In a way, what’s called Gen X culture is really more elder Millennial culture. By the early 90s when these key pieces of media you mention were produced, a good chunk of us Gen X types were already slipping around in adulthood. We may have produced these works, but we weren’t shaped by them in the same way those who encountered them as teenagers would have been.
The culture we grew up swimming in was undiluted Boomer culture. And we grew up witnessing that culture perpetually praise itself for its Flower Power era idealism while simultaneously embracing Reaganism. When the amount of self-mythologizing going on around you had everyone being their own Forrest Gump (there’s the obligatory Gen X pop culture reference for you) it’s probably not to hard to see how a suspicion of generational identity, and more importantly inherent generational virtue, begins to look suspicious.
And honestly, remain suspicious. When hearing how Gen Z will save us all, it’s not hard to recall when the same thing was said about the Boomers and how they then delivered us Reagan. Material change seems less assured when you notice Pride has started to look a lot like Flower Power.
Oct 8, 2023·edited Oct 8, 2023Liked by Charles Petersen
There's both substantive and bull shitake versions of histories that attempt to capture the experiences of specific generations. On the substantive side are folks like Glen Elder on children of the Great Depression, or V.P. Franklin on children and youth of the Civil Rights Movement. On the questionable-but-plausible side are pop writers like David Kamp, of "Sunny Days," who argued that there was a zeitgeist of children's media culture in the early 1970s. My test of substance is whether someone who is interested in the cultural history of a generation tries to cross-check the cultural history with other parts of a generation's experience: for Gen X, for example, there's the expansion of special education and inconsistent but real expansion of desegregation in public schools; inflation and gas shortages during their childhood; a peaking of Cold War tensions in the late 1970s-early 1980s; the expansion of mass incarceration that disproportionately affected Black members of my generation; serious gun violence that peaked in our early adulthood. How that shaped our cultural experience is an open question, but some of that has to be in there, no?
In a way, what’s called Gen X culture is really more elder Millennial culture. By the early 90s when these key pieces of media you mention were produced, a good chunk of us Gen X types were already slipping around in adulthood. We may have produced these works, but we weren’t shaped by them in the same way those who encountered them as teenagers would have been.
The culture we grew up swimming in was undiluted Boomer culture. And we grew up witnessing that culture perpetually praise itself for its Flower Power era idealism while simultaneously embracing Reaganism. When the amount of self-mythologizing going on around you had everyone being their own Forrest Gump (there’s the obligatory Gen X pop culture reference for you) it’s probably not to hard to see how a suspicion of generational identity, and more importantly inherent generational virtue, begins to look suspicious.
And honestly, remain suspicious. When hearing how Gen Z will save us all, it’s not hard to recall when the same thing was said about the Boomers and how they then delivered us Reagan. Material change seems less assured when you notice Pride has started to look a lot like Flower Power.
There's both substantive and bull shitake versions of histories that attempt to capture the experiences of specific generations. On the substantive side are folks like Glen Elder on children of the Great Depression, or V.P. Franklin on children and youth of the Civil Rights Movement. On the questionable-but-plausible side are pop writers like David Kamp, of "Sunny Days," who argued that there was a zeitgeist of children's media culture in the early 1970s. My test of substance is whether someone who is interested in the cultural history of a generation tries to cross-check the cultural history with other parts of a generation's experience: for Gen X, for example, there's the expansion of special education and inconsistent but real expansion of desegregation in public schools; inflation and gas shortages during their childhood; a peaking of Cold War tensions in the late 1970s-early 1980s; the expansion of mass incarceration that disproportionately affected Black members of my generation; serious gun violence that peaked in our early adulthood. How that shaped our cultural experience is an open question, but some of that has to be in there, no?