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anonymous

Death of the American Century | Lifecourse Blog - 0 views

blog.lifecourse.com/...death-of-the-american-century

generations silent genx

shared by anonymous on 30 Apr 10 - Cached
  • This view that Allen describes, of America as history’s existential good guy, is very linked to the psyche of his  Silent (born 1925-1942).
  • In any event,  Generation X (born 1961-1981) seems entirely unmoved by the emotional tensions and turmoil that Allen describes.
  • It’s fascinating, in retrospect, that the Silent interpreted the warmth with which a war-devastated world regarded Goliath America just after WWII as genuine affection, as opposed to transient gratitude triggered by necessity. 
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Back in the 1990s, Allen interviewed me at length about a feature story he was doing (it was later published in the WP) on how people of different ages react to that old Warner Brothers cartoon about Roadrunner and Wile E. Coyote.  In a talk he was giving at a local college, he discovered by accident that all of the (Xer) students sympathized with the coyote, not the roadrunner.  He was flabbergasted, because for as long as he could remember, he and his peers had always rooted for the roadrunner.
  • anonymous on 30 Apr 10
     
    By Neil Howe at Lifecourse on April 30, 2010. A generational look at the changing assumptions of America's ascendancy.
anonymous

The death of the American Century - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...AR2010041903936.html

generations genx silent

shared by anonymous on 30 Apr 10 - Cached
  • I was quite young -- born in 1941 -- but old enough to hold these truths to be self-evident: We didn't conquer; we liberated. We were always the good guys. We wore the white hats. Despite their grousing about uncultured big-foot Yankees, everyone else secretly wanted to live like Americans.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 30 Apr 10
       
      This is a fantastic little fantasy, but not very representative of the hard reality. Still - quite a useful look into one generation's framing of the post WWII-era.
  • anonymous on 30 Apr 10
     
    By Henry Allen at the Washington Post on April 20, 2010. Silent generation lamentations for the passing of American greatness. This was referenced by Neil Howe's post here: http://bit.ly/bWNbUn
anonymous

Death of the American Century - 0 views

blog.lifecourse.com/...death-of-the-american-century

generations

shared by anonymous on 30 Apr 10 - Cached
  • It’s fascinating, in retrospect, that the Silent interpreted the warmth with which a war-devastated world regarded Goliath America just after WWII as genuine affection, as opposed to transient gratitude triggered by necessity.
  • This view that Allen describes, of America as history’s existential good guy, is very linked to the psyche of his  Silent (born 1925-1942).
  • In any event,  Generation X (born 1961-1981) seems entirely unmoved by the emotional tensions and turmoil that Allen describes. 
  • anonymous on 30 Apr 10
     
    By Neil Howe at Lifecourse on April 30, 2010. A generational look at the changing assumptions of America's ascendancy.
anonymous

How Many Stephen Colberts Are There? - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...stephen-colbert.html

shared by anonymous on 11 Jan 12 - Cached
  • anonymous on 11 Jan 12
     
    There used to be just two Stephen Colberts, and they were hard enough to distinguish. The main difference was that one thought the other was an idiot. The idiot Colbert was the one who made a nice paycheck by appearing four times a week on "The Colbert Report" (pronounced in the French fashion, with both t's silent), the extremely popular fake news show on Comedy Central. The other Colbert, the non-idiot, was the 47-year-old South Carolinian, a practicing Catholic, who lives with his wife and three children in suburban Montclair, N.J., where, according to one of his neighbors, he is "extremely normal." One of the pleasures of attending a live taping of "The Colbert Report" is watching this Colbert transform himself into a Republican superhero.
anonymous

BioShock Infinite: an intelligent, violent videogame? - Read - ABC Arts | Australian co... - 1 views

