The Lamest Generation

Carrie Fisher knows me. Not literally, but belonging to the great sisterhood of Bipolar Disorder, we’ve lived similar lives. She captured that life perfectly in “Postcards from the Edge”, which feels like an autobiography even though my mother and I were never in show business and bear little resemblance to Meryl Streep and Shirley McLaine. The angst is distilled into one perfect line, where upon being told the evils of her generation, Meryl/ Carrie/ I reply “I don’t have a generation”. I’m a little younger than a Baby Boomer. I’m a little older than most Gen-Xers, though we used to club together in the Grunge days. We’re smack dab in the middle of middle age with no defining characteristics. Tom Brokaw identified the “Greatest Generation”. Now I claim for us a title we richly deserve: The Lamest Generation.

We grew up getting the Vietnam war served up with our evening dinner. Sonny and Cher were “just a couple of wierdos” according to my dad, but I thought she was cool. Kent State happened in my back yard, so my first unofficial civics lesson was that the President of the United States shoots students for protesting the war. I saw what the war did to my older cousins who went away happy young men and came back physically intact but forever scarred in deeper ways and I knew the war was bad. I couldn’t wait to grow up, go to college, and protest the war. (Unfortunately, I started College in 1979 in the middle of the most apathetic era in human history. The only students protesting at my school were Iranian.)

When Woodstock happened, I didn’t quite understand what all the fuss was about, but I knew there was a party going on and that I wasn’t old enough to go. Shaun Cassidy later called us “a generation younger than Rock and Roll” and it was true. Everything after the Beatles and Bowie is derivative, and Paul McCartney is the same age as my mom. That’s just wrong.

We had a great foundation to build on. The anti-war movement, the civil rights movement and the women’s movement came together to form a cultural revolution. All we had to do to create a world of justice and opportunity was keep the ball rolling. We didn’t.

I secretly blame Timothy Leary. He urged our older brothers and sisters to “turn on, tune in and drop out.” 2 out of three just didn’t cut it this time. He should have been telling us to “turn on, tune in and take over.” We were so busy opposing authority and ignoring social convention that we didn’t - and haven’t - figured out that you can’t throw the old rules out without putting something new in their place. Nature abhors a vacuum, so when the old structure starts to crumble, you either build a structure of some sort in its place or you suffer the consequences. Can you say “Reagan”? A lot of us that lost our financial aid and had to leave our educations unfinished can. And need I remind you of the other evils of the 80’s? “Greed is good“. Electronic music. AIDS.

The Sexual Revolution never really came to fruition, and took an unexpected and deadly turn. We were in a position to stop it. We didn’t, and we still aren’t. Most of the single women I know still have unprotected sex. They know better. They do it anyway. We went from Free Love to fatal attraction. The backlash to feminism is in full swing - men demand sex without commitment, are marriage-phobic, and a good portion of them never really seem to grow up anymore. There’s a general sense of entitlement and selfishness that works on people my age. We don’t compromise. We’re hypercritical. We’re generally anti-social. There’s a reason we made Seinfeld a cultural institution. We’ve all dated George Costanza and he isn’t ”sponge-worthy“. Jerry could be, but he’s a perpetual kid who wears sneakers, talks about Superman, tells jokes, and judges his many women by such shallow standards as the size of their hands and the sound of their laughter.

And now, our government is gone. In its place, we have a coup d’etat every four years with nary a shot fired. Unless you count the shots fired in countries we have no business in. Our founding fathers rioted over a tax on tea. We let a fascist regime with dangerous ties to religious interests take over every branch of government in a process eerily similar to the one the Nazis used to take control of Germany. We might have recognized the pattern if we hadn’t been cutting class that day. Who can study History with a hangover?