Crock of Ages
Hirschorn, Michael
ON POLITICAL BOOKS Crock of Ages Would the baby boomers please stop ranting about the twentysomethings? by Michael Hirschorn 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail? Neil Howe and Bill Strauss...
...The result is a work that offers a careful and comprehensive account of the process of unification and its implications for the future of European and international politics...
...You feel the glare beating down on a barren landscape devoid of secrets or innocence...
...The JLbeach crowd is exhausted, the sand shopworn, hot, and full of debris—no place for walking barefoot...
...Thirteeners are cursed with the lowest collective self-esteem of any youth generation in living memory," Howe and Strauss write with the kind of blase self-confidence that characterizes this whole book...
...Fair point, but look who gets the royalties...
...If you guys are so concerned about being pigeonholed, why do you read this 2boomers stuff at all...
...Back at home, the gap between college-educated and non-college-educated Americans grows apace...
...The only indisputable lesson Hollywood teaches us today is that pap and violence sell...
...But 13th Gen is blind to subtleties in the culture, so eager is it to use any type of social expression to prove its point...
...Likewise, it seems indisputable that my generation came into the job market at a singularly unpropitious time, with marginal job growth outside of what Douglas Coup-land famously called the McJob sector...
...I mean, who do these people think they are...
...This new book sheds light on applying TQM in the real world of government organizations— showing how to intoduce TQM, overcome barriers to change, and make TQM a success story...
...Details magazine's David Keeps, with whom I chaired a recent panel devoted to marketing to twentysomethings, held up a sensationalist British paperback called Generation X, which devoted to the bizarre wants, needs, and habits of younger Brits—in 1962...
...32.50 Available from your bookseller, or PENN STATE PRESS University Park, PA 16802 German Unification in the European Context PETER H. MERKL Merkl provides the first in-depth analysis in English of the process and implications of German unification in its historical and international setting...
...tional terms...
...The divorce rate doubled between 1965 and 1975, and a child born in 1968 was three times as likely to suffer through a divorce than a child born in 1948...
...This image forms the thesis of Neil Howe and Bill Strauss's 13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail, the latest effort to make hay out of the putative disenfranchisement of the generation of Americans born between 1961 and 1981...
...You step on a bottle and a cop yells at you for littering...
...He enlisted the cooperation of a leading East German expert, Gert-Joachim Glaessner, to contribute a chapter on the GDR...
...The thesis, more or less, is that this generation, of which I am a part, is a group of fully ironized, badly educated, dysfunctional underachievers who nonetheless have embraced the role of cleaning up the mess older generations have left behind...
...Generationality, as such, truly gained currency only when marketers, following on the heels of early rock 'n' rollers, realized they could exploit the anti-adult leanings of cash-rich post-World War II teenagers...
...And, of course, there was Billy Idol, whose eighties band, Generation X, tried to articulate an anti-authoritarian punk gestalt for the suburban crowd...
...Neil Howe and Bill Strauss Vintage Books, $10 ? ?~W"magine arriving at a beach at the end of a I long summer of wild goings-on...
...The title of this book is an effort to fashion a buzzword out of the authors' calculation that this is the 13th generation in American history (they wrote a book last year called Generations, which casts the entire history of America in generaMichael Hirschorn is articles editor of Esquire magazine and writes a regular column called "Lost in the Funhouse...
...Howe and Strauss seem to feel that a contention is cinched if a movie, TV show, or advertisement exists that even superficially dovetails with their argument...
...While it is incontestable that the school system bottomed out just as our generation was learning its Ps and Qs, it is not, as the authors claim, a simple question of progressive ideology destroying traditional (i.e...
...And many of my Jewish friends have chosen to yoke themselves to a long religious tradition precisely to anchor their wispy urbanity in more solid spiritual foundations...
...Increasingly, it seems, blacks and whites get their news from different sources, have different interests, watch different TV shows, and listen to different music...
...he writes...
...433.0499 vorce...
...The neologism is an annoying contrivance...
...We're talkin' taste buds.'" Or, here, describing 13ers'—my—feelings about the workplace: "Like Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future II, most 13ers would be unfazed to learn that the boss who fires them 20 years from now will be a Japanese businessman wearing a thousand-dollar suit...
...they ought to call it the 13th generalization, that's all I'm going to say...
...More substantively, the ongoing immigration boom makes mincemeat of the idea of American history as a self-contained march...
...The truth is that "generationality," if I, too, may coin a phrase, has never been a particularly useful way to explain America or Americans...
...For all the efforts of older writers/marketers to sell us kids on the idea of "Generation X," our generation really does not exist as such...
...Reading this endless skein of cutesy, facile generalizations, I found myself repeatedly choking back the bile...
...With the Japanese economy in the doldrums, this scenario seems less and less likely, but then again, what facts can compete with a Bob Zemeckis movie...
...It clangs like a bungled ad line, and there's nothing we "13ers" hate more than bad marketing, you know...
...Virtually any statement by a twentysomething seems sufficient to make a sweeping generalization: "Like the young New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan, [13ers] consider themselves 'post-ideological.'" We do...
