From: rich@pencil.cs.missouri.edu (Rich Winkel)
Subject: Who's generation is Generation X?
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Originator: daemon@pencil.cs.missouri.edu
Organization: University of Missouri
Date: Wed, 8 Apr 1992 21:40:22 GMT

From: PENN@MITLNS.MIT.EDU (steve penn 26-567, 253-1521 Remember Our Humanity; Science is Not Neutral; MIT War Research Kills.)

Included below is an article from the New Liberation News Service
(NLNS) Packet 2.7 (supplemental) -- our autoposter is posting one
article at a time from this 168K file. To receive the full file,
use the GET command (see bottom) on the file NLNS PACKET ; to 
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--Harel B.
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NLNS  Packet 2.7b  -  24 March 1992
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Who's generation is Generation X?

Randy  Viscio, NLNS 

	In the March issue of the New Liberation News Service [Vol.2, Packet 
#7, p.24 - 25] I read a reprinted article written by Cosner of the Student 
Insurgent. The article, entitled "Slacker and Generation X Define a 
Generation," gave a positive review of Doug Coupland's new book 
Generation X. While I agreed with Cosner's basis for writing the article 
which was to fend of "a cultural stampede that squelched the imagination 
and destroyed community in the name of goals" I have a serious problem 
with his interpretation of Generation X which completely ignored the book's 
class bias.
	The book left me asking myself 'which portion of the generation is 
Coupland talking about?' The background and experience of  the author 
and his characters are middle and upper-middle-class and the book levels 
our generation by presuming that we are all having the same middle-class 
experience. Moreover, the tone of the book--the characters' self-pitty for 
their downward mobility--exposes the author's ignorance of status. 
Coupland's characters, Andy, Dag and Claire, living out in their desert 
bungalow, cruising around in their Saab and sipping their drinks, have got 
it pretty god-damned easy compared to most young people who are either in 
the military, unemployed or busting their asses off working blue collar jobs. 
The reviewer not only misses this class dichotomy, he never even questions 
the abstract, impractical nature of Generation X  which is more of a 
fairytale than any kind of generational gauge. Here are just a few minor 
examples:
	First, Cosner hails the narrator, Andy, for "Dropping out of the 
career track" and living "in a desert bungalow, tending bar and 
uncomplicateing his life." Cosner never questions the basis of this. A bit of 
research shows that the characterization is based on Coupland's real life 
story and that Coupland went out to the desert to live an uncomplicated life 
only after he received a nice advance sum of money to produce the book. 
	Next, Cosner notes one of the themes of  Generation X  as "Coupland 
coins the term 'poverty-jet-set' to refer to those souls for whom travel is an 
approach, not an escape." The very idea that jet-setting can be either and 
escape or an approach for a person exposes the class bias of the book. The 
largest portion of the youth population does not jet-set at all because travel is 
simply not an option.
	Thirdly, Cosner champions the book's characters as people of our 
generation who have "abandoned the illusions of limitless and harmless 
growth and may have even embraced the heresy that downward mobility 
could actually be life-affirming." This is a romantic notion that distorts the 
reality of low-income youth who have serious economic struggles to 
overcome; but then that's my point, the book isn't about the low-income 
youth of this generation and does not speak for them.
	In an October interview with People Magazine Coupland stated, "It's 
the kind of thing that some people get and other's don't. If you don't get it, 
you don't get it." Again, an elitist perspective from an elitist author. 
Generation X does not define a generation or the young people I grew up 
with. It speaks for middle and upper-middle class youth who are facing an 
accelerated culture and have a particular experience to share. Generation 
X may be important for those young people but to stereotype it the way 
Cosner did as being definitive of our generation is to ignore the reality of so 
many young people that this book left out.

P.S. Who reads Generation X?  The October 14, 1991 People Magazine tried 
to answer that question. Here's what they found:

"One fan, 26-year-old Heather Coen, defined her generation's ethos thus: 
'We leave the overachievement to the elder siblings, the prison cells of those 
office jobs to the thirty-somethings, and we live off Mom and Dad as long as 
the umbilical cord will stretch.'"

Randy Viscio is the National Office Outreach Coordinator for the Student 
Environmental Action Coalition; P.O.Box 1168, Chapel Hill, NC 27514.

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