Fight For Your Right To Party

Have picked up some new books that provide competitive or complementary thoughts on a few narrative threads. Thanks to the incredibly fast Inter-Library Loan program, I have a copy Meredith Bagby's Rational Exuberance: The Influence of Generation X on the New American Economy. Even though the folks at The Baffler generally belittle Bagby for her free-market capitalism cheerleading, her book is pretty "postpartisan," to use one of her favorite terms. If it's pro-anything, it's very pro-GenX, which makes it stand out compared to some of the stuff I've read.

Her book also pointed me toward a couple of articles that mark a turn from the X-bashing so popular in mainstream mags in the first half of the 1990s. A Forbes piece from 1995 (there's that year of demarcation again) lauds the entrepreneur impulse of our protagonists. (The article subhead reads: "Grungy? Maybe. Lazy and apathetic? Not at all. The so-called Generatin X is the most entrepreneurial generation in American history.") This item may be a landmark in and of itself because it seems like the first piece in a general-interest magazine trying to chart a new narrative for the generation. Also notable is a 1997 U.S. News and World Report article titled "Boom Time for GenX?" subtitled "Older than you think, and smarter, too, they are making, saving, figuring out money." Of course the dot-com boom was already starting to influence how Generation X was viewed by then, and the new twentysometing-genius-IPO-instant billionaire narrative was not too far off by that point.

An interesting claim Bagby makes trumpets the civic involvement and volunteering of Generation X, which stands in opposition to the sour note Robert D. Putnam sounds in Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. In the book (mentioned in an earlier post), Putnam explains that volunteering, voting and even signing petitions have been on a downward trend since the Boomer generation. Well, the Century Foundation listened! Sort of. They issued a report called Engaging Youth: Combating the Apathy of Young Americans toward Politics. I've picked up this report, penned by Kevin Mattson, from the library and have barely looked at it -- but it's interesting that it does seem to reinforce the Xer stereotypes and conveniently ignore the dropoff in civic engagement starting with the previous generation. Well, that doesn't make for good copy when it's so much more fun to worry about the youth of the nation.

On a more fun note, the library furnished a copy of The Cinema of Generation X, one of multiple intriguing sources for looking at GenX film. This study by Peter Hanson looks at younger directors like Quentin Tarantino, Kevin Smith and Ben Stiller and how they were affected by, and in turn influenced, their generation. I did not pick up Jonathan Bernsterin's Pretty In Pink -- a study of 1980s teen movies -- but it could be interesting in terms of what filmmakers were providing us as entertainment in our teen years. These two books, together with Timothy Shary's Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary Cinema and a few days on the sofa with movies of the 1980s/1990s could probably lay the groundwork for a whole thesis. For now, we'll see how they fit with everything else.

Looks like I have some thesis-type reading on my schedule.