Generation X, aka 13ers (as in the 13th generation of Americans, of the archetype “Nomad”), is anyone two young to remember JFK’s assassination (about 1962) to about 1986. This includes Barrack H. Obama, but does not include Donald J. Trump. Nonetheless, Trump 47 is the first time in history the country is operating as if Gen X was running it.
Obama, though a Gen Xer, was surrounded by Boomers and even a few Silents (the people born from 1925 to 1942). The institutions, still mostly intact and respected, were designed by and for the post-WWII era. The corporations that mattered were the same—run by Boomers and Silents and designed and operated for the post-WWII world. No matter how Obama tried to change them, he couldn’t. They were too big and too stable.
But Obama could do something: he could destabilize them.
And he did.
Like the CIA, Obama mistakenly believed that his destabilization would work in his favor since he thought of it. So, he destabilized the institutions that were rock solid from 60 years of care, maintenance, and refinement. The FBI, the CIA, the State Department, universities, public health institutions, great American corporations, the armed forces—name the institution, Obama destabilized it.
But destabilization is not the same as destruction. Obama did not tear down the institutions; he built them up! He expected the institutions to fix their stability problems in his Image and Likeness. POWs are brainwashed by, first, being mentally, emotionally, and, if necessary, physically destabilized, then exposed to a new reality—a reality that stops the pain. When they operate in this new reality, they are not beaten or frightened or tricked. When they slip back into their old reality, the horrors return. Likewise, when an institution is is destabilized and offered a path to safety, it takes it. Joe Biden arrived just in time to throw the institutions their lifelines.
But just as the CIA’s best laid plan, perfectly executed, rarely achieve the Nirvana final outcomes dreamed of, Obama’s destabilization and Joe Biden’s ineptness exposed the rot inside these institutions for all to see. Not all said, “w—- t— f——?” but all saw and knew. The WTF crowd said, “burn it down.” The anti-WTF crowd said, “OMG! There’s nothing see here. Everything’s fine. Joy!” The WTFers paid for those institutions; the anti-WTFers did not. The anti-WTFers actual made bank from the unstable institutions, which lost all accounting functions in the destabilization process. They became ATMs for the “everything’s fine” crowd who, in turn, became the institutions’ greatest champions to point of censoring, canceling, and even trying to kill the WTFers. They created snappy slogans. “When you attack me, you’re attacking science.” “Diversity is our strength.” “I want to understand white rage.” “Listen here, Jack.”
But the WTFers, who were throughout the post-WWII, the champions of these institutions, were like, “Sorry, dude, but this is my money they’re wasting, my kids they’re mutilating, my house they’re squatting, and my store they’re looting.” WTFers responded with their own slogans: “Let’s Go Brandon,” “FAFO,” “Based and red-pilled.” The WTFers became rabidly irreverent. They laughed at the unlaughable. They parodied and ridiculed and mocked and demand extreme measures. They were unemotional, unless you count snark and sarcasm as emotions. They became cold, ruthless dismantlers of the very institutions they once idolized because they saw the rot inside and knew they were looking at a tear-down, not a renovation.
Total role reversal.
Now, let’s look at some descriptions of Gen X from the men who defined the generation even before Douglas Coupland named it. From Howe and Strauss’s The Fourth Turning: (remember that Howe and Strauss labeled this generation “13ers” before Coupland’s book, Generation X, was published.)
The first 13ers engaged in high-risk behavior coming of age, but today’s fledgling householders are beginning to turn against personal and public risk. (p. 97)
13ers have come to expect little of themselves as a generation—a fact that itself has become part of their collective persona. A similar trait arose in the generations of George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower. (p. 68)
The 13ers’ global peers, today’s youthful “90s generation” (in France, the Bof generation, as in “who cares?”) are described in the media as fun-loving and rootless, environmentalist and entrepreneurial, pragmatic and market-oriented, globalist economically yet xenophobic socially, and less interested in politics than in making money. (p. 120)
Throughout the 13ers’ childhood era, the adult media battered their collective reputation and, over time, began to portray this generation as having absorbed the negative message. “We’re rotten to the core,” sang the preteen thug-boys in Bugsy Malone. “We’re the very worst—each of us contemptible, criticized, and cursed.” As the 1970s gave way to the 1980s, teenagers began repeating this line, as when one student mockingly tells his friends in River’s Edge: “You young people are a disgrace to all living things, to plants even. You shouldn’t even be seen in the same room as a cactus.” (p. 195)
Parents were shunned if they tried to bring small children into restaurants or theaters. Many rental apartments started banning children. The ascendant Zero Population Growth movement declared each extra child to be “pollution,” a burden on scarce resources. (p. 195)
“Now once more the belt is tight and we summon the proper expression of horror as we look back at our wasted youth,” F. Scott Fitzgerald said after the crash that hit his peers at the cusp of what should have been their highest-earning years. (p. 287)
Nomad generations—what Christian Slater refers to as “a long list of dead, famous wild people”—have always been the ones who lose ground in wealth, education, security, longevity, and other measures of progress. Yet they have also been the generations who lay at the fulcrum between triumph and tragedy, the ones who hoist their society through the darkest days of Crisis. (p. 288)
In a recent [1997] genre of action films (from War Games and Back to the Future to Terminator and Independence Day), a stock drama unfolds. A young protagonist—alone, unprepared, and immersed in a junky culture—is chosen by chance to decide the fate of humanity. The situation looks dicey. The protagonist, too, has slim expectations of success. But at a pivotal moment, this lonely wayfarer challenges destiny, deals with the stress, zeroes in on what matters, does what is required, and comes out on top. The most popular video games, following the same script, stress one-on-one action and deft timing: Find a treasure, grab the tools, rescue a princess, save the kingdom, slay the enemy, and get out alive. Everything is yes-no, full of code words and secret places—in a style one TV executive calls “Indiana Jones meets a game show.” (p. 288)
They will carry the reputation for having come of age at a time when good manners and civic habits were not emphasized in homes and schools. With their arrival, midlife will lose moral authority and gain toughness. Their culture will be a hodgepodge of unblending styles and polyethnic currents that will reflect the centrifugal impulse from which many Americans (including 13ers) will now be eager to escape. (p. 288)
They will never have known a time when America felt good about itself, when its civic and cultural life didn’t seem to be decaying. From childhood into midlife, they will have always sensed that the nation’s core institutions mainly served the interests of people other than themselves. (p. 290)
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