www.abc.net.au/...s3733057.htm

shared by anonymous on 14 Apr 13 - Cached
  • Infinite has the difficulty of an inherited legacy: people like to point to the first BioShock (2007) as an example of how videogames made in studios by hundreds of people and financed by corporations can be artistic. It was, in a way, a beacon of hope for those who dreamed that the sheer industrial scale at the peak of the videogames business could translate into something worth taking seriously.
  • BioShock Infinite is a videogame with ideas. Set in 1912, it’s in part inspired by The Devil In The White City, Erik Larson’s 2003 novelistic account of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.
  • The city is beautiful, and possibly unparalleled in terms of visual design in a videogame: along with the expected white American neo-classical architecture, we get an astounding array of poster art and fashion, taking in both the decline of the strong silhouettes and Gibson Girl aesthetics of the 1910s, and the Art Nouveau movement, as well as Kinetoscopes similar to the illusionistic films of Georges Melies.
  • ...20 more annotations...
  • Columbia, according to Infinite, is to have set sail at the 1893 Fair, thus opening up a ripe array of potential themes stemming from real world history and politics, all of which get at least lip service in the game: Manifest Destiny, American Exceptionalism, racism, and religious conflict.
  • This all occurs, as with the first BioShock, within the framework of a first person shooter.
  • The first major choice that players of BioShock Infinite are presented with is whether they would like to publicly punish an interracial couple or not. You may choose to throw a ball at the couple, who are tied up in front of a crowd at a fair, or you may choose to throw the ball at the man who is asking you to do so. The outcome of your choice is mostly the same.
  • Let’s think about that for a moment. BioShock Infinite, the game that many would hope to point to as an example of how art and subtlety might be found in expensive, mainstream videogames, sets up its moral stakes by asking the player if they would like to be a violent bigot.
  • Would you like to be for or against?
  • This is thunderously stupid, and an insipid example of how terrifyingly low the bar is set for ‘intelligence’ in mainstream videogames
  • In taking the game seriously, I want to be as clear as possible: BioShock Infinite uses racism for no other reason than to make itself seem clever. Worse, it uses racism and real events in an incredibly superficial way—BioShock Infinite seeks not to make any meaningful statement about history or racism or America, but instead seeks to use an aesthetics of ‘racism’ and ‘history’ as a barrier to point to and claim importance.
  • puts the lie to the claim that by engaging with these themes, BioShock Infinite is the place to find substance in mainstream videogames.
  • At the real Wounded Knee, over three hundred Native Americans—the Lakota Sioux—were massacred. Many of them were unarmed. Some of them were children. These were real people, with real lives and real families. The victims were buried in a mass grave, and many of the US Cavalry who led the massacre were later awarded the Medal of Honor, a decision that remains shameful today.
  • I am certainly not saying that a videogame has no right to engage with such events. What I am saying is that when you use such a horrific historic event in art—in any media—you have a responsibility to get it right, to use it to say something worthwhile, to make the invocation count.
  • Wounded Knee, I believe, is not something you get to invoke in 2013 without also making a statement of sorts. The idea of publicly punishing interracial relationships, something that of course has happened in reality, is also not something you get to invoke in 2013 without making a statement.
  • “[Letting] the player decide how they feel,” is not respecting your audience’s intelligence in these situations; it is a cop-out of the highest order.
  • For a game that so explicitly aimed to take on racism through its 1912 setting, the politics of BioShock Infinite are defined by evasion.
  • Such nihilistic disapproval is the absence of a political position masquerading as shrewd criticism. It may seem worldly, but it allows BioShock Infinite to be controversial to no-one by treating everyone with equal contempt.
  • Let us get one thing straight, then: despite its desperation to be taken seriously, BioShock Infinite is not an intelligent work of art. It is a history-themed first person shooter, and it deserves no more or less respect than any other first person shooter.
  • You can argue that the faults of BioShock Infinite are the latest and most unfortunate result of the first-person genre that found bedrock in both Doom (reflexes and gore) and Myst (architecture and mystery) in the mid-1990s, two sharply different trajectories that have been bound into problematic convergence ever since. While the two genres remain fruitfully exploited in separation, all attempts at marrying the two—and thus discovering the elusive union of the shooter’s popularity and the exploration game’s more literary aspirations—have remained ill considered. In a way, mainstream videogames are still completely dumbfounded by Edge magazine’s famous 1994 criticism of Doom: “If only you could talk to these creatures.”
  • Maybe this is really the central problem of the game—how do you merge any kind of intelligent thematic exploration while taking unrestrained pleasure in shooting people in the face?
  • Where do those two circles converge in a Venn diagram?
  • By its conclusion, BioShock Infinite quickly forgets that it ever engaged with ideas of racism and American Exceptionalism in favour of a tangled Christopher Nolan puzzle plot about time travel. This is the sound of a thousand popguns going off, taking up the silent report of a giant cannon that failed to fire.
  • it remains difficult to point to a single videogame that is both artful, subtle and a successful mainstream videogame, and BioShock Infinite only muddies the waters further.
  • anonymous on 14 Apr 13
     
    "Can mainstream videogame makers present an artful, intelligent thematic exploration about real world history within a game dominated by scenes of unrestrained violence, asks Daniel Golding."
anonymous

