Conservatives should reject this woke right Marxist nonsense.
I was in high school when I came across a copy of ‘13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail’ in the principal’s office. The book with its shortened ‘generation’ title, computer reference, mixture of cartoons and factoids had been intended for teenagers, but was mostly read by the baby boomers trying to understand them. And ‘13th Gen’s message was to blame the Boomers.
‘13th Gen’ was the work of two D.C. consultants and staffers William Strauss and Neil Howe trying to popularize their, unfortunately all too popular, ‘generational theory’ to a younger generation that they presumed was stupid, shallow and incapable of grasping anything that wasn’t an MTV music video. And they did it by trying to convince Gen X they were victims.
The popular stereotype of the newest generation as lazy idiots wasn’t a new one.
“What is happening to our young people? They disrespect their elders. They disobey their parents. They ignore the laws. They riot in the streets inflamed with wild notions. Their morals are decaying. What is to become of them?” Plato wondered.
The Greatest Generation had been held in contempt by its elders who had fought in the trenches amid poisoned gas, and the veterans of Normandy then scorned the Boomers, but Gen X was the first generation to be both held in contempt and to be told it wasn’t their fault.
When I skimmed through 13th Gen, the takeaway was that my generation was doomed, the Boomers had taken all the good things in life and left nothing but crumbs and a poisoned chalice. We would inherit a bad economy and a wrecked environment and the Boomers who selfishly did this would unfairly blame us for being slackers even though we never had a chance.
13th Gen is long forgotten because Strauss and Howe made a bad bet on the branding, trying to brand my generation as the 13th after America’s Founding. A bad novel written by an author influenced by the ‘Strauss-Howe Generational Theory’ borrowed the old Generation X name that had been in use for every generation beginning with the Baby Boomers. And it stuck.
By the time I was skimming through 13th Gen, I was confused by the title because we had long since been known as Generation X and I wasn’t impressed by its premise that I was one of the downtrodden, a member of a ‘generation’ rather than myself. I had not yet learned to apply the concept of ‘Marxism’ to pop culture messages but victimhood had never appealed to me.
Strauss and Howe did better when they named Millennials who proved less resistant to generational victimhood than Generation X had and then the awkwardly named Gen Z had come of age in a culture where victimhood had become the default setting for daily life.
Generational victimhood turned generations, beginning with mine, into minority groups, simultaneously treated as inferior and as victims, who needed to be condescended to and life had to be made easy for, because we weren’t good enough and it wasn’t our fault.
Gen X and then every generation after us were the new ‘blacks’, told that there was no use in trying because the game had been rigged against us, that we should stop working hard and start radicalizing against our generational oppressors. And much as black people were condescended to and organized in this fashion by white liberals, Baby Boomers like Strauss and Howe were the ones telling newer generations beginning with mine to blame their generation.
This behavior might seem paradoxical to anyone who took the Strauss-Howe generation paradigm seriously, but it’s how Marxism works as revolutionary thought-leaders seek to define an underclass of ‘others’ to organize against their peers, the poor against the rich, minorities against whites, women against men, and the young against the old, to overthrow the system.
Academics trying to dismantle the system claimed that Gen X had to be talked down to and so replaced English Literature with the lyrics of Kurt Cobain, then Buffy episodes for Millennials and SpongeBob for Gen Z. (The cartoon character shows up alongside Karl Marx and Kafka’s Metamorphosis in a comparative literature class at Emory University about the evils of work.)
Radicalizing Gen X paid dividends with the WTO riots in Seattle that foreshadowed Occupy Wall Street and introduced Antifa violence in major cities. Organizers billed it as the voice of a disaffected generation. Their ‘disaffection’ coincidentally sounded like Marxist talking points. The violence marked the official passing of the radical torch across generations. “WTO Protest: The apathy generation finally has a reason to be angry,” a relieved Independent article proclaimed. --->READ MORE HERE
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