Did My Generation Fail Me?

All the things we missed about Gen-Ex were there to see the whole time

(Image credit: KDOC screencap)

“I'm really cool because I smoke

And think that life's a total joke

I'm sensitive and cry inside

I want to be Trent Reznor's bride

Or Pamela Lee's, if I'm a guy

But I don't get dates cuz I'm too shy

My poetry tells how I feel

The only thing that's truly real

I hurt myself to feel the pain

As I pretend that I'm insane

I'm being angst-ridden, so sue me

Let's light up a big fat doobie”

-Tato Shots, “My Generation Are Dorks”

I wrote the above lyrics, a combination of pet peeves about others and myself, for my college band, while I was 20-ish at the height of Gen-X's tenure as target demographic supremo. There I was, on a full scholarship to the best film school in the country, unable to quite process why I wasn't happy about it, save for certain obvious factors: one being that most of the student body were locals who went home on weekends, and with the university being in a generally shady part of town, there wasn't much that was open or to do on weekends. (The Internet, for you kids, was barely a thing. It began to become one my junior year, but I didn't really get access to it until I was three years out of college.)

So why were we so self-loathing that a huge percentage of us had started smoking despite objectively knowing it's a fatal habit, to prove they didn't give a shit if they lived a long time? (Not me; I never overcame my childhood dislike of the carbon monoxide/nicotine stench, and having roommates who blew smoke in my face made me loathe it even more) Why was all our music either full of rage – the punk/noise/grunge/techno/industrial stuff – or dark and weird? One theory was that we were the first generation in some years who knew we were going to do worse than our parents, but I'm not sure we really conceptualized that yet, and it certainly wasn't clear in 1994 just how much the Internet was going to take away.

Another, perhaps, was that, at least in the University of Southern California, so many of us from around the country – myself being the valedictorian of Smoky Mountain High School in Sylva, North Carolina – had hoped to come to Southern California to find tolerance and our tribe. Instead, we found a student body that was heavily OC bro, a lot of born-again Christians, and devotees of this new radio host Rush Limbaugh, known at the time for coining the phrase “FemiNazi.” Oliver North came to speak on campus my freshman year and got a hero's welcome; Ice-T came my sophomore year and I got given a ticket and a stern lecture from a local cop for wearing my Body Count shirt to go support him. He'd busted me and my friend jay-walking, which I had done to avoid a homeless guy I knew was going to harass my friend; there were lots of them who simply descended on the surrounding area, giving the same aggressive sob stories over and over. There was the one who always opened with “Have you ever heard of skid row? Not the band Skid Row, but the place skid row?” A woman who always yelled “Can ya hep me?” Another one who did a Columbo impersonation, and handed out useless trinkets as “collateral” for a “loan” or “blessing” you might give him in cash.

Those who weren't fans of Limbaugh were often fans of Howard Stern, whom Limbaugh's “dittoheads” considered to be the foul-mouthed opposite end of the spectrum, but it wasn't that simple. Stern was known primarily for his most outrageous sex comments, but was also self-deprecating, and politically libertarian. Similar to Joe Rogan today, he “just said what people were really thinking.” Yet there was more nuance there because unlike the Rogan types of today, Stern wasn't a jock. He could connect to the inner picked-on kid in a way that felt vulnerable, and not just manipulation to the alt-right, and indeed, his evolution as an older man into more of a sensitive liberal hasn't entirely been a shock. However, it must be said that in the '90s, at USC, a lot of his hardcore fans were far-from-liberal dickheads who were trying to play electric guitar and would yell stuff like “Fartman rules!” When a potential romantic situation for me once disintegrated before it could even start because she loved Limbaugh, she exclaimed, “At least I don't think Howard Stern is God!” to which I responded, “I don't either. Alice Cooper is God.” (I'm not sure I knew at the time that he would probably consider that as offensive as she did.)

I also discovered a surprising harbinger of things to come in ways I couldn't possibly imagine at the time – the conservative nerd. It was inconceivable to me that anyone smart enough to know computer programming yet frail and gawky enough to be picked on a lot, would be a right-winger siding with oppressors, and yet there were two notable such types in the Dean's Hall, whom we dubbed the Master Debaters, always looking for an argument, and most entertaining when they went after each other. One was a thoroughly unemotional Korean, whom we'd probably nowadays define as asexual, who didn't seem to understand how the pursuit of pleasure would possibly motivate anyone to do anything. The other was a military brat obsessed with military strategy, who would frequently yell “Bullshit!” or “By the way!” to begin a tirade explaining why everything you believed about deterrence was wrong.

I presume they work for Tesla or something like it today. Who knows. I've never found either one online again.