Lawrence O'Donnell Yells at Julia Ioffe About Putin and Snowden - 0 views

www.newrepublic.com/...-ioffe-about-putin-and-snowden

shared by anonymous on 11 Aug 13 - No Cached
  • I decided to contest O'Donnell's premise that Russia had this thing planned and under control from the beginning, and that they did, in fact, create the situation.
  • We then squabbled over whether Putin personally controls everything in Russia: what TV anchors say, everything that happens at Sheremetyevo, even every breath that Snowden takes.
  • I am also seriously suggesting the following things:Vladimir Putin is not omnipotent. He does not control everything that happens in the Russian Federation, a vast and often inhospitable landmass that spans 10 time zones. Similarly, Barack Obama does not have total control over the minutiae of the United States of America.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • The Obama administration trapped Snowden in Russia. The U.S. unsealed the charges before it had Snowden in custody, revoked his passport, then downed the plane of the president of a sovereign state over other sovereign states because it thought Snowden was on board.
  • If a Russian Edward Snowden ended up in JFK Airport, there is no way in hell we'd turn him over to the Russians. Not in a hundred years, and not ever.
  • If you are a world leader worth your salt, and have a good diplomatic team working for you, you would know that. You would also know that when dealing with thugs like Putin, you know that things like this are better handled quietly. 
  • The Obama administration totally fucked this up. I mean, totally. Soup to nuts. Remember the spy exchange in the summer of 2010? Ten Russian sleeper agents—which is not what Snowden is—were uncovered by the FBI in the U.S. Instead of kicking up a massive, public stink over it, the Kremlin and the White House arranged for their silent transfer to Russia in exchange for four people accused in Russia of spying for the U.S.
  • My main beef with O'Donnell is not that he wouldn't let me make these 11 points—because, let's face it, that's not what the TV is for—but that he did exactly the same shit Russians did to me when I was in Russia. They assumed that the U.S. and its government was one sleek, well-functioning monolith, that Obama was omnipotent, and that everyone in the world, including other important (and nuclear!) world leaders, act and must act as Russia demands it should, using Russian foreign policy calculus, and with only Russian interests in mind.
  • Sound ridiculous? Believe me, it sounds just as insane in reverse. The problem is that this was not in the ranting comments section, but was coming from the host of a prime time, national television show. And if you don't have the good sense and education or, hell, the reporting experience to know better, then just let the guests you invited on speak.
  • anonymous on 11 Aug 13
     
    "Tonight, I went on Lawrence O'Donnell's show, and Lawrence O'Donnell yelled at me. Or, rather, he O'Reilly'd at me. That O'Donnell interrupted and harangued and mansplained and was generally an angry grandpa at me is not what I take issue with, however. What bothers me is that, look: your producers take the time to find experts to come on the show, answer your questions, and, hopefully, clarify the issue at hand. "
anonymous

Why Americans Hate the Media - Magazine - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...5060

media politics america

shared by anonymous on 14 Oct 10 - Cached
  • But while Jennings and his crew were traveling with a North Kosanese unit, to visit the site of an alleged atrocity by U.S. and South Kosanese troops, they unexpectedly crossed the trail of a small group of American and South Kosanese soldiers. With Jennings in their midst the Northern soldiers set up an ambush that would let them gun down the Americans and Southerners. What would Jennings do? Would he tell his cameramen to "Roll tape!" as the North Kosanese opened fire? What would go through his mind as he watched the North Kosanese prepare to fire? Jennings sat silent for about fifteen seconds. "Well, I guess I wouldn't," he finally said. "I am going to tell you now what I am feeling, rather than the hypothesis I drew for myself. If I were with a North Kosanese unit that came upon Americans, I think that I personally would do what I could to warn the Americans." Even if it meant losing the story? Ogletree asked. Even though it would almost certainly mean losing my life, Jennings replied. "But I do not think that I could bring myself to participate in that act. That's purely personal, and other reporters might have a different reaction."
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 14 Oct 10
       
