That’s from Robert Lukefahr, 29, coeditor of Diversity and Division, one of a handful of new twentysomething periodicals that have sprung up to throw dirt on their elders. With a pot-smoking, draftdodging, womanizing, Michael Bolton-loving boomer guiding the nation’s moral and esthetic rudder, it’s now open season on the generation that gave us Earth shoes. “Boomers call us moral mutants,” says John Cowan, cofounder of Lead or Leave, a sort of political youth corps that pushes a twentysomething agenda. “Well, there’s the pot calling the kettle black.” Warnings about a generational rift have appeared in The Atlantic and The New York Times. Now young Americans are laying down their remote controls, flicking on their Macs and firing off angry, if occasionally self-indulgent, manifestoes to Diversity and Division and The Next Progressive in Washington and Chicago’s Pure Magazine. The journals may have a certain bridge-club-newsletter look and circulations in the four figures, but each has a singular message to boomers about today’s ills: they’re your fault, not ours. Obscure, you say’.? That’s what they said about Rolling Stone in the early 1960s.
Basically, the whippersnappers posit that the problems associated with them were created by boomers. “Drugs, the deficit, a bankrupt political system, bad schools were the legacy boomers gave us-and now they blame the victim,” says Lukefahr. But what really irks the “Nightline” guests of tomorrow is the way their elders relentlessly gloat over their own perceived social triumphs. They “gleefully shifted from sixties hedonism to eighties materialism,” writes David Kurapka in The Next Progressive. “Somewhere on the way to the promised land, they stopped off to call their real estate agent and take a Jacuzzi.”
Clearly, the boomers’ most vulnerable flank is their terrifying contribution to American pop culture: folk rock, Twinkies, sitcoms, the men’s movement (strangely, few twentysomethings noted that the great opiate of the young masses, MTV, was a boomer brainchild). “Any generation that believes Hunter S. Thompson was a sage … or that Andy Warhol and his ‘Exploding Plastic Inevitables’ were artists,” rages Diversity and Division, “has little room to criticize our trash culture.”
Then again, maybe this whole brawl is the result of too many bored, overeducated hand-wringers–of all ages–desperately trying to pin today’s problems on somebody else. After all, nobody really complained about twentysomethings until a newsweekly in need of a cover story invented the term. But perhaps the best evidence that the whole controversy is pretty artificial is Douglas Coupland, author of the seminal twentysomething novel “Generation X.” “I’m 31,” he said when asked for his expert opinion on the matter. “So I’d really like to stay out of it.”
