1 Philippe Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact,” in On Autobiography, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 3–30.
2 Saturday Evening Post, January 30, 1932.
3 Saturday Review of Literature, July 30, 1938.
4 Claude Stanush, “King of the Cowboys,” Life, May 13, 1946 (reprinted in Reader’s Digest, August 1946); Brenda Ueland, “Men’s Tears,” Collier’s, February 19, 1949.
MATT BECKER
The We in the Me: Memoir as Community
• • •
WITH AN EXCERPT FROM
“Behind the Boom: Memoirs of a Gen Xer”
FROM “Behind the Boom: Memoirs of a Gen Xer”
Every afternoon that spring semester of 1994, I came home from classes at the University of Minnesota around noon, ate lunch, took a quick nap, and headed to the East Side St. Paul YMCA, where I worked as a teacher’s assistant in the after-school child care program. The meal was always quick; I watched CNN Headline News as I ate, but the stories usually just became background noise. I was far more concerned with girls and music than current events. The headline story that second Friday of April stopped me cold:
“Kurt Cobain, lead singer and songwriter of the band Nirvana, was found dead today of an apparent suicide.”
He had been a heroin addict, said CNN, and had suffered from depression. They showed an image of Nirvana from a 1992 cover of Rolling Stone, with Cobain wearing a tee-shirt that said “Corporate Magazines Still Suck,” and I remembered that he had also been critical of himself for selling out his punk principles to a major record label. Apparently his sadness and self-loathing had become too much, and he put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.
Pundits had anointed Cobain the spokesman of Generation X—my generation—after his song “Smells Like Teen Spirit” became a massive hit in 1991. The song was a study in juxtaposition, with music that was soft and melodic one moment, harsh and angry the next, accompanied by lyrics that expressed hope and cynicism, interest and apathy. Through these juxtapositions Cobain hinted that he was uncertain not only about who he was and where he was going, but whether he even cared enough to ponder the questions. And it was this ambivalence and indifference that were supposedly characteristic of our entire generation, and the reason we had been collectively dubbed “slackers.”
As I drove to work, the deejay on the car radio was trying to make sense of Cobain’s death. I had never considered him the spokesman of my generation, but I knew why people my age connected with his music and lyrics. He had turned the very insecurities that made him a slacker into art, and listening to him, we knew we were not alone with these feelings. That he survived and even thrived meant that maybe we could too. So when he decided to put a bullet in his head, what did that mean for the rest of us?
The sky was grey with clouds, and it felt like winter. I opened the window a crack, and as the earthy air rushed into my car and reminded me that it was spring, the deejay played “Smells Like Teen Spirit.”
• • •
The We in the Me: Memoir as Community
I was never drawn to the memoir as a reader or as a writer. It always seemed a literary genre centered on the gratuitous celebration of the self, in which authors prove to the rest of us just how extraordinary their lives have been, or how their seemingly ordinary lives are, in the end, actually extraordinary. I think I developed this attitude because I grew up in the shadow of the sixties generation.
As a member of Generation X—the cohort born between the mid-1960s and the early 1980s, and thus immediately after the post–World War II baby boom—I was a teenager and a young adult in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, the same period in which those who had been my age during the 1960s became the establishment. In their new adult positions as pundits and politicians, professors and parents, these boomers were quick to trumpet anything associated with their youth. After all, they had been inspired to political action by John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and had created the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and Students for a Democratic Society. They had marched in the civil rights movement and in anti–Vietnam War protests, and they had demanded greater equality for women, homosexuals, American Indians, and other oppressed communities throughout the world. The more radical of them had even sought to overthrow the entire capitalist system, which they considered the root of all inequity and militarism. They had also listened as the Beatles, Bob Dylan, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and the Grateful Dead—all members of their generation—redefined popular music. They had produced new fashions and lingoes, taken new types of drugs to experience unexplored states of consciousness, and even formulated new ways of relating to one another and the world. At places like San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury neighborhood and the Woodstock Music and Art Fair, they had created an entire counterculture around bell-bottoms and long hair, LSD, and Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, free love, togetherness, and egalitarianism. The boomers could rightfully be proud of the role that they played in the significant social and cultural changes of the 1960s. How could we Gen Xers compare? How could we come up with anything that would compete?
It’s easy enough to argue against sweeping generalizations made about generational change. But those generalizations play a role in popular culture, marketing, and politics, and they can have a real impact on people’s perceptions and actions. Boomers lamented that our generation was nowhere near as revolutionary, engaged, or optimistic as they had been when they were our age. Boomers “are having a heyday calling [Xers] apathetic, shiftless, causeless navel-gazers,” noted a 1993 USA Today article.1 These supposed characteristics of my generation were summed up with a single disparaging term—“slacker”—which was derived from director Richard Linklater’s 1991 film of the same name, about the aimless lifestyles of underemployed and overeducated twentysomethings in Austin, Texas. We Gen Xers alternatively saw the boomers as a smug and narcissistic generation, and we were sick of their criticisms and tired of hearing about the grand experiences and accomplishments of their younger years.
