We Didn't Start The Fire

With the most sweeping and historic fires in history, we rarely know the cause. The Great Fire of Chicago, legend tells us, was caused by Mrs. O'Leary's cow kicking over a lantern. But this sounds like a folk tale, the kind of thing we'd expect for events as remote and ancient as when Rome burned to the ground.

The same can be said of the great bonfire of the vanities that was the hype surrounding Generation X. Almost overnight, pundits and trendwatchers everywhere created an effigy for a whole generation, which media commentators were more than happy to set aflame. Many came to bury a generation, not to praise it, laughing and roasting marshmallows over the embers of youth culture damned to flame out spectacularly and be mere ashes next to its parents' glowing accomplishments.

But what started it all? As mentioned in a previous post, Douglas Coupland -- author of the novel Generation X: Tales From An Accelerated Culture -- wrote in a 1995 Details magazine piece that he triangulated the tributaries clearly. His thesis is that observers took the "overeducated and underoccupied oddballs" in Coupland's book, matched them against similar idlers in Richard Linklater's cult-fave film Slackers, poured in the grunge movement rising in Seattle and created a massive stereotypical cocktail washing over twentysomethings everywhere. It was overly simplistic and woefully inaccurate, but you see very few accounts at the time trying to shout it down.

Maybe that's because members of this new "Generation X" really were cynical enough not to trust the media and realized someone else was in control of the gathering conflagration. A couple of cold cups of water would have done little to stop the blaze. Many of us just laughed at it in those days or shrugged as we went to our jobs and helping in our communities as had our parents and their parents. In retrospect, maybe we should have fought harder ... but perhaps we weren't properly equipped or in the right positions to fight the inferno.

But it all happened so fast, and the big why such a craze could suddenly pigeonhole a generation remains unknown. Perhaps all my research will never reach a definitive cause, other than the general laziness and lemminglike nature of our media machine. We can connect the dots to ascertain, perhaps, answers to some subthreads, such as why the prototypical slacker was a white male, but tackling the bigger question of why slackers dominated media images at all may be like chasing a white whale.

Nonetheless, nothing of consequence can be accomplished by fixing your boat for something within your immediate sight. Voyages of discovery can only commence by looking out at a great blue horizon, and setting sail looking for something at least initially beyond our grasp.