Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, May 20, 1993 TAG: 9308230257
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARSHALL FISHWICK
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Before we define the desperation, what about defining this new generation? Even the question scares some graduates. ``They say our generation can't be defined,'' reads the headline in the May issue of The National College Magazine. ``So why are they trying so hard?''
We try because we care; and because labels are the handles on which we hang our ideas. This new crop deserves a name, and it will surely get one. ``You can't ignore our generation,'' says Jake Perkins, a Virginia Tech senior. ``America should be ready.''
We recall our own labels. I was a Depression Baby and we became G.I. Joes. Then came the Silent Generation. Before long Ginsberg sent up his ``Howl,'' young people began to Let It All Hang Out, and we talked of Beatniks, Junkies and Hippies.
The '60s had a war to hate, a self-indulgence to love, and a nation called Woodstock. Today's youth had no Depression, no Vietnam. ``All we had,'' writes Elizabeth Lee, ``was Ronald Reagan and a pocketful of money that ran out when we ran off.''
Reagan went West, Bush was defeated, and radicals came in from the cold. We talked of Yippies in the 1970s and Yuppies in the 1980s. Tom Wolfe coined a phrase that stuck: the ``Me Too'' generation. They loved their BMWs, brie cheese, white wine and Ronald Reagan. Working in and out of the government, they gave us the greatest national debt in history. It's still there.
But the 1990s? There's the problem. Not that we lack for suggestions. Call them the Baby Busters (as in ``From Boom to Bust'') or the Baby Boomerangs (coming back home without a job). What about the Lost Generation? We can't remember the old one.
A little probing turns up lots of other suggestions: the Cable Generation, the Brady Bunch (for the reruns they loved to watch), cyborgs, videos, latchkeys, mall rats, downbeats, burnouts ... the list goes on and on. People who make big bucks from coining the right names are frantic. Anyone who sells or advertises anything gets into the act. They point out that more than 80 million Americans were born between 1961 and 1981. What's in a name? Everything. How do we create some community and identity, since the age-group ID is a cultural imperative?
Perhaps we should ask the twentysomethings themselves. Here are two answers. Rachel McNally, 24, says, ``We are sort of caught in a big muddle of trying to see every side of everything and not being able to move forward.'' Multiculturalism? Or this from Charles von Simson, 28, a law student who live in Brooklyn:
``We are caught behind a defining generation. We must settle for junk culture as a unifying symbol. We couldn't rebel against Vietnam. We missed the '80s boom and all the good jobs were taken. So we invented this slacker psyche and, in my case, went to law school.''
Then came a suggestion from the nation's No. 1 Baby Boomer, Bill Clinton. Hard at work on his national ``sales blitz,'' a public-relations campaign to pressure Congress to support his economic agenda, he came up with a politically correct suggestion. Why not move from the ``Me Generation'' to the ``We Generation?'' Isn't it time ``we'' came together, to share the burden and the pain of renewal?
It's too early to say, but the fast-track lobbyists and special-interest groups are nervous. Does he expect the successful Baby Boomers to cut back on wine and cheese? The Texans to give up that ultimate pork barrel, the supercollider? Or the Golden Oldies to cut back on their Social Security checks? Or any of us to pay a whopping tax at the gas pump? Come on Bill, wise up.
Maybe if we wise up WE will accept the WE. In any case, the presidential sales pitch is in place. In Clinton's words: ``It's the morning after the 1980s and we are seeing what a binge we went on the night before. We have to replace it with a collective creed that values service and commitment.'' He goes on to give us the sound bite: ``The test of this plan cannot be what's in it for ME. It has got to be what is in it for US.''
To get to ``We,'' we have to curb ``E'' - the obsession with Entertainment, which has spread like the Exxon oil spill off the Alaska coast, blanketing our whole culture - religion, journalism, public policy, education. In a recent poll, college students gave as the No. 1 reason for cutting classes that the class was ``boring.'' Did anyone ever say tackling a tough mathematical problem or translating a foreign language was supposed to be fun and games? Do our students spend thousand of dollars to get professors or merely song-and-dance men? And how ``entertaining'' is the real world in which they must struggle to find a job?
No one is opposed to entertainment - but are we (to quote the title of Neil Postman's new book) Entertaining Ourselves to Death? Much of what now passes for entertainment is built on violence and an alienated imagination, which acquires an autonomy of its own and becomes a substitute world. It is not concerned with education but titillation. This kind of activity mentally exhausts itself in itself, becoming a form of psychic masturbation. We are diverted into the impotence of moral indifference.
What's in a name? Just as we must strive to get names, we must be willing to give them up. We have lived all our lives in the 20th century. In a few years we must give up that idea, and adjust to the 21st. We have been proud of the ``modern'' world, which is now widely labeled as post-modern.
Not only names but nations change, and even disappear. There is no more U.S.S.R., which until five years ago spread across two continents and 11 time zones. Yugoslavia disintegrates under our very eyes.
Nor can we solve problems by merely changing names, or slapping labels on problems. As Robert Chambers pointed out:
``To change the name, and not the letter, is a change for the worse, and not the better.''
To find a name we must find a focus. The new graduates seem to have none in an age obsessed with diversity. They seem more like a subculture of subcultures suffering from option paralysis. When you have few guidelines and unlimited choices, you end up making none.
Benden Gillen mirrors the distrust that the young have for older Americans, and the way ``alternative'' is becoming mainstream. ``Once you find something interesting, big old fat guys, balding, with cigars, take it away from you.''
We don't want to take away, but to give you your share of the American dream. We share your urgent and growing need to define goals and set policy. We need your help, not your animosity. The not-very United States must come together again, substituting ``we'' for ``me.''
Yes, we are a superpower. Can we become a superculture? That is the question on which all generations and labels must center. \
Marshall Fishwick is professor of humanities and communication studies at Virginia Tech.
by CNB