...Someone named Cogan finally has enough...
...Blacks feel they must confront the issue of Afrocentrism...
...7/8ths of this stuff has nothing to do with me...
...The sun is directly overhead and leaves no patch of shade that hasn't already been taken...
...good) pedagogy...
...Schools confidently performed their educational missions and were criticized only when they fell below prevailing standards of excellence...
...A book-long essay confected out of the vast wasteland of demographic studies, surveys, newspaper and magazine clippings, movies, music, advertising, and other ephemera, 13th Gen purports to provide what marketers like to call a "psycho-graphic" profile of the 80 million Americans born in that two-decade period...
...As the authors point out, our childhood and adolescence coincided with a striking rise in diSteven Cohen, Ronald Brand Total Quality Management in Government A PRACTICAL GUIDE FOR THE REAL WORLD By adopting Total Quality Management (TQM) strategies, business organizations are working smarter and gaining the competitive edge in the new global economy...
...AND FERNANDO HENRIQUE CARDOSO "This new book is a gem...
...So I hit him," Williams writes, "and then the principal came and put the fire out and took me to the guidance counselor...
...Exactly what effect this had is not clear, but it would not be excessive to suggest, as the authors do, that the partial breakdown of the family unit altered many of my co-generational-ists' economic welfare, not to mention our experiences of childhood, and even our "self-esteem...
...his remarks come out of specific experience rather than marketing surveys...
...Here's how: "They just rent Easy Rider and Hair videos, and hey, no problem...
...If anything, this book comes at a time of profound disenchantment with conventional media of all stripes, and at a time when mainstream Hollywood, for one, seems unable (not to June 1993/The Washington Monthly 45 mention uninterested) in contributing to some deeper understanding of its mostly youthful audience...
...And there is no intelligent way—though Howe and Strauss try their darndest—to tie together an abiding strain of Reaganism and an equally rigorous PC tendency...
...T]alk about being defined, man...
...This is a rosy history, but it is hard to overlook the roiling issues of integration in the fifties and sixties, which politicized the public school and higher-education systems well before bilingual education came along...
...When the appellation "Lost Generation" was applied to youth after World War I, it was a quasi-ironic commentary on the alienated posings of a small group of artistic elites...
...We're not talkin' brain cells here...
...176 pages cloth: $25.00 paper: $12.95 June 1993/The Washington Monthly 49...
...diplomat who made it his business to get out on the streets...
...The authors contend that as a result, 13ers no longer view their work lives as an opportunity to "find a higher calling," but rather as "a means of survival, as an opportunity to prosper, as something that doesn't mean anything but just has to get done if anybody's going to get paid...
...The conceit is that the entire work was written on a bulletin-board service, and that Williams and his friends responded via modem to "2Boomers," as Howe and Strauss call themselves on-line...
...He recounts a fourth grade class in which a classmate poured rubber cement on his model of the Acropolis and set it on fire...
...In transforming a brief period of self-serving social unrest in the sixties into a living monument to self-love, they obscure the fact that the sixties as it is conceived in the current popular imagination existed only for those lucky or rich enough to go to college...
...We would...
...Jonathan Greenwald's honest, day-by-day account of the stirrings of a restless society is political analysis taken beyond the Politburo's shadow dances...
...464 pages cloth: $65.00 paper: $18.95 MasterCard/VISA orders, call 1-800-326-9180 The New Global Economy in the Information Age Re/lections on Our Changing World MARTIN CARNOY, MANUEL CASTELLS, STEPHEN S. COHEN...
...Williams has a hopeless task, but he is the best thing about this book...
...The internal gaps between "13ers" are deep and not easily resolved by appealing to a common popular culture, which is itself becoming fractured...
...They cite examples of TQM successes in specific government agencies to reveal how the principles of TQM can be applied at all levels of government...
...And of course, there are the ever tedious Baby Boomers...
...Drawing on extensive research and their own "school of hard knocks" experience implementing TQM in a unit of the U.S...
...Luckily, Howe and Strauss allowed a younger writer, Ian Williams, to "crash" the book to offer a 13er perspective...
...All the authors make important observations about the chaotic events of the past decade, while at the same time adding to their already substantial contributions to social science" —Jeffrey Hart, Indiana University The New Global Economy in the Information Age contains interrelated essays by four leading social scientists who analyze the revolutionary technological, economic, and political changes occurring throughout the world today and show how these changes have affected the growth potential, development strategies, and interconnected-ness of nation-states...
...I can't prove them wrong on this point, but it seems reductionist, both in terms of our generation's cynicism and the older generation's supposed lack of concern for the bottom line...
...But they fail to realize that the proliferation of minority, sexual, class, race, and other particu-larist agendas has transformed us into a loose affiliation of generations, a kind of demographic Balkans...
...The notion of a generation gap is meaningless when the parents of many Generation Xers spent their teen years in Guatemala, Poland, Thailand, or 46 The Washington Monthly/June 1993 Iran, where the Baby Boom was not a significant cultural feature of the Pahlavi dynasty...
...With 13ers, that all changed...
...You look around at the disapproving faces and can't help but sense that, somehow, the entire universe is