      This was a powerful moment that I *still* remember to this day.
  • Jennings was made to feel embarrassed about his natural, decent human impulse. Wallace seemed unembarrassed about feeling no connection to the soldiers in his country's army or considering their deaths before his eyes "simply a story."
  • Meet the Press, moderated by Tim Russert, is probably the meatiest of these programs. High-powered guests discuss serious topics with Russert, who worked for years in politics, and with veteran reporters. Yet the pressure to keep things lively means that squabbling replaces dialogue.
  • ...34 more annotations...
  • In the 1992 presidential campaign candidates spent more time answering questions from "ordinary people"—citizens in town-hall forums, callers on radio and TV talk shows—than they had in previous years. The citizens asked overwhelmingly about the what of politics: What are you going to do about the health-care system? What can you do to reduce the cost of welfare? The reporters asked almost exclusively about the how: How are you going to try to take away Perot's constituency? How do you answer charges that you have flip-flopped?
  • Earlier in the month the President's performance had been assessed by the three network-news anchors: Peter Jennings, of ABC; Dan Rather, of CBS; and Tom Brokaw, of NBC. There was no overlap whatsoever between the questions the students asked and those raised by the anchors. None of the questions from these news professionals concerned the impact of legislation or politics on people's lives. Nearly all concerned the struggle for individual advancement among candidates.
  • The CBS Evening News profile of Clinton, which was narrated by Rather and was presented as part of the series Eye on America, contained no mention of Clinton's economic policy, his tax or budget plans, his failed attempt to pass a health-care proposal, his successful attempt to ratify NAFTA, his efforts to "reinvent government," or any substantive aspect of his proposals or plans in office. Its subject was exclusively Clinton's handling of his office—his "difficulty making decisions," his "waffling" at crucial moments. If Rather or his colleagues had any interest in the content of Clinton's speech as opposed to its political effect, neither the questions they asked nor the reports they aired revealed such a concern.
  • When ordinary citizens have a chance to pose questions to political leaders, they rarely ask about the game of politics. They want to know how the reality of politics will affect them—through taxes, programs, scholarship funds, wars. Journalists justify their intrusiveness and excesses by claiming that they are the public's representatives, asking the questions their fellow citizens would ask if they had the privilege of meeting with Presidents and senators. In fact they ask questions that only their fellow political professionals care about. And they often do so—as at the typical White House news conference—with a discourtesy and rancor that represent the public's views much less than they reflect the modern journalist's belief that being independent boils down to acting hostile.
  • The subtle but sure result is a stream of daily messages that the real meaning of public life is the struggle of Bob Dole against Newt Gingrich against Bill Clinton, rather than our collective efforts to solve collective problems.
  • The natural instinct of newspapers and TV is to present every public issue as if its "real" meaning were political in the meanest and narrowest sense of that term—the attempt by parties and candidates to gain an advantage over their rivals.
  • when there is a chance to use these issues as props or raw material for a story about political tactics, most reporters leap at it. It is more fun—and easier—to write about Bill Clinton's "positioning" on the Vietnam issue, or how Newt Gingrich is "handling" the need to cut Medicare, than it is to look into the issues themselves.
  • Whether or not that was Clinton's real motive, nothing in the broadcast gave the slightest hint of where the extra policemen would go, how much they might cost, whether there was reason to think they'd do any good. Everything in the story suggested that the crime bill mattered only as a chapter in the real saga, which was the struggle between Bill and Newt.
  • "In some ways it's not even the point," she replied. What mattered was that Clinton "looked good" taking the tough side of the issue. No one expects Cokie Roberts or other political correspondents to be experts on controlling terrorism, negotiating with the Syrians, or the other specific measures on which Presidents make stands. But all issues are shoehorned into the area of expertise the most-prominent correspondents do have:the struggle for one-upmanship among a handful of political leaders.
  • When the Clinton Administration declared defeat in 1994 and there were no more battles to be fought, health-care news coverage virtually stopped too—even though the medical system still represented one seventh of the economy, even though HMOs and corporations and hospitals and pharmaceutical companies were rapidly changing policies in the face of ever-rising costs.
  • Health care was no longer political news, and therefore it was no longer interesting news.
  • In interviews and at the news conferences he conducted afterward Bradley did his best to talk about the deep problems of public life and economic adjustment that had left him frustrated with the political process. Each of the parties had locked itself into rigid positions that kept it from dealing with the realistic concerns of ordinary people, he said.