But even for those of us who were progressive, though, our beliefs were thick with irony. We loved stuff from yesteryear that was weirdly bad in hilarious ways, and humor that depended on either casual dropping of super-offensive words, or bizarrely pointless non-sequiturs. Rush Limbaugh was awful and anathema to us, but we adored Wally George, his more over-the-top, bewigged counterpart on late-night local TV. Space Ghost Coast to Coast epitomized what we loved – a terrible Hanna Barbera cartoon repurposed into a deliberately vapid host interviewing confused has-been celebrities hamming it up. We'd make ironic heroes out of the likes of Herve Villechaize, without them being in on the joke – see the movie Ghost World for more of how this worked. Years later, when The Room initially became popular, we sort of did the same thing to Tommy Wiseau, except he was kind of in on it, and went with it, and the fandom ultimately became sort-of mostly unironic. Which is to say there was a bit of a mean-spiritedness to it then that there's less of now – laughter at the freak show, that turned into genuine appreciation of his commitment.

We thought we were free-speechers, freely asking questions you weren't supposed to ask, and saying anything except the one slur you can't say – though even that one might be quoted as it appeared in rap lyrics. It seemed super cool and open, and people made the sort of nasty jokes that would briefly get James Gunn canceled years later, but in hindsight, we were missing a lot. Trans people, for example, didn't have a seat at the metaphorical table and might as well not have existed – there's a reason you don't see replays of the Beavis and Butt-head episode where they comment on RuPaul (yes, I know RuPaul is not trans, but I'm saying that if even mere drag or androgyny weirded people out, they were not going to be open to more, and I say that as a straight man who did wear a dress at times). I watched an old episode of Duckman not long ago, and it included, as a punchline, the dialogue “he had sex with a transvestite midget clown.” Ha ha. Slurs we didn't know were slurs be funny, because those who could have taught us better weren't in a position of enough empowerment to tell us so. A female friend of color told me very recently about the bigotry and neglect she felt from our crowd all those years ago, and I had never realized it. She still won't go into stores like Target, tired of being conspicuously tailed by staff watching her every movie. If my normal, short, unassuming, middle-aged friend experiences this even now, how did we hope to get people to vote for Kamala Harris as if that societal prejudice just doesn't exist?

So, when I see that white guys of my generation disproportionately voted for a famous-for-being-famous weirdo with a nihilistic worldview, possibly ironically, and definitely in denial about systemic racism...can I really be surprised? I mean, I was. But I shouldn't have been. There's barely any substantive difference – aside from the consequences – between a Trump rally and Hot Seat With Wally George, even down to the bad combovers and drunken, porn-addicted fans chanting along to every catchphrase. Gen-X hated the Boomer selfishness, but we were selfish in a different way. In my twenties, I had real issues with none of my friends ever keeping appointments, or being where they said they'd be. Flaking, we called it. We didn't all have cell phones yet – some had pagers. Our selfishness wasn't borne out of us thinking we were important, but that nobody was. We all had our art, but never expected anyone would see it. Or perhaps a miracle would happen and our greatness would be seen.

But in the meantime, nothing mattered. Go to class, do the basic work, get the grade. I regret that only in my senior year of college did I suddenly realize, “Hey, I learned something today I didn't know before! And that's cool!” I'd been an honor student programmed to do homework and classwork all my life, getting it right but seldom enjoying it or taking it in. I thought automatically that nobody wanted me to be creative, nor liked when I went really outside the box. I'd love to go back and shake that notion out of myself. Hell, I should do it now, regularly. Why not? Maybe here.

(Image credit: Rage Against the Machine merchandise store)

I know a whole lot of dumbasses bought those Rage Against the Machine T-shirts with Che Guevara's face on them probably thinking it was Zack de la Rocha. That was a nice bit of subversion on the communist band's part. But I confess I never thought that in middle age, any of us would see a Tom Morello Tweet and complain to him about the band going woke or getting too political. Even the dittoheads didn't seem that out-of-it back in the day. Just callous.

When the first season of The Real World came on, and country girl Julie got in an argument about America's metaphorical melting pot with urban black man Kevin, many of us at the time, I think, took Julie's side, thinking Kevin was unduly harsh – turns out many employers felt the same way, and Kevin's career was actually hurt by it. Rewatching a year or so ago when Paramount Plus replayed it, I was absolutely team Kevin. In 1992 I was a kid from a small town in the big city for the first time, not unlike Julie. What was everyone else's excuse? Not that any excuse is valid. But for all the talk, legit, about how the Internet has ruined things, once everyone got smartphones, people started finding each other, and we realized isolated stories of discrimination weren't so isolated and individualized as we thought, that part of the discourse changed for the better.

Sadly, it let the whiny bros who no longer ran everything find themselves too. All the dittoheads who went home for the weekend leaving us to our own self-destructive impulses now control the vote. Maybe.

There are other things, too, when it comes to that. Those of us who pay attention to politics can get blindsided by just how much some voters don't. They still think being fiscally conservative for a politician means the same thing as it does in a household – they imagine a mom balancing the family checkbook, rather than a billionaire handing out tax breaks for business owners and taking away all government aid. They still think in terms of '80s stereotypes that Republicans love business and the troops, while Democrats like government aid and nonwhites, and hate the police. How do you change that conception when all the casual news a noob hears is snatches of right-wing owned corporate media?

For one thing, you might have to turn Gen-X away from nihilism, and I'm not sure how you do that. But I know I'll have more thoughts. Maybe one of these days I'll see if you'll pay for them.

Or we can just talk about movies. But as the late James Rocchi said, that means talking about everything.