A GenX Manifesto

What it meant to a lot of us.

The other evening I was sitting in on a meeting with the new leader of FIRE for the Arts and a couple dozen other folks from around the country and one thing we all seemed to vibe on was GenX. I think we are at a socially recognizable inflection point at which we are wresting attention and credibility, if not power, from the Boomers. This means necessarily that Obama was at the cutting edge and it flopped back to Biden and Trump both of whom we are personally sick of, and rather pissed that they retain symbolic leadership of American values. But I think that’s about to change so let’s lay a few things out.

First of all, I’m talking about Americans society, and our society is monstrously large. We are bigger than Christendom, which at its maximum was 100 million in the year 1800. So the fundamental adjustment to know here is that all of our society lies on a bedrock of socioeconomic class. We’ve gone over that before.

A Stoic Political Taxonomy

Rulers. Geniuses. Peasants. So will attempt to make sense of our social priorities keeping in mind that we are economic animals in a fairly rigid class system.

My GenX identity comes from a happy place. The more I think about it, the more I know that I came to life in a nation engaged in a Cold War. I’m definitely a Cold War kid. I was fascinated by The Bomb, riveted by the Planet of the Apes and became a planespotter always on the lookout for Soviet aircraft. I read Fail Safe and Hiroshima, not Silent Spring. I recall my parents admitting to me that they were only scared of one thing, and that was the Cuban Missile Crisis. I recall asking my father once, why we didn’t just end the Vietnam war with nukes. He said that everybody in the world would hate us, like if I brought a knife to a tackle football game. Even war has rules.

So there was a world of rules. There were the rules of the house. There were the rules of school. But importantly there were the rules of play - of sportsmanship, of fair competition. You didn’t hit girls. You didn’t hit a man with glasses. You don’t shoot a man in the back. Outside of home and school, where our duties were dictated to us, there were our rules made by us.

We understood plenty of things, but we were ready to experiment and learn our own limits. We had the freedom to do so outside. Outside was for us, and the dogs and fruit trees and neighbor kids. We had skateboards and bikes and ramps and klick-klacks. We had denim jackets with peace signs and American flags. We had windbreakers and bellbottoms. We had hula hoops and frisbees. We had paper routes and baseball gloves. We knew how to repair broken windows and whip up pancake mix. We knew about axle grease and master links. We knew about tube testers and horizontal hold. We built crystal radios and electric circuits. We wore red LED watches and played Atari football. We put reflectors on our sissy bars and studs on our beanies. We put Dymo tape on our radio and drew afros on the Pee Chee folder athletes. We wore Stan Smiths and powder blue sweatsuits, or cutoffs and tank tops. We always competed. We hated cheaters.

We were merciless pranksters. We ragged on each other’s mitchmatch socks, talking shoes, stripes and plaids. Our Toughskins had patches. Our mothers wore curlers outside. Our fathers smoked Tiparillos and drank Schlitz. We were all amazed by Bob Griese and the perfect season of the Miami Dolphins, but we still thought their colors were nasty. We weren’t so poor that we had to steal hubcaps but we tested our stealth and craftiness in the candy aisle. On the scale of reckless adventure, I knew I was the boy somewhere between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. But I had more than graveyards and rivers, I had the imagination of science fiction, the boldness of America and the vastness of the space as potential.

I remember Craig Breedlove and Evel Knievel. Mickey Thompson and Don Garlits. Every high octane V8 with unleashed stacks and headers was the symphony of power, speed, dynamism and bravery. Every dirtbag on a Harley chopper challenged the slow of the status quo. Every youth with horizontal striped t-shirts in an open air dune buggy or convertible VW was moving, changing, going somewhere. We couldn’t keep still. We wanted to go higher, further, faster. We wanted to break the limits. We wanted to be fearless. But we were not afraid to get our hands dirty, indeed dirty hands and a brassy sassy attitude were markers of pride. There was something to be seen in the purity of the ambitious passionate soul that drove a body to the extremes. We are inverted from that position today. Today we expect our slick outsides to outweigh our insides. This is infantilization culture. GenX couldn’t wait to grow up.

The music of our generation was not of our own generation. We listened to the music that moved our parents. We were still under the influence of romantic singers like the Spinners and Frank Sinatra and Nat King Cole. Stevie Wonder used electric keyboards as did Journey, Yes and Pink Floyd - but there were no boy bands. No kids 15 years old on TV were role models. No teenaged girls, with the possible exception of Marsha Brady gave us our own culture. We had to deal with the adult world in adult terms. We learned from Bugs Bunny and Fred Flintstone. Even our cartoons were mature. Mr. Rodgers was polite and respectful, not like Ed, Edd and Eddie or Catdog.

We lived through integration and bussing. We understood the work necessary to deal with and gain respect from strangers, and we were all about that because we knew the alternative. We knew what it was like to have a race riot in our towns. We knew what it was like to have, not microaggression, but real aggression. We decided to turn away from places where teargas canisters would fly. I think for us in Los Angeles, it was watching the Symbionese Liberation Army get taken down in 1974. If this is how the revolution goes, I’m not going.

Two years later, we danced to KC & The Sunshine Band at the Bicentennial celebration at the LA Coliseum. It was time to get about the Friendship Train. Anybody make songs like this any longer?

Harmony is the key for sisters and brothers.
People we can’t wait for another day might be too late.

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As much as I come at my positions from pure logic, I have to think that my predisposition to be agnostic to a postmodern philosophy and ethos comes from such formative experiences as were probably easier to come by in the wake to the treacherous 1960s. Yes, I am counter-revolutionary but that’s because I reckoned with the failure of the revolution. The bad ideas still persist, but all those ideas did were to rot people from the inside out.

Even the honesty of the punks of the 80s was better. They didn’t pretend that they were going to change the world. They were honest critics. They simply protested the mainstream with their alternative style and flavor they wouldn’t dare try to foist upon America’s institutions. They were grownups and they built their own clubs. At least that’s how I remember the Ramones, Clash, Blondie and CBGBs. My favorite was Malcolm McLaren, a creator until the end. Not a destroyer.

GenX, we suck it up. Millennials invented safe spaces. GenX invented mosh pits.