Maybe I was repelled by the rise of memoir during this same time precisely because it seemed to give the sixties generation yet another way of drawing attention to its youth.
• • •
Boomer nostalgia tends to override a more nuanced view of these bygone days. And because they have become the establishment and thus dominate the public discourse, the romantic vision of the 1960s frequently prevails, even if a less than glorious interpretation may be equally valid—and, indeed, was current at the time.
Examples abound. Take The Graduate, that iconic film of 1960s youth culture. While Ben could be understood as a countercultural character who shuns the stifling discontent of the plastic world of adulthood for a more meaningful life, he’s also a young college grad without ambition who opts to coast along instead of work. He even moves in with his parents and spends his days loafing around the pool. His reckless breakup of his estranged girlfriend’s wedding near the end of the film might illustrate the sixties maxim that all you need is love, but as the two flee from the church on a public bus, their faces suddenly go from smiles to blank stares. Instead of excited hope for a future of blissful togetherness, their expressions show sudden panic: “What did we just do, and where do we go from here?” Apparently, love is not all you need when you both lack direction. Or consider those youth of the 1960s who took Timothy Leary’s advice to “turn on, tune in, drop out” through LSD. While the psychedelic doctor may have envisioned the drug as a tool that would eventually help those who used it transform the world, most young people instead took it to get lost in a private sensory explosion of pretty colors.2 As the 1960s wore on, more and more decided to heed only the last part of his dictum and simply dropped out of society altogether, sequestering themselves in communes or religious cults, inward turns that, one might argue, set the stage
for the Me Decade of the 1970s. Some may laud these sixties youths as heroic resisters of the mainstream. But they look more like slackers, to me.
In fact, in many cases, the supposedly revolutionary attitudes and actions of sixties youth culture weren’t really all that different from the mainstream. The hippie’s do-your-own-thing ethic, for example, was basically a variation of American rugged individualism, whereas their illicit drug use for pleasure and insight echoed a long American tradition of using narcotics and alcohol for relief and escape. The most egregious of these inconsistencies was that of the supposedly progressive young men who simultaneously criticized the submissive gender roles of the older generations, touted free love and egalitarianism, and expected women in the movement to wait on them. This glaring double standard kick-started the Women’s Liberation movement.3 In a 1971 issue of Rolling Stone, that bible of the sixties generation, music critic John Landau pondered these hypocrisies, asking, “We tell ourselves we are a counterculture. And yet are we really so different from the culture against which we rebel?”4
Of course, there were plenty of youth like Landau in the 1960s who were aware of these contradictions and worked to diminish them. Likewise, there were many who were deeply committed to social justice, equality, and peace and who did not turn inward as they aged but, instead, like the late Paul Wellstone, they never stopped championing these celebrated sixties ideals. The point is to recognize that the sixties generation, like all generations, has never been monolithic in its attitudes and behaviors. As cultural historian Jay Stevens puts it in Storming Heaven: LSD and the American Dream, his detailed study of psychedelic drugs and sixties culture, for each young man during that era “who wanted to seize power, dismantle the Establishment, and redistribute the wealth, there were at least ten others who just wanted to get through school, get laid, get a job, and get out of going to Vietnam.” For every one “who grew his hair long, smoked dope, listened to rock music, and proclaimed an urgent longing to make a clean break with American society, there was a corresponding kid who drank beer, worshiped the local football team, and measured his personal worth by the car he drove.”5
In the same way, it’s a mistake to think of Generation X as a monolith of cynical slackers whose nihilism and pessimism are outweighed only by their apathy. After all, we comprised the first significant fan base for U2, one of the most politically engaged, hopeful bands in rock ’n’ roll history. And in the late 1990s, people in their early twenties volunteered 39 percent more frequently than had people that age in the mid-1970s.6 Indeed, I have always suspected the motives of those who charged my generation with being cynical: was it some hippie-turned-hip-capitalist attempting to play on our insecurities in order to sell us tennis shoes? Or some civil-rights-marcher-turned-political-pundit condemning us as apathetic because we weren’t championing her favorite cause?
Yet it would also be a mistake to think Gen X is without slackers, cynics, or nihilists. How else to explain a television cartoon like South Park, which is produced by a couple of Gen Xers and portrays every institution and person as corrupt? If polling data on the political views and behaviors of my generation has been correct, we have indeed been more apathetic and less hopeful than earlier generations of the twentieth century. In the 1998 congressional election, for instance, turnout among voters aged eighteen to twenty-four was less than 17 percent, roughly half that of older voters.7 Maybe this is because, compared with the boomers, we have spent most of our lives in a historical period that has, in fact, been less promising.
