13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail?

"Imagine arriving at a beach at the end of a long summer of wild goings-on. The beach crowd is exhausted, the sand shopworn, hot, and full of debris--no place for walking barefoot. You step on a bottle and a cop yells at you for littering. The sun is directly overhead and leaves no patch of shade that hasn't already been taken. You feel the glare beating down on a barren landscape devoid of secrets or innocence. You look around at the disapproving faces and can't help but sense that, somehow, the entire universe is gearing up to punish you."

This image forms the thesis of Neil Howe and Bill Strauss's 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail, the latest effort to make hay out of the putative disenfranchisement of the generation of Americans born between 1961 and 1981. A book-long essay confected out of the vast wasteland of demographic studies, surveys, newspaper and magazine clippings, movies, music, advertising, and other ephemera, 13th Gen purports to provide what marketers like to call a "psychographic" profile of the 80 million Americans born in that two-decade period. The thesis, more or less, is that this generation, of which I am a part, is a group of fully ironized, badly educated, dysfunctional underachievers who nonetheless have embraced the role of cleaning up the mess older generations have left behind. The title of this book is an effort to fashion a buzzword out of the authors' calculation that this is the 13th generation in American history (they wrote a book last year called Generations, which casts the entire history of America in generational terms.) The neologism is an annoying contrivance. It clangs like a bungled ad line, and there's nothing we "13ers" hate more than bad marketing, you know. Reading this endless skein of cutesy, facile generalizations, I found myself repeatedly choking back the bile. I mean, who do these people think they are?

"Thirteeners are cursed with the lowest collective self-esteem of any youth generation in living memory," Howe and Strauss write with the kind of blase self-confidence that characterizes this whole book. Elsewhere: "You just have to imagine"--do we really?--"a TV-glued 13er audience nodding in response to Jay Leno's line about why teenagers eat Doritos Tortilla Chips: |Hey kids! We're not talkin' brain cells here. We're talkin' taste buds.'" Or, here, describing 13ers'--my--feelings about the workplace: "Like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future in most 13ers would be unfazed to learn that the boss who fires them 20 years from now will be a Japanese businessman wearing a thousand-dollar suit." We would? With the Japanese economy in the doldrums, this scenario seems less and less likely, but then again, what facts can compete with a Bob Zemeckis movie?

It's a classic error of pop sociology to invest the Capital--C Culture with the wisdom of the times. The only indisputable lesson Hollywood teaches us today is that pap and violence sell. It is another basic error to confuse a group of people with the media and merchandising others direct their way. If anything, this book comes at a time of profound disenchantment with conventional media of all stripes, and at a time when mainstream Hollywood, for one, seems unable (not to mention uninterested) in contributing to some deeper understanding of its mostly youthful audience. This failure may explain the recent profusion of independent filmmaking, small presses, and self-published magazines, which have formed a kind of American samizdat in opposition to mainstream vanilla.

But 13th Gen is blind to subtleties in the culture, so eager is it to use any type of social expression to prove its point. Howe and Strauss seem to feel that a contention is cinched if a movie, TV show, or advertisement exists that even superficially dovetails with their argument. After showing how 13ers have rejected the Boomer sixties esthetic, Howe and Strauss note that "like tie-dyed Marlena Baxter, making a living selling falafel to Grateful Deadheads, or like bell-bottomed Olivia D'Abo, cast as a hippieish girl in The Wonder Years, 13ers know how to present a Boomerish front when it works to their advantage." Here's how: "They just rent Easy Rider and Hair videos, and hey, no problem." Virtually any statement by a twentysomething seems sufficient to make a sweeping generalization: "Like the young New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan, [13ers] consider themselves |post-ideological.'" We do?

There is nothing particularly new about older generations treating youth as some kind of outlying faunal manifestation (Howe and Strauss are, as they remind us throughout the book, Baby Boomers). Details magazine's David Keeps, with whom I chaired a recent panel devoted to marketing to twentysomethings, held up a sensationalist British paperback called Generation X, which devoted to the bizarre wants, needs, and habits of younger Brits--in 1962. Richard Hell and Voidoids wrote their anthem "Blank Generation" in the mid-seventies, with the nihilistic refrain, we "can take it or leave it each time." And, of course, there was Billy Idol, whose eighties band, Generation X, tried to articulate an anti-authoritarian punk gestalt for the suburban crowd.

The truth is that "generationality," if I, too, may coin a phrase, has never been a particularly useful way to explain America or Americans. When the appellation "Lost Generation" was applied to youth after World War I, it was a quasi-ironic commentary on the alienated posings of a small group of artistic elites. Generationality, as such, truly gained currency only when marketers, following on the heels of early rock |n' rollers, realized they could exploit the anti-adult leanings of cash-rich post-World War II teenagers.

And of course, there are the ever tedious Baby Boomers. In transforming a brief period of self-serving social unrest in the sixties into a living monument to self-love, they obscure the fact that the sixties as it is conceived in the current popular imagination existed only for those lucky or rich enough to go to college.

