Lost Generation
“In literature, the Lost Generation refers to a group of American writers who came of age during World War I and established their literary reputations while making Paris the center of their literary activities in the 1920s. They were never a literary school.
The term is also used more generally to refer to the entire post-World War I generation. Demographers William Strauss and Neil Howe outlined their Strauss-Howe generational theory using 1883-1900 as birth years for this generation.”
Seven years that changed history profoundly. Not because of Hemingway, Stein, and Fitzgerald. Because they were among the first Americans to notice that World War I had changed all the rules, dramatically shifted the pillars of civilization to the point that they were toppling into a frightening new realm of chaos. World War I was mankind’s first glimpse of its emerging technological capacity to destroy civilization altogether. The race of man was mortal not just individually but as a species. And via inertia and momentum, obviously capable of determined, organized, suicidal insanity. The ‘Roaring Twenties’ in the United States was a naive celebration of the victory won by American troops in the war to end all wars. The writers and artists who emigrated to Paris felt more at home there, where the terrible costs of the war were evident and illuminating to their creative energies. What followed was a long-term trickledown effect on western culture of depression, despair, and loss of faith in most of the time honored verities. The impact of World War I has never ended in fact. The children enrolled in college are simply the newest victims of an entire century of spiritual decline.
The newest ‘Lost Generation’ (there has been at least one other since WWI) is a population consisting of Americans born between the years 2001 and 2006. Five years of unique life influences no one has take a close look at for its probable results. We’ve seen the outliers in the form of school shooters who seem mostly normal but show up to class one day with a duffel bag of guns and ammo to mow down all in their path. We are shocked, shocked. How did this happen? Why? Why did they do it? Why did no one see it coming? It makes no sense. There is no reason. Why can’t we do something about the guns?
The diversion of our attention from the killers to their weapons makes about as much sense as responding to the current hysterical tantrum in the name of Palestine by outlawing flags and signs and bullhorns. Something has gone wrong in the heads of the perpetrators. What?
Our new lost ones comes from the category listed above as Generation Z. Their parents’ category is just as important: the famous Generation X which followed the Baby Boomers. These are both categories of impaired people.
Even the oldest GenXers are too young to have been conscious participants or witnesses in the greatest cultural upheavals of the 1960s and ‘70s. They’d have been just hitting puberty in 1977 when the Carter Administration was presiding over the savaging of American prestige in the eyes of the world. They’d have been a twinkle in their mother’s eye when JFK was assassinated, three when MLK and RFK were assassinated, four when Apollo 11 landed on the moon, eight when the Supreme Court made all abortions legal, and nine when Nixon resigned in disgrace to be succeeded by an unelected President and Vice President for the only time in American history. Born between 1965 and 1980, they missed everything about the Vietnamese War except possibly its humiliating final helicoptered end in 1975 after years of relatively quiet ‘peace talks’ concealed the depth of the wound to the nation. They had no firsthand memory or experience of the Civil Rights Movement, the meteoric rise of feminism, and the violence of the radical sixties, except for the anecdotal makeovers of that time by the embarrassed survivors, the musical monument called rock and roll, and the drugs they inherited from that time as an unquestioned fact of life. They came of age, went to college, and launched their careers in the economic boom and relative peace of the Reagan era, when it seemed the country was on an upward swing and they were free to follow their own personal desires without much thought about the price others had paid for their liberty. The last of the GenXers were born in 1980, well beyond the brief acquaintance with hardship provided by the ‘malaise’ presidency of Carter. These younger X’ers entered college in 1998, when the hottest national news story was the President masturbating a female intern with a cigar, lied about it, escaped conviction after impeachment, and left office more popular than when he entered it.
These are the parents of the Z Generation. What wisdom were they able to pass on to the inheritors of the assorted liberal movements and the runaway rise in the power and reach of technology into everyday lives? Parenting lessons they learned from Stephen Spielberg about the sanctity of childhood whims, even the whims that were foul-mouthed and insubordinate? Moral and sexual verities when these were being ridiculed and flouted in every form of popular entertainment? The primacy of the family unit and family time together when every child was now equipped with a smartphone and continuous contact with unknown correspondents even during the few meals a family with two working parents could manage to schedule? Conventions of genteel language in public or in private when by the time the kids are 10 the movies are saturated with an ever-rising tide of F-bombs and more scatology than you can find in a bus station bathroom? Does anyone wonder when the phenomenon of the intimidating, uncontrollable teenage monster first appeared on the scene? It happened when working parents began to yield their authority to schools that refused to discipline bullies and rewrote the meaning of in loco parentis to become the pimps of pubescent girls in defiance of their biological parents, helping to conceal their prescriptions for birth control pills, as well as knowledge of their access to alcohol, drugs, and abortions.
