Talking 'bout my "generation"

I think it’s a positive thing that the concept of “generations” on a mass scale is falling apart. It’s a pretty silly notion, if you think about it. You can talk about generations in terms of family, in terms of, maybe, neighborhoods or communities, but anything beyond that…? It’s like the old Athenian idea of a polis, or democratic voice of the people – with one person you don’t have a polis, and with a hundred thousand you no longer have one. You can’t have generations with 300 million people wandering about. It’s not like there are great lulls in which pediatricians and elementary school-teachers sit around, playing cards and dusting, waiting for the next wave to come along. I can’t confirm this with statistics, but I’m pretty sure that there were graduating classes all across the country every year between 1969 (the last of the ‘baby boomers’) and 1980 (the start of ‘generation X’). Should we just cast those people aside? The flotsam of procreation? Essentially “generations” is a marketing tool: a way to lump people as part of something through gross generalization.

You know whose fault it is? This generation idea? Gertrude Stein. When will Gertrude Stein’s reign of marketing tie-in terror end??!! WHEN?! Damn you, Gertrude Stein! Damn you to hell! Yaaarrrgh!

Anyways, she was sitting around some Paris flat talking to Hemingway and a bunch of the ex-pats and they were drinking and blah-blahing about meaninglessness and so forth, and she said, “Yours is a lost generation.” Then everybody went, “Cooooooool, I want to be in a lost generation!” I mean, who wouldn’t? It’s like being admitting to a super-hip club just by being born at a certain time. And generations are usually used to described younger people, and the description usually based around youthful behavior, so it’s rebellious, yet inclusive.

So then, of course, you get the baby-boomers, which is good because it would be more difficult for them to be so utterly self-involved without a catchy name. Then Generation X (seriously, people, naming a whole cultural wave of people after a briefly-existent punk band?), which was when the whole marketing idea really took off. If we say that our product is the choice of this generation, why they’ll have to buy it! Remember in the 80’s, before we had the term generation X, and Pepsi launched the “You’re the Pepsi generation” campaign? Jesus Christ, that’s subtle.

Now there’s all this generation Y (come on, that’s not even trying), and generation E and crap. If this group of teenagers is supposed to be an offshoot of Generation X, shouldn’t they be called Billy Idol? Aaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahaha! Get it?! You don’t? Oh.

But, of course, it doesn’t make any sense, because the people who are being marketed to aren’t the children of generation X, there just other people. As it stands, I’ve heard people from age 46 to 14 claim to be generation X, usually with a furrowed brow, trying to figure out what this means. That’s a big-ass generation. Let’s just drop it. No tidy groups, just a big mess of people.