  • What turned up in the press was almost exclusively speculation about what the move meant for this year's presidential race and the party lineup on Capitol Hill. Might Bradley challenge Bill Clinton in the Democratic primaries? If not, was he preparing for an independent run? Could the Democrats come up with any other candidate capable of holding on to Bradley's seat? Wasn't this a slap in the face for Bill Clinton and the party he purported to lead? In the aftermath of Bradley's announcement prominent TV and newspaper reporters competed to come up with the shrewdest analysis of the political impact of the move. None of the country's major papers or networks used Bradley's announcement as a news peg for an analysis of the real issues he had raised.
  • Every one of Woodruff's responses or questions was about short-term political tactics. Woodruff asked about the political implications of his move for Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich. Bradley replied that it was more important to concentrate on the difficulties both parties had in dealing with real national problems.
  • As soon as he finished, Woodruff asked her next question: "Do you want to be President?" It was as if she had not heard a word he had been saying—or couldn't hear it, because the media's language of political analysis is utterly separate from the terms in which people describe real problems in their lives.
  • Regardless of the tone of coverage, medical research will go on. But a relentless emphasis on the cynical game of politics threatens public life itself, by implying day after day that the political sphere is nothing more than an arena in which ambitious politicians struggle for dominance, rather than a structure in which citizens can deal with worrisome collective problems.
  • Fourteen prominent journalists, pollsters, and all-around analysts made their predictions
  • One week later many of these same experts would be saying on their talk shows that the Republican landslide was "inevitable" and "a long time coming" and "a sign of deep discontent in the heartland."
  • But before the returns were in, how many of the fourteen experts predicted that the Republicans would win both houses of Congress and that Newt Gingrich would be speaker? Exactly three.
  • As with medieval doctors who applied leeches and trepanned skulls, the practitioners cannot be blamed for the limits of their profession. But we can ask why reporters spend so much time directing our attention toward what is not much more than guesswork on their part.
  • useless distractions have become a specialty of the political press. They are easy to produce, they allow reporters to act as if they possessed special inside knowledge, and there are no consequences for being wrong.
  • The deadpan restraint with which Kurtz told this story is admirable. But the question many readers would want to scream at the idle correspondents is Why don't you go out and do some work?
  • Why not imagine, just for a moment, that your journalistic duty might involve something more varied and constructive than doing standups from the White House lawn and sounding skeptical about whatever announcement the President's spokesman put out that day?
  • The list could go on for pages. With a few minutes' effort—about as long as it takes to do a crossword puzzle—the correspondents could have drawn up lists of other subjects they had never before "had time" to investigate. They had the time now. What they lacked was a sense that their responsibility involved something more than standing up to rehash the day's announcements when there was room for them on the news.
  • How different the "Better safe than sorry" calculation seems when journalists are involved! Reporters and pundits hold no elected office, but they are obviously public figures. The most prominent TV-talk-show personalities are better known than all but a handful of congressmen.
  • If an interest group had the choice of buying the favor of one prominent media figure or of two junior congressmen, it wouldn't even have to think about the decision. The pundit is obviously more valuable.
  • Had Donaldson as a journalist been pursuing a politician or even a corporate executive, he would have felt justified in using the most aggressive reportorial techniques. When these techniques were turned on him, he complained that the reporters were going too far.
  • Few of his readers would leap to the conclusion that Will was serving as a mouthpiece for his wife's employers. But surely most would have preferred to learn that information from Will himself.
  • ABC News found that eight out of 10 approved of the president's speech. CBS News said that 74 percent of those surveyed said they had a "clear idea" of what Clinton stands for, compared with just 41 percent before the speech. A Gallup Poll for USA Today and Cable News Network found that eight in 10 said Clinton is leading the country in the right direction. Nielsen ratings reported in the same day's paper showed that the longer the speech went on, the larger the number of people who tuned in to watch.
  • The point is not that the pundits are necessarily wrong and the public necessarily right. The point is the gulf between the two groups' reactions. The very aspects of the speech that had seemed so ridiculous to the professional commentators—its detail, its inclusiveness, the hyperearnestness of Clinton's conclusion about the "common good"—seemed attractive and worthwhile to most viewers.
  • The difference between the "welcoming committee" and the congressional committees headed by fallen Democratic titans like Tom Foley and Jack Brooks was that the congressmen can be booted out.
  • Movies do not necessarily capture reality, but they suggest a public mood—in this case, a contrast between the apparent self-satisfaction of the media celebrities and the contempt in which they are held by the public.
  • the fact that no one takes the shows seriously is precisely what's wrong with them, because they jeopardize the credibility of everything that journalists do.
  • when all the participants then dash off for the next plane, caring about none of it except the money—when these things happen, they send a message. The message is: We don't respect what we're doing. Why should anyone else?
  • anonymous on 14 Oct 10
     
