The Beaten Generation

I mentioned earlier how Spin publisher Bob Guccione Jr. accused journalists -- and his fellow Boomers -- of treating the rising generation like some kind of disease or oddity. You can particularly see an odd backlash in such publications as Bernard Carl Rosen's Masks and Mirrors: Generation X and the Chameleon Personality and Peter Sacks' Generation X Goes to College.

Perhaps it was the knowledge that the so-called GenX was rising into power that fueled these kinds of insecure theses. This seems to be at least part of the motivation for Rosen, a social historian from Cornell, who identified a strain of "elite Xers" in the business climate who he saw as a kind of pathology. Some elite Xers hid a mean streak, "determined to knock the Boomers off their comfortable perches and make it big whatever the cost," Rosen posited. These ambitious animals masked their emotions in temporarily subverting their raging individualism, so that they appear "docile and unthreatening" while actually waging a covert, devious war. Continuing his observations in the tone of a wildlife observer, Rosen explained these elite Xers lull "competitors into a false sense of security" to "position unwary opponents for drubbings when circumstances permit."

Wild Kingdom imagery aside, Rosen saw Generation X in a kind of ascendancy, even though the media glare abated years before he wrote his book. He perceived a win-at-all-costs ethic in these elite Xers who applauded winners and "have no place for losers," emphasizing that, more than anything, "Xers want to be winners." Their youth – particularly their ability to hustle and keep up with, as well as drive, the emergence of new technology – gave the Xers a leg up on Boomers like Rosen. For better or worse, he warned ominously, the world since the 1990s has become one where "we cannot escape their influence."

Sacks, meanwhile, didn't see even this much ambition in the Xers he encountered when left the world of journalism to begin teaching at a community college. The pseudonymous author was shocked when he believed he found students who felt they were "entitled to easy success and good grades even though they were often unwilling to work to achieve them." (This doesn't sound like anyone I went to college with ... well, almost anyone. Every generation has its slackers.)

Sacks told of entering academia only to find a raging "culture war" (there's that generational warfare thread again!) between Boomer teachers like him and Generation X students. He spoke of finding a room filled with "young women trying very hard to look like models in fashion magazines with their big hair and lips" and young men in "baseball caps, often worn backwards" sporting a uniform of "baggy shorts, a team T-shirt and an ample attitude." As he tried to teach and reach students, he failed, and reinforced an earlier media paradigm by observing "this could be a generation in trouble, foreboding possibly scary times for our country" unless the regnant Boomers overhauled the educational system. (Perhaps he should have tried to figure out who wrecked the system in the first place?)

Typical of Boomer authors writing books charged with the terms of generational warfare, Sacks saw Gen X as a problem and appeared incapable of seeing that the youngest, brightest minds of that generation could provide part of the solution. Instead of changing the system (and thus living up to the Boomer meme of high ideals), Sacks decided to turn his class into a kind of collegiate kindergarten in what he termed "the Sandbox Experiment." Desperate to counter negative student evaluations and to attain tenure, he mastered such tasks as "hand-holding and spoon-feeding" and won acceptance from his unmotivated charges. As a result of selling out, Sacks saw his student evaluations rise from exasperated to excellent, and he received tenure.

Despite his high-minded preaching, Sacks offers an unintended, yet telling, moral that treating Xers like children, and not preparing them for their important future roles, can help a Boomer like him achieve success. It seems authors like he and Rosen were looking to supply fuel for the generational war more than they wanted to bring peace, love and understanding.