For all the efforts of older writers/marketers to sell us kids on the idea of "Generation X," our generation really does not exist as such. What is interesting about people in their teens and twenties is what is interesting about America: our helter-skelter diversity and our consequently profound, even tragic, differences. Howe and Strauss pay requisite lip-service to the multicultural question. But they fail to realize that the proliferation of minority, sexual, class, race, and other particularist agendas has transformed us into a loose affiliation of generations, a kind of demographic Balkans. If anything, most young Americans I know tend to identify themselves as members of ethnic minorities of some sort, if that's what they are, or as scions of a fading WASP culture if they are not. Gays find themselves grappling with the political and social ramifications of their homosexuality. Blacks feel they must confront the issue of Afrocentrism. And many of my Jewish friends have chosen to yoke themselves to a long religious tradition precisely to anchor their wispy urbanity in more solid spiritual foundations.

The internal gaps between "13ers" are deep and not easily resolved by appealing to a common popular culture, which is itself becoming fractured. Increasingly, it seems, blacks and whites get their news from different sources, have different interests, watch different TV shows, and listen to different music. Fewer people listen to what older folks consider rock music than at any time in recent memory; they are turning to hip-hop, hardcore rap, hippy rap, house, techno, grunge, folk, country, heavy metal, death metal, funk, and even so-called neo-lounge music.

More substantively, the ongoing immigration boom makes mincemeat of the idea of American history as a self-contained march. The notion of a generation gap is meaningless when the parents of many Generation Xers spent their teen years in Guatemala, Poland, Thailand, or Iran, where the Baby Boom was not a significant cultural feature of the Pahlavi dynasty. Back at home, the gap between college-educated and non-college-educated Americans grows apace. And there is no intelligent way--though Howe and Strauss try their darndest--to tie together an abiding strain of Reaganism and an equally rigorous PC tendency.

To be fair to Howe and Strauss, there are broader points you can make about my generation. As the authors point out, our childhood and adolescence coincided with a striking rise in divorce. The divorce rate doubled between 1965 and 1975, and a child born in 1968 was three times as likely to suffer through a divorce than a child born in 1948. Exactly what effect this had is not clear, but it would not be excessive to suggest, as the authors do, that the partial breakdown of the family unit altered many of my co-generationalists' economic welfare, not to mention our experiences of childhood, and even our "self-esteem."

Likewise, it seems indisputable that my generation came into the job market at a singularly unpropitious time, with marginal job growth outside of what Douglas Coupland famously called the McJob sector. The decline of union power combined with the decrease of high-paying, blue-collar jobs has meant an almost crippling dearth of opportunity for those without specific job skills. The authors contend that as a result, 13ers no longer view their work lives as an opportunity to "find a higher calling," but rather as "a means of survival, as an opportunity to prosper, as something that doesn't mean anything but just has to get done if anybody's going to get paid." I can't prove them wrong on this point, but it seems reductionist, both in terms of our generation's cynicism and the older generation's supposed lack of concern for the bottom line. It is better, I think, to blame tough economic times for our generation's--indeed, most American's--hard-headedness than to suggest we have some kind of moral failing.

Trickier still is the authors' bald condemnation of American public schools. While it is incontestable that the school system bottomed out just as our generation was learning its Ps and Qs, it is not, as the authors claim, a simple question of progressive ideology destroying traditional (i.e. good) pedagogy. In Howe and Strauss's account, "[Baby Boomer] students were expected to give |right' answers and compete hard for grades and college admissions. Schools confidently performed their educational missions and were criticized only when they fell below prevailing standards of excellence. Social turmoil stayed outside the school house doors. With 13ers, that all changed." This is a rosy history, but it is hard to overlook the roiling issues of integration in the fifties and sixties, which politicized the public school and higher-education systems well before bilingual education came along. It is also difficult to ignore how the public education system was left to deal with issues of sex, drugs, diet, race, and class that the rest of society seemed uninterested in grappling with.

Luckily, Howe and Strauss allowed a younger writer, Ian Williams, to "crash" the book to offer a 13er perspective. The conceit is that the entire work was written on a bulletin-board service, and that Williams and his friends responded via modern to "2Boomers," as Howe and Strauss call themselves on-line. Williams has a hopeless task, but he is the best thing about this book; his remarks come out of specific experience rather than marketing surveys. He recounts a fourth grade class in which a classmate poured rubber cement on his model of the Acropolis and set it on fire. "So I hit him," Williams writes, "and then the principal came and put the fire out and took me to the guidance counselor. I told miss stem what he did, and she said that there were things about gary kline that I didn't know and that he was just expressing himself and that if we stop him from expressing himself then he'll only get worse."

Delightfully, Williams and his co-crashers become increasingly dismissive of "2boomers" as our fearless duo treads deeper into its grand theory. Someone named Cogan finally has enough. "If you guys are so concerned about being pigeonholed, why do you read this 2boomers stuff at all?" he writes. "[T]alk about being defined, man. I think this generation stuff is all bullshit. 7/8ths of this stuff has nothing to do with me. they ought to call it the 13th generalization. that's all I'm going to say." Fair point, but look who gets the royalties.