    "Why has the media establishment become so unpopular? Perhaps the public has good reason to think that the media's self-aggrandizement gets in the way of solving the country's real problems" By James Fallows at The Atlantic on February, 1996
anonymous

The Gen-X Nostalgia Boom - 2 views

www.nytimes.com/...the-gen-x-nostalgia-boom.html

generations nostalgia Gen-X

shared by anonymous on 04 Aug 11 - Cached
  • We bristled when we heard them wax self-congratulatory about ending segregation and war
  • We resented their monopoly on cultural space, realizing that “boom” also described what their collective voice would always be, compared with our demographically feeble squeak.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Aug 11
       
      I was a late bloomer in this regard. When I finally had a small degree of cultural awareness, I began to note things. Mainly that my music sucked, we sucked, and everything was better before I was around.
  • And when they did briefly notice us, in the Generation X media frenzy of the mid-1990s, it was only to reduce diverse people and experiences to catchwords like “slackers” and “grunge” and dismiss paralyzing economic and ecological anxiety as privileged extended-adolescent angst.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Aug 11
       
      I had that TIME Magazine. I used to read P.J. O'Rourke bitching about my generation. I bristled at being called a gen-x'er (I only ever tolerated grunge). As quickly as that media fascination came, it went. I guess maybe we were 'dealt with'.
  • ...19 more annotations...
  • I would say we were marked by two traits: our dislike of nostalgia and our irritation whenever our barely formed narratives were appropriated and marketed back at us.
  • it brings on something of an identity crisis to see Gen X’s formative years become part of the cycle of retro revivalism
  • Meanwhile MTV is exhuming “Beavis and Butt-head” and “Pop-Up Video,” while Nickelodeon is offering a 1990s-themed block of late-night programming with old shows like “The Adventures of Pete & Pete,” presumably to help herbally sautéed 20-somethings regress in giggly reminiscence.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Aug 11
       
      With our beer bongs and our hula hoops.
  • Most kids who entered college this year weren’t even born when grunge broke. If it’s too soon, you’re too old.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Aug 11
       
      Ouch.
  • But of course we are not just the unwilling victims of the 20-year cycle of resuscitation. We are its architects, as a few of us have been able to wrest culturally influential posts away from baby boomers.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Aug 11
       
      S&H would (probably) argue that this is because Gen X is a reactive one (like Silents). 
  • One of The Onion’s most biting headlines this year: “Winona Ryder finally agrees to sleep with Generation X.”
  • This is the sting in the rising buzz of 1990s nostalgia: It feels like retroactively giving in to those reductive media representations.
  • At that time, the sharpest articulation of generational pique was found in The Baffler
  • Now we’ll get to see how The Baffler dissects the rise of Gen-X-Squared
  • age can prompt even the most cynical to realize not only nostalgia’s sickly-sweet temptation but also its usefulness.
  • What is nostalgia good for, then?
  • it runs search-and-rescue missions against the disposability of consumer capitalism
  • And it raises exception to the great leveling effect of the Internet
  • In intimate terms, nostalgia is a glue that reinforces bonds of solidarity and shared experience
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Aug 11
       
      And that's one reason why, as much as I railed against the Gen X label, I certainly was part of a peer group with shared experiences.
  • Today’s Birthers and Tea Partiers seem less apocalyptic if you remember that the last time a Democratic president battled Republicans over health care and federal budgets, he was being smeared as a conspiratorial murderer.
  • So how can an anti-nostalgic generation honor its past without becoming the thing it hated?
  • One answer is the old standby: Gen X’s endemic, possibly pathological, sarcasm.
  • Rather than the 1990s being, as the demoralizing claim went, the “end of history,” it turned out to be more like a mix-tape pause of history between the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, a kind of break from big convulsions while humankind mainly figured out how to work the Internet.
    • anonymous
      anonymous on 04 Aug 11
       
      That's a great bit.
  • There’s a model here for nostalgia that doesn’t wish away the distance between past and present; doesn’t romanticize the past as tragic and heroic; and doesn’t simply trivialize it (as so much 1980s nostalgia did) as trite and silly.
  • anonymous on 04 Aug 11
     
    Long before we had much life to look back on, North Americans my age knew that nostalgia was a sickness. It's not that we were aware the term was coined to describe the crippling melancholia that overcame many 17th-century Swiss soldiers when war took them away from the bucolic mountain landscapes of home. It was that, being in our teens and 20s in the early 1990s, we had grown up in the penumbra of the great eclipsing nostalgia of the baby boomers
  • Erik Hanson on 17 Aug 11
     
    And here I could swear I've been toying with nostalgia my whole life. Mind you, it was always nostalgia for previous countercultural movements.
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