• • •
Gen Xers came of age in the post-Watergate era, when belief in the integrity of official institutions had eroded considerably and damning messages about the government and its leaders became the norm. We lost faith that we could ameliorate these institutions as we witnessed the baby boomers become the very establishment that they had so passionately promised to change. Raised in an age of downward mobility that began in the 1970s (after the first wave of boomers had been educated and were launched into adulthood), we have faced an employment market increasingly characterized by rapid deindustrialization, offshoring, and outsourcing, in which traditional careers with permanent contracts and good salaries and benefits have more and more been supplanted by service industry and short-term contract “jobs” with no benefits, low wages, and little security. For much of our lives, the “facts” of the news have been filtered through political spin-doctoring or watered down with human interest stories and infotainment, while the “truth” of religion has been distorted by televangelist scandals or sexual abuse crimes. With divorce rates rising from just over 300,000 in 1965 to nearly 1.2 million by 1985, even the family and romantic relationships have seemed to us decidedly uncertain propositions.8 Is it any surprise those of my generation might be a little less optimistic and trusting?
We also matured amid the excessive individualism of the Reagan era, when the president and his New Right coalition dismantled the social welfare programs associated with Roosevelt’s New Deal and Johnson’s Great Society because they thought them too collectivist and too expensive. Reagan and the New Right believed that the free market, not big government, could best meet society’s needs and that individual success or failure was more a matter of personal responsibility than any socioeconomic issue that could be managed by bureaucrats. Such an outlook was expressed perhaps most succinctly by Reagan’s conservative counterpart in Britain, Margaret Thatcher, who declared in 1987, “There is no such thing as society....There are individual men and women and there are families and no government can do anything except through people and people look to themselves first.”9 This was the message our most prominent and powerful leaders stressed as my fellow Gen Xers and I came into political consciousness: that although both individualism and communalism have been central to American (and British) national identity, the former would now unequivocally come first.
The seventy-five million baby boomers, we were told, were born into an affluent post–World War II world where parents doted, schools were well funded, neighborhoods were tight knit, and Kennedy promised exciting “New Frontiers.” In contrast, the fifty million of my generation were born into an era of economic stagflation when divorce and crime rates rose, budgets for schools and community centers were cut, and behind Reagan’s promise of a “Morning in America” lurked punitive policies that favored the powerful and punished the vulnerable. As a generation of latch-key kids, we learned to look out for ourselves, and by the time we were old enough to protest and attend concerts, downward mobility amid triumphant free-market greed had made it harder to be concerned with the collective good.10
Besides, it didn’t seem to us that all that togetherness had done much anyway, as many of the problems the sixties generation sought to change seemed even more intractable. True, the war in Vietnam had ended, but now we had a president in Reagan who spearheaded the largest peacetime military buildup in American history. Yes, Jim Crow laws were gone, but we still had Willie Horton ads, politicians complaining of welfare queens, and other slippery specters of racism. And how much did the relaxing of sexual and gender norms associated with the free love and feminism of the 1960s and 1970s have to do with AIDS and the higher divorce rates of the 1980s and 1990s?
The trend toward the individual over the community that began in the 1980s has also been encouraged during this same period by technical revolutions that have greatly facilitated the privatization of leisure. With the introduction of cable television, personal computers, the Internet, MP3 players, and similar new technologies, people are no longer beholden to the content or scheduling of the Big Three television networks, national and local print news, major record and radio companies, and other providers that dominated the media for much of the twentieth century. This shift has democratized the media, allowing us access to an unprecedented breadth and depth of information, misinformation, and entertainment whenever and wherever we want, which we can tailor to our interests and biases as n
ever before. But this media personalization has also helped erode community, as we are no longer united by the common experience of watching the same national television news program, listening to the same regional radio station, or reading the same city newspaper. And, too often, the more immersed we become in our own media worlds, the less time we devote to daily human interaction.
In this hyperindividualistic era, community seems devalued, elusive, and perhaps even unnecessary. Maybe this is why scholars like Robert Putnam have found that people of my age are more likely than previous generations to value the personal and private over the public and collective. But this doesn’t mean that we don’t still long for community. Putnam, for instance, contends that unfulfilled desires for community have related directly to the rates of unhappiness, depression, and suicide among younger people that started to rise in the 1970s and 1980s.11 Such self-destructiveness might be the ultimate testament that by nature and history humans are pack animals and that our need to interact with others of our species does not disappear, even if we seem determined to drown out this instinct under isolation headphones.
This longing for human connection amid increasing privatization and social fragmentation helps explain the celebrity-centric American media and the phenomenon of reality TV—both of which have come of age with my generation. Infotainment shows like Entertainment Tonight, which first aired in 1981, provide glimpses into the private lives of celebrities, suggesting that, because the famous confront the same quotidian life issues as you and I, we could get to know them on this human level. Reality TV, which began with shows like MTV’s The Real World in the early 1990s, presents everyday people with whom viewers can easily identify, in purportedly unscripted situations (which in fact are heavily scripted) with which we can easily relate. Even local and national news programs play on this desire for a more personal connection through human interest stories.
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