Jeff Gordinier - X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft But Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking

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Table of Contents

For Julie, whos been waiting patiently

+

For Margot and Toby, whove been screaming their heads off

A Disclaimer

The careful reader of X Saves the World might be prone to point out that the book contains its fair share of generalizations. (Pretty big ones, in some cases. Maybe even whopping.) The author is aware of this, and while he assures the reader that plenty of tireless leg-work and traditional research have gone into the production of the work at hand, he concedes, too, that he has, yes, here and there, taken what we might call attitudinal liberties. Are all boomers venal sellouts? Are all millennials spotlight-craving airheads? (For that matter, are all Gen Xers nobly ironic individualists?) Well, of course not, even though the reader will notice that these generalizations do ring true on many surprising levels.

And that said, the author does not happen to agree with the gentleman from the Washington Posta boomer, of coursewho, in the spring of 2006, suggested that such generational generalizations are baloney. The author prefers to think that the generalizations in X Saves the World are more along the lines of mortadella, which is that really expensive and delicious baloney they make in Italy.

JSG

My life had become a series of scary incidents that simply werent stringing together to make for an interesting book, and God, you get old so quickly! Time was (and is) running out.

Dag, in the chapter Dead at 30 Buried at 70, from Douglas Couplands 1991 novel Generation X

Q: Do you like American Idol?
A: Come on! Who does not like American Idol? Its the best.

Excerpt from an interview with Frances Bean Cobain, age thirteen, in i-D magazine, January 2006

How young are you?
How old am I?
Lets count the rings around my eyes.

The Replacements, I Will Dare

INTRODUCTION: CHECK YOUR HEAD

Do they make a pill for athazagoraphobia?

Athazagoraphobia.

You know the sensation, even if you dont know the word. You can look it up on one of those awesome Web sites devoted to phobias, where youll find it listed along with fear of vegetables, fear of razors, and fear of the great mole rat. Youll probably see it right between fear of ruins and fear of atomic explosions, which is kind of perfect.

Athazagoraphobia tends to signify an abnormal and persistent fear of being forgotten or ignored, so, if were speaking generationally, we might think of it as akin to the anxiety that Molly Ringwald felt in Sixteen Candles. The fear of being passed over. Left behind. Blown off.

And, since were speaking generationally, theres a good chance that youve been feeling that way over the past few years.

Might the term Generation X ring a bell? Well, in the event that youve forgotten, Generation X had a very good run between 1991 and 1999, but media curiosity about our reticent, dark-horse demographic began to dribble away at the end of the nineties. Right around the time of the dot-com meltdown, a stubborn old standby began to reassert itself. Once again it was time for a familiar spiel. Just the other day I got a press release for a PBS series called The Boomer Century. Heres what it said:

PBS Looks Back at a Generation That Transformed AmericaAnd Leaps Forward to Predict Their Future

In The Boomer Century: 1946 - 2046

Rob Reiner, Oliver Stone, Erica Jong, Tony Snow, Dr. Andrew Weil...

SAN FRANCISCO, CAThe Who famously sang I hope I die before I get old to their fellow Baby Boomers in My Generation, but with one of this demographic groups 78 million members turning 60 every eight seconds, they will soon be the largest elder population in American history. Will the nations most closely observed generation simply kick back in its later years, or keep breaking the rules?

Generation X has marinated in the fat of boomer mythology for so long now that were like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix when hes hooked up to all those tubes and wires in a tub of gelatin. We dont even notice. And yet the relentlessness of the juggernaut really, its amazing. Pick up Newsweek and youll come across a series called The Boomer Files, which presses that creaky rewind button one more time to tell usto teach usabout all the astonishing changes the disco-and-Brie generation has wrought upon the American lifestyle. Fashion, music, money, food, shopping, parenting, sexthere is no realm of human conduct, Newsweek avers, that remains unboomerized. A few sentences from the series have stuck with me. The first, written by Peg Tyre, appears in a story about a shocking discovery: it seems that when boomers fall sick or get lonely, they often turn to their friends for help and support. So smart! Im thrilled to hear that boomers have opened up this new growth sector in interpersonal relationships, because until now, whenever Ive been sick or lonely, Ive usually dealt with it by curling up in the garage with a bag of dog biscuits. But Pegs nice enough to throw the rest of us a bone. Boomers, of course, she writes, didnt invent close friendships.

In a different installment of The Boomer Files, David Gates, a fine critic and novelist, nevertheless delivers one of the baldest confessions of smug boomer solipsism youre likely to find. Six months ago, he writes, a friend played U2 for me for the first time. It was okay.

It was... okay.

Theres a scene in Half Nelson that, for me, captures the boomers incredible shrinking values. Half Nelson is a movie about a young white teacher named Dan Dunne, played naturally and brilliantly by Ryan Gosling, who can be found right in the trenches when it comes to making a difference. During his work hours he teaches history and coaches basketball at an inner-city high school. In his spare time he smokes crack. Unlike the honky-savior pedagogues who usually populate these chalkboard movies, Dunne is a wreck: dumpy and disheveled, in debt, emotionally stunted, a junkie too clever for rehab.

But he still comes off better than his boomer parents do. At one point in the film Dunne goes home to see his mother, and the domestic tranquility of the scene is jarring: here you find a snapshot of Summer of Love pieties at their most cozy and cobwebbed. There is red wine, there is old music, there are were-all-friends-here wisecracks about Ebonics, there is the inevitable Im still sexy like Susan Sarandon earth-mama shimmy in the den. Goslings character, who seems to be simmering at a low boil of disgust, goes to the kitchen, where his mother says, Your father and I thought we were going to change the world when we were young, you know. What did we know?

When it comes to changing the world, the boomers choked, but if were to judge from the deluge of magazine covers and TV commercials these days, there is no hope of ignoring or diverting their grand march of triumph. Boomers are having sex! Staying young! Retiring in high style! Gearing up for their second act! Hey, fifty is the new thirty! Right on, maaan!

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