Generational differences

John (hi), there's so much in this that I don't want to tackle it all--however, anyone who argues that people were better off in the 1950s and 1960s just wasn't there. I was.

Trust me. The standards (for material goods) that people have today are so much higher than they were then. The idea of a couple *buying* a house before or when they married, for example--just wasn't there. It is today. The idea that houses have to be huge (albeit in an old cotton/potato/corn patch in a low spot) wasn't there. It is now.

It's so much easier to feel like an economic failure today than it was then--but it's only, I think, because the standards are higher (I am not talking about the average clerk who has to work two jobs to make $30,000 or $40,000 a year--but the "average" income earner who is up to his/her neck in hock so that those giant houses mushrooming in the flyover fields can be purchased. If I promise not to generalize about your generation, try not to generalize about mine (whatever that might be). Cheers. L.

I'm so sick to death of this Boomer bashing, and depending on these broad categorizations of generations. Just stop it, please. Case in point: I'm technically a Boomer -- last year 1964. Believe me I have far less in common with some old coot in their late fifties than I do someone a year younger than me. Right? Right? Just nod, OK? Thank you.

While this generational hyperbole used to be somewhat useful in discussing shared cultural experiences, there is no more Grand Audience, grand narrative, or any of it. Chances are older people are grumpy because the older you get the more you hate change. Oops. Broad generalization, scratch that. PLEASE, let it go already. Does anyone still think that Boomers are running the show? They may have the money and the status, but the zeitgeist is the province of youth.

P.S. I'm not technologically clueless. Someone had to design those early web pages, after all.

In spite of everything, I really think younger people today have it better than I did 20 years in terms of outlets for creativity.

In my not-so-copious free time, I'm taking multimedia and graphic design classes, and I'm struck by how curious my fellow classmates (who are 18, 19, 20 years old) are about technology, art and music. These kids aren't passively consuming stuff; they're making stuff on their own. They're willing to experiment and critique.

What would they be doing without computers and the Internet? Undoubtedly, they would be pouring their creativity into other things, but without the payback of public exposure, however limited, on their own websites. And without computers, some of them may not discover their inner talents at all. Technology is opening new vistas for people, and I can't help but think this a good thing.

It's only recently that I've started to see "Baby Boom" so strictly defined as those born between 1946 and 1964.

Once upon a time a time, all those children who managed to get conceived by WWII soldiers and their squeezes were considered the start of the baby boom -- certainly they (people like my mother) grew up thinking of themselves that way. Surely the person who must be credited as giving a defining name and voice to the group known as Generation X -- Douglas Coupland -- ranks, one could posit by definition, as a Gen Xer?

And yet, according to his own online biography: "Douglas Coupland is Canadian, born on a Canadian Air Force base near Baden-Baden, Germany, on December 30, 1961."

So.

Cutting Mr. Coupland himself out of a claim to being a part of the generation he helped define makes the point of the "Gen X" concept rather succiently: those who drop off the demographic radar having been born between the self-entitled glut of the Pepsi Generation (roughly 1940-1955) and the aptly-dubbed "Y" generation whose role models include Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton.

People lucky enough to have spent their youths in an era when youth, most emphatically, didn't buy you much (not that we're bitter about it), and yet have spent the rest of our lives enduring the cult of eternal youth enjoyed (relentlessly) by those generations that bookend us.

Anonymous,
Save the beer for the following writers and their editors, all of whom were found easily using Google:

Adam Gopnik writing about Kingsley Amis:

Amis's career as a novelist was a long declension from comic candor into mere misanthropy, and toward crude misogyny, before ending in a kind of all-over nihilism that becomes interesting again.

Christopher Benfey writing about William Faulkner:

He was born William Cuthbert Falkner, on September 25, 1897. (He later added the "u," just as Hathorne added a "w" and Melvill a final "e," to make the name seem more aristocratic.) A steady declension in fortune and status from generation to generation had left him with little "soil" to call his own.

Frank Thomas, in his "Conquest of Cool," cites Rick Perlstein's "declension hypothesis" about the 1950s devolving into the 1960s:

Mainstream culture was tepid, mechanical, and uniform; the revolt of the young against it was a joyous and even a glorious cultural flowering, though it quickly became mainstream itself. Rick Perlstein has summarized this standard version of what went on in the sixties as the "declension hypothesis," a tale in which, "as the Fifties grayly droned on, springs of contrarian sentiment began bubbling into the best minds of a generation raised in unprecedented prosperity but well versed in the existential subversions of the Beats and Mad magazine." The story ends with the noble idealism of the New Left in ruins and the counterculture sold out to Hollywood and the television networks.

Clive James writing about Aldous Huxley:

Those who think that Huxley's fine brain turned to mush in California are apt to ascribe his declension to the mind-bending stuff he took in: the Wisdom of the East, hallucinogenic drugs, ESP. They tend to ignore the significance of what he left out.

Albert Mobilio writing about Lydia Davis' new book of short stories, "Samuel Johnson Is Indignant":

This declension of a fantasy from passion to the pedestrian is rendered crisply, as if by a particularly astute analysand [there's a word for you; means a person getting psychoanalysis], and the concluding philosophical summation, one raising but not engaging the boundary between intention and act, functions as the punch line to a well-told joke.

Well, John, you do have Laurence Sterne on your side, according to dictionary.com, and who am I to argue with him? The first 50 or so Google hits show one or two other obscure texts circa 1800 using "declension" for decline. Otherwise, it looks as if the vast majority of usages have to do with the grammar of languages other than English. And for anyone who took Latin, "declension" tends to bring on a nervous sweat; going to hell, for some people, means landing in a place where they make you memorize declensions all day. Also, my radar goes off when I encounter a term William F. Buckley might use, but that George Orwell or Jimmy Breslin would never touch. But if you must, you must. And you will, you will. Get "declension" by your editor in lieu of "decline" (and without generating any reader complaints) and I'll stand you a beer.

Mike,

No. 1: Please see the following from dictionary.com:

de·clen·sion

-noun 1. Grammar.
a. the inflection of nouns, pronouns, and adjectives for categories such as case and number.
b. the whole set of inflected forms of such a word, or the recital thereof in a fixed order.
c. a class of such words having similar sets of inflected forms: the Latin second declension.

2. an act or instance of declining.
3. a bending, sloping, or moving downward: land with a gentle declension toward the sea.
4. deterioration; decline.
5. deviation, as from a standard.

No. 2: I like the variety and color and texture of words. "Declension" has some of that. For me, anyway. It has senses (or is it flavas?) that exceed those of decline -- deterioration, deviation, desperation, bending, succombing, sloping, emptying, etc.

No. 3: I made myself clear as crystal when I said the rhetoric of declension was rhetoric that aims to persuade us the world is going to hell.

No. 4: I liked to contrast between "declension" and "going to hell." I tried to set up that pairing to resonate. There's a certain friction between the two, one high, one low. Perhaps this is the postmodernist in me, as you say of my generation. I don't know.

No. 5: When I like a word, I use it.

First off, can we speak simple English and use "decline" instead of "declension?" Our rhetoric, our ability to speak simply and clearly, is the foundation of our trustworthiness and effectiveness as writers. "Decline" was good enough for Gibbon writing about the Roman Empire; it should be good enough for us in writing about the American one. Maybe criticism's standing is in trouble because of words like "declension." Which, if memory serves, is a term from grammar. Yecch.

Second: America inarguably has declined economically, relatively speaking since the 1950s and 1960s, when it bestrode the postwar world like a colossus (and psychological studies show that relative well-being, rather than absolute standard of living, is what counts for human happiness). There has been lots of techonological progress, resulting in many wondrous improvements to health and well-being, but in terms of human dignity and freedom there has definitely been a backsliding now that it takes two incomes to buy the middle class lifestyle rather than one.

Industrial jobs that allowed high school grads to support families have vanished; service jobs sans benefits proliferate. Unions, and with them worker power, went kablooey. I'm not saying the arts can't prosper under today's increasing Medici model (it depends how much our Medici really care about and understand art and the need to let artists paint their benefactors into hell if that's what the artists want to do).

I think that excellent artists, of whatever generation, find ways to create and reach enough of a sliver of the overall audience to forge the beginnings of a legacy that can endure.

I don't buy into Boomer-idealism nostalgia -- most of the protest thing was about saving middle-class skins from the draft during a hideous war, and the key players in the Civil Rights struggle and the creation of rock 'n' roll were born before 1946.

The challenge today is finding a more just and intelligent way to reward work in our society, and to find meaningful work that doesn't require an advanced technical degree.

Health care and cleaning up the environment seem to be two obvious areas to explore. Instead of moping about whether American life is on the downswing, maybe all generations should be thinking about what we can do to make the most of what we've got, which is more than sufficient if used wisely.

One hopeful development is Gen Y's apparent progress in shucking itself of the great American curse, bigotry. Lets hope some Boomer-and-older-led horror re: immigration doesn't snuff that potentially divine flicker.

Lastly: anyone who takes the arts seriously and thinks they reflect the best of humanity's ability to approximate the truth of our condition believes in entropy and decline, because that, over and over, is one of the great themes of art: the impermanence of everything, the human propensity for vanity, shallowness, folly and greed, generation after generation, punctuated by triumphs that lose their luster before the trumpets' blare has even faded.

At best, per Thornton Wilder writing during the depths of World War II, we get by by "The Skin of Our Teeth." Or, per Beckett after World War II's horrors were fully known and nuclear dawn had struck -- "so what?"

Decline is what we live with every day; good art helps make that bearable; so can a religious outlook (preferably infused with humaneness and divested of intolerance). In philosophy, there's a lot to be said for Existentialism, a contribution of a vastly declension-beset French society; it beats the hell out of that French-made fad, Deconstructionism, which seems to have unduly influenced the Gen X intellectual sensibility.

Screed over, with apologies.

The unbelievably crappy newspaper website -- and I grant you, the Savannah Morning News' site is a little startling in its obtuseness -- is more a factor of print journalism confusion over the web than it is boomer v. gen-X thinking. You're making the admittedly creditable equation of web savvy with gen-X, web cluelessness with boomers.

But given the generally junky-ugly nature of most newspaper websites, their unbelievably balky layouts and navigation systems and -- perhaps most annoying to me -- their occasional death-grip refusal to let you return to your previous site, all of these have led me to believe that most newspapers a) haven't figured out how to translate their ad-heavy, news-bombardment formats to the web and/or b) they are either too cheap or simply can't afford good web designers.

For years at the Dallas Morning News, I suffered much the same problem you have -- compounded by the fact that the Morning News had an entire page devoted to the 'arts columnists.' But because much of my books coverage was done as features or reviews (even though my title was book columnist), people who took the obvious path and gravitated to that 'columnists' page' and clicked on my portrait would find next to nothing of what I wrote. It took years to get that simple problem corrected. It's still the case that the columnists' contributions to any blog are not found linked from their portraits.

The age and/or generational thinking of management seems mostly incidental to me in all this. There just aren't that many good newspaper websites. Even the supposedly hipper, younger alt-weekly websites can be horrorshows.