Well, here we go again. They are a bunch of whiners, so there. Polls may indicate that as a whole, the members of Generation X are not particularly disaffected with their lot, not particularly pessimistic. But it’s also true that most of the books and articles that have defined the generation in the public imagination are one long streak of misery. This, its writers would have us believe, is the generation that feels a ““distinct and undeniable alienation from the culture’’ (Ian Williams); whose members wonder ““why they were even born’’ (Neil Howe and Bill Strauss); and which then has the nerve, the sheer gall, to say (in Rushkoff’s words), ““We are not complaining, get it?’’ Oh, right.
The ugly truth, says Karen Lehrman, 32-year-old literary editor of the Wilson Quarterly, is that ““it’s cool to whine. You’re not intelligent if you’re happy. You have to be depressed to show you’re a deep thinker.’’ Not just in America, either. Whining has gone global. Wherever you look, the children born after the end of the West’s golden years of economic growth are self-obsessed and hard-done-by, carrying anomie and angst around with them like a perpetually runny nose.
True, there’s no real equivalent to Generation X in Britain, but only because the whole of British society is so alienated from itself that the twentysomethings can’t stand out. German kids started spray-painting no future on walls in the early 1980s. As Germany approaches an election in October, says Keith Bullivant of the University of Florida, its politicians worry that young Germans just feel null Bock – or, ““can’t be bothered.’’ France has its ““bof’’ generation (asked what they care about, they lightly shrug their shoulders, puff out their cheeks and go ““bof’’ – ask your French au pair how it’s done). One reads, with something approaching horror, that Albert Camus, whose books are vintage whine, is once again becoming a cult figure in both France and the United States. In his novel ““Generation X,’’ Doug Coupland uses a copy of Camus as an example of objects with ““intellectual or fashionable cachet.''
Still, there are excuses for the Europeans. The kids in eastern Germany – the home of the ““no future’’ movement – have a real beef: they were brought up to worship a state that turned out to be built on a lie. The bofs have at least started whining in an active mode, marching in the streets of Paris to demand jobs. It’s not just the lack of justification for American whining that sticks in the gullet; it’s the damn passivity of it.
There’s a long history of torpid American whining, especially evident in the years between the world wars. Think of T. S. Eliot, of ““The Waste Land,’’ the most pretentious whine in history (““April is the cruellest month . . .’’ – oh, come on). Read ““Generation X’’ and then follow it with Hemingway’s Lost Generation novel ““The Sun Also Rises.’’ Spot the similarities. ““My mind stopped jumping around and started to go in smooth waves. Then all of a sudden I started to cry. Then after a while it was better . . . and then I went to sleep.’’ Though that’s Hemingway’s antihero Jake Barnes, it could easily be Coupland’s Andrew Palmer. But Barnes had had his balls shot off (or something) in World War I; Palmer’s beef is that he doesn’t like his McJob.
Can anything be done to juice up Generation X? Perhaps the Xers don’t need fathers, the stuff of a thousand whines about divorce; they need a father figure. Why is the Port Huron statement, the key political manifesto of the 1960s, such a joy to read? (““We are people of this generation, bred in at least modest comfort, looking uncomfortably to the world we inherit.’’) Partly, because every line in it was influenced by the sociologist C. Wright Mills, who combined bitter (beautifully written) criticism of American society with a ravenous appetite for it – riding his motorbike to Columbia, drinking through the night, sleeping with anything in a skirt.
The Xers and their literary spokespersons seem to have taken their inspiration from one of Mills’s less muscular contemporaries. Their work constantly reminds me of Betty Friedan’s ““The Feminine Mystique.’’ Now this is the real thing, the very Chateau Lafite of whine (take a look at the book’s first paragraph). But whatever you think of Friedan’s tone, she at least had a legitimate point – postwar America did indeed treat intel-ligent women worse than shabbily. With the Generation X writers, it’s just the whine without the grievance, the whine without the wit to do anything about it; just dull, flat, whine, a world not ending but being made (Eliot again) with a whimper. Enough.