What else did the X’er parents miss in the hectic households of two working parents on the hunt for bigger homes and TVs or, worse, one single parent engaged in continual scramble for next month’s rent? They missed the fact that school was no longer about the 3 R’s, because the state teacher colleges no longer required their graduates to know them or learn how to teach them. So the R’s remained only as lip service for courses in Language Arts without teacher-corrected writing assignments, Social Studies instead of history because who really needs dates or rote memorization of anything anymore, Algebra without homework or ‘showing your work,’ Geometry without postulates and theorems but much prettier charts, Science without any Socratic exchanges between teacher and students, and various courses in all kinds of made-up subjects tested only multiple-guess answer sheets. But what there might be plenty of in a content-free curriculum is politics, opinions offered up by semiliterate instructors in their favored grudges against whoever and whatever they think made them so unhappy.
And meanwhile, the colleges and universities were waiting for them, staffed with their own army of resentful malcontents, PhDs who had never held down a real job, been responsible for a payroll, served in the military, or experienced elders offering seriously different and better informed knowledge of history, political systems, economics, literature, and the ethics of the professions, including the professoriat. How did this army get smuggled into the top universities in the nation? Because they were the army that dodged the Vietnam era draft by enrolling in graduate school when it still bought you a deferment. Once installed in their own university jobs, they welcomed the returning refugees who had fled to Canada and gradually filled all the hiring committees with cowardly revolutionaries like themselves, waiting to get their revenge by creating new generations of activists who might one day throw the bombs they had spent their own adult lives dreaming about. On top of all this, 8 years of Obama racialist provocations to violence by young fanatics had already proven to the Z-kids that more deadly protests in future would be acceptable and even laudable to the mass media and major corporate elites. Game Time.
What did the GenZers have available to defend themselves from such monolithically minded proselytes? Well, not parents, not elementary or high school education. They’d never had to read any the Classics in literature, history, philosophy, religion, or the arts. They didn’t read newspapers. They didn’t even use Wikipedia except as the world’s best ever resource for plagiarism. Cast your eyes over these two charts. These are the influences the GenZers, children of GenXers, had to inform them about the nature of adult life, morality, and responsibility during their adolescence.
What were the most important because most popular movies?
What was the most important because most popular music they had to meet the challenge of their grandparents’ top hits of the 60s and their parents’ top hits of the 80s?
So life is a superhero fantasy, filled with cartoon violence and computer graphics effects. Just like video games. A significant chunk of gore is built in, but you can always go home or change the channel afterwards, yourself unchanged. There’s nothing here to care about, and you’ve never really felt anything much for the victims of any violence unless it’s violence done to you. Doesn’t everybody feel that way?
Well, more people feel that way than should. Including your own parents, O You Members of the LostGen. We should have paid more attention for all those years when we were too busy, too distracted, too caught up in our own petty fights with each other and the system that owns us.
As I said in another post yesterday, this showy generational tantrum we’re seeing is not about the Palestinians:
“Nobody cares about the Palestinians. They’ve never had, never been, a nation. They were just the Arabs nobody else wanted to claim who lived in a patch of land on the Mediterranean controlled mostly neglectfully by the British Empire in the aftermath of WWI’s takedown of the Ottoman Empire. They have no unique culture, no distinct history to speak of as a people, no literary, artistic, architectural, musical, theological, scientific, or medical contributions to the sum of human civilization. Compared to the Jews, they are a nonentity distinguished only by an accident of geography. They are just a name slapped on history’s oldest grudge, the hateful resentment of the boastfully superior Jews. They’ve become the poster child for that hatred because it’s the only thing that defines them as a scattered post-1947 population.”
It’s not about the Jews either as far the GenZers are in any position to know. They’ve never been a witness to previous wars and tragedies of the Jewish experience. They’ve never been taught about those crucial turning points in history. They’ve probably not had much personal experience of Jews, who are only 2 percent of the U.S. population after all, hardly a physical threat of any kind to American citizens. They’re just a convenient target for a lifetime of suppressed unconscious rage.
If I’m wrong about the argument I’ve just made, then how do you account for the ugliness and vehemence of this tantrum? It’s just an excuse to get some attention on themselves, the absence of which over the years of their youth has made them deeply resentful.
And it’s made an awful lot of us deeply culpable. If your kid sounds and acts like a Hitler Youth on parade, you have some ‘splaining to do. I’m sure the rest of us would be interested to hear it.
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