X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking

By Jeff Gordinier

Read Jeff Gordinier's posts on the Penguin Blog

In this simultaneously hilarious and incisive "manifesto for a generation that's never had much use for manifestos," Gordinier suggests that for the first time since the "Smells Like Teen Spirit"breakthrough of the early 1990s, Gen X has what it takes to rescue American culture from a state of collapse. Over the past twenty years, the so-called "slackers"have irrevocably changed countless elements of our culture-from the way we watch movies to the way we make sense of a cracked political process to the way the whole world does business.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Penguin Books
• Release date: Mar 27, 2008
• ISBN: 9781440639616

Book preview

QUICK FIRST-PERSON TANGENT: CELEBRATED SUMMER 1984

We are pathetic. We are stars.

—Dave Eggers, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

It ’s 1984 and I’m spending the summer scooping ice cream for tourists in Laguna Beach, California. This is exactly two decades before the town will cease to be a town and will, instead, become a reality show on MTV. I’ve just graduated from high school, and even though the French gentleman who owns the ice cream store is aware of this fact and what it tends to imply in the way of personal responsibility, he insists on making a rash business decision: he gives me and Phil, my eighteen-year-old comrade in the art of the waffle cone, complete control of the sound system.

The sound system is piped into a public patio where Forest Avenue and the South Coast Highway meet. Which means that Phil and I have been handpicked by this generous Gaul to provide the subliminal soundtrack for thousands of international visitors as they pass through the heart of our whimsical seaside village. In fact, we are just a few feet from Laguna’s famous Greeter’s Corner, where for many years an old bearded gent who looks like an ancient mariner from a box of frozen fish sticks has been recruited to stand all day long in the scalding sun, waving at cars and confused pedestrians. He is the greeter. Most people assume that the greeter is homeless, and therefore they steer clear of him. This, of course, only makes the greeter more aggressive about greeting people.

Phil and I see ourselves as greeters, too, and we’re wondering how far we can push it. It turns out that we can push it very far. Most of the time the sound system at the ice cream store is tuned to K-EARTH 101, the Los Angeles oldies station, but there’s a cassette player in the back where the French guy bakes the croissants every morning. Phil and I decide to bring in some tapes. We see this as a sociological experiment; sort of like that test they did at Yale where the scientist asked people to zap other people with jolts of electricity. What we’re wondering is, What kind of music will prove so intolerable to the tourists that they will find it impossible to enjoy their croissants and waffle cones?

We start out with Elvis Costello, having determined that albums like This Year’s Model and Imperial Bedroom sound sober and pleasant enough that nobody will notice that they are not listening to the Beach Boys. We are correct. Elvis Costello produces no discernible change in behavior among the tourists on the patio. Satisfied customers buy their waffle cones, eat them, and leave without a word. Hmmm. Phil and I upgrade to Echo & the Bunnymen: surely Ian McCulloch, gas-baggily crooning about the killing moon, will shoo away the Motown-loving day-trippers in droves. But no, nothing happens. Waffle cone sales remain brisk, and not even the Frenchman complains about our patio soundtrack—a phenomenon that we attribute to the profound Frenchiness of Echo & the Bunnymen. Well then, how about the Smiths? Can a brood of pasty, sun-burned Christians from Nebraska really stand there ordering their triple-decker Rocky Road and Bubble Gum ziggurats without once doing a double take at colossally gay lyrics like You can pin and mount me like a butterfly? Yes, it turns out they can. We sell as much ice cream as ever, and we seem to get even busier when we up the ante with Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five. How can this be? How can someone listen to these unflinching narratives of inner-city despair and still want sprinkles on

Reviews for X Saves the World

[kristenn_43 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Pieces like this drive my Gen-Y boyfriend crazy, but I enjoyed it. The author is five years older than I am, but from the same music/fashion subculture. So it's mostly fun as a nostalgia trip. The sociological analysis is more tongue in cheek. Slamming the boomers is as easy as it is common. He did make some interesting new (to me) points on the dot-com era, however, particularly in regards to the angle of whether a person who got rich overnight could really have sold out, and how that can redefine success and ambition.

[trav_14 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a book that I want to share with my friends. Gordinier does a FANTASTIC job of capturing the thoughts, discussions, issues and music that I had all throughout my school days.

Gordinier does a good job of outlining the media's fascination with the tsunami that is the Baby Boomer generation and the lurid news fix on the youngest generation, the Millennials. Sandwiched between these two spotlight hogging masses is Generation X.

If you're looking for a strong call to action to save the world and a 10 bullet-point plan for starting a movement. This book isn't it (and you're probably a Boomer anyway). If you're looking for a book to outline a strategy to get your cause noticed and bring some media attention your way. This book isn't it (and you're probably a Millennial).

This book has all those things, but presents them in a much more REAL way. Not slacker. Not dumb. Not unmotivated. But data driven; experience driven; community driven. Real.

At 179 pages, it reads like a well-informed passionate op-ed piece and not much more. And the beauty of it, is that it doesn't try to be much more. Sure there are the rants and causes that come into play late in the book, but this is all just to show what's possible and what Generation X is grappling with now, in 2009.

At a minimum, the book will have you out renting Slacker, Googling Captain Beefheart and surfing eBay for Oblique Strategy Cards.

So if you're looking for something to help you build you case or start a movement, there are probably better books out there. But if you're interested in what's happened over the past 20 years, where it's all going and who is in charge, then this short cultural history is just the thing.

[coconutmacaroon · Rating: 1 out of 5 stars]

I expected to love this book, but it was so self-indulgent and pretentious. Reading it felt like such a pointless waste of time that I returned it to the library after skimming a few chapters.

[justjill_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

From Doc Martens and Nirvana to YouTube and Stephen Colbert this book is a fun ride through the X-scape. A little nostalgic, a little hopeful, a lot fun

[jaie22 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Surprisingly good, and made me feel rather more typical/normal than I thought I was.

To quote a short passage, which in turn is Gordiner quoting activist Cameron Sinclair, "'The problem with the boomer generation,' Sinclair says, 'is they really believed in utopia. And utopia is dead.' ... 'Most people of my generation understand crisis, right?' Sinclair goes on. 'So when Al Gore comes out with *An Inconvenient Truth*, most of us, we're like, "Yeah, tell us something we don't know." We were *born with this*. We were born with AIDS. We were born with climate issues. We understand crisis. So we're pissed off, and we understand that utopia doesn't work.'"

Sigh.

Also reminds us that Obama is a Gen Xer (which had escaped me) who has "found a way to reconcile his ironic wariness with an impulse to save the world."

But I might be too full of "ironic wariness" to think he can do it.

[dmcolon · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

I expected a lot out of this book and was pretty disappointed. As an Gen Xer myself, I somehow thought this book would speak to me, but in the end the book was as self-indulgent as Gordinier claims the other generations to be. I guess I just don't want anyone praising our generational cadre -- it's part of what makes us interesting