SPITTING
AT THE GENERATIONS, AND OTHER CUSP-WORDS
You're nobody
if you don't wear a label. For a nation
supposedly made up of rugged individualists,
we come by our group identities awfully
easily. Hold out for a singular existence
untrammeled by the bumper-sticker taglines of
pundits and pop scholars, and you either find
yourself dumped head-first into the trashcan
of American culture or assigned to a category
against your will. Face it--the only maverick
left in this country is Gerald Ford, who as
the only unelected president in American
history forms a select group of exactly one
person.
Used to be
that people were commonly lumped together by
political (Republican, Democrat), ideological
(conservative, moderate, liberal), or
religious (Methodist, Catholic, Jew, Baptist)
persuasions. Perhaps because of a more
deterministic bent in our society--or the
corporate desire to better target
consumers--these groupings have given ground
over the past two decades to the method of
classifying people by age group. In the eyes
of the people who sell you cars and cop
shows, a liberal Democratic Jew and a
conservative Republican Baptist are, if not
interchangeable, pretty similar if they are
both males in the 18-35 age bracket.
From there, it
was only a short step to bracketing
generations by birth years and charting their
progress as a group from cradle to grave.
While this sociologial mode of study was
pioneered by what's now known as "the
World War II generation", it was
popularized by the most intensively studied
(and self-examining) generation in American
history--the Baby Boomers. Love or hate the
Boomers and their endless rite-of-passage
navel gazing, the clarion call to wear a
generational badge has been picked up by
their successors, Generation-X (as
defined by their resident pulse-taker,
novelist Douglas Coupland).
There is
validity in placing personal history within
the history of the times one lives in. The
big problem with generational diagnoses is
that the ability to select a personal label
has been wrested from the individual and
given over to the random factor of a
birthdate. Deterministic trends or not, no
one likes to be told who and what they are by
virtue of the calendar.
While no one
has gone to the trouble yet of boycotting Atlantic
Monthly or picketing the USA Today
offices, it's not unusual to see a few fits
of pique thrown when your neighborhood
Nostradamus begins to wax generational in
conversation. Worse, basing the profile of
millions upon arbitrary dates becomes a
massive exercise in the straining of gnats
and the swallowing of camels; assigning
cutoff years to generations makes about as
much sense as proclaiming that New Wave
became New Rock on August 14, 1982, and that
New Rock became Alternative on December 4,
1989.
A more
personal problem lies in the lack of an
authoritative bracket-maker. Some
sociologists and trend-spotters place the
changing of the guard from Boomer babies to
Gen-X babies at the dawn of the Kennedy
Camelot, 1960.
Others, in an
attempt to round out the traditional twenty
years assigned to a generation (presuming
that Boomerism was birthed at the end of WWII
in 1945), place the Boomer/Gen-X frontier at
1964. It's a personal problem because there
are millions of us who, like the mouse
passing through the snake, formed huge
kindergarten classes between 1965 and 1969
and crested the final wave of the Boom before
hospital nurseries everywhere went Bust.
We don't fit
either of the accepted profiles of the two
generations in question as created by the
facile and shallow popnoscenti who trouble
themselves with such depictions. We have no
memory of either assassinated Kennedy, and
the Beatles are better recollected from
perpetual airplay post-breakup than from any
timely currency in the sixties. "The
Brady Bunch" defined our childhoods, the
mutually-incompatible musical genres of disco
and arena rock define our adolescences (or
punk, if you're into lying about your
hipper-than-thou youth), and Ronald Reagan
and the AIDS crisis define our young
adulthoods. We mark time by where we were
when John Lennon, not John Kennedy, was shot,
and the Challenger disaster of 1986 is a more
indelible memory than the Armstrong/Aldrin
moonwalk of 1969 (unless you had parents with
enough foresight to let you stay up way past
your bedtime that long-ago summer night).
Furthermore,
we provide no interesting fodder for the
would-be generational psychoanalysts. We lack
the narcissism, the anti-authoritarianism,
and the resistance to aging gracefully of the
Boomers, and we likewise don't see ourselves
in the cynical slacker mercenaries and
isolationist software coders of Gen-X. We
were too young to march with the former, too
old to slouch with the latter. We drank a lot
and had fun at college toga parties, grew up
a little, got married, settled down, and took
insurance claims adjuster jobs to pay for the
kids and the mortgage and the minivan. While
we may wonder whatever happened to Leo Sayer
and wistfully break out the old Foghat LPs
from time to time, we are more concerned with
keeping up the daily Nordic-Track workout
regimen--because of what we know about good
health, not because we want to ape our silly
gray-ponytail ex-hippie elders in eluding
Father Time.
The experts
have no idea what to do with those of us who
lie on the '60--'64 intergenerational cusp.
They'd just like to forget we exist. We are a
boring anomaly, a WWII-generation retread
sandwiched between two really interesting
essay subjects for Harpers. The
pundits just spit on us and redraw the
brackets wherever they please. Or, if they
deign to notice our presence, they give us a
stupid label like "Gappers", as if
that moniker wouldn't be confused with a
certain retail clothing chain (and we've been
Sears people ever since Mom bought us our
first Garanimals). The guy who came up with
that name is obviously still trying to make
amends for his failed career as the "new
Coke" advertising maven.
Life is hard
for those of us on the cusp, but we soldier
on. We pass over the generational punditry
and proclamations and move on to the sports
section or the TV listings. They may spit on
us, but we're used to it. For we are the
Cuspidors.
Captain
Spaulding
Previous Mountaintop
Experiences with Captain
Spaulding:
Hooray
For Me, #1-- The
Anti-Parrothead Rant
