: Teach for America, Americorps, Yahoo, Excite and a bevy of other Web companies ...
"The people who were once Generation X -- those born between '62 and '72 (roughly) -- are now moving on with their lives. They're getting married or finding life partners, many are now parents. They've been exposed to awful disease (AIDS) and political corruption (Iran/Contra), feast ('80s conspicuous consumption) and famine (Ethiopia, Afghanistan, Somalia). And you know what? Amid all the cynicism and despair, I've known some of the greatest people I ever will. I'm part of that group (born in '69) and I feel lucky to have been exposed to both the horrors and pleasures of a pre-millennial world."
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"Ultimately the author is misguided for trying to say anything meaningful about the Gen X conceit: It has never been well-defined, so how do you critique it? The author takes on pop culture as some kind of archeological evidence and finds scorn and ambiguously directed mockery. What is the society that created these artifacts? he wonders. He falls into the same trap of those that he tries to describe: Without knowing what to do about the subject, he vaguely describes it and mocks it along the way. It's just that same subject -- us, himself -- devouring itself again."
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"Articles about any 'generation' always strike me as talking about nothing but hype. They're supposedly hip, I guess because they're the most abstract way to talk about cultural trends and simultaneously show off how young you are, or used to be."
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"If he wants to reduce a generation to a collection of pop-cultural references and stereotypes, he shouldn't be too surprised when the always-
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"This article was so self-absorbed that I would have thought it was written by a baby boomer, except, of course, that it's written by a whining GenXer who doesn't like it that the younger kids are now getting more attention than his aging self. He doesn't quite realize that time is temporal, and trends come into the limelight as they are adopted by the young'uns. You feel like you're not in the spotlight anymore? Like, the press is supposed to moon over Nirvana for 10 years? Oh, and of course, the things you liked are much more worthy than the things that are popular now? Please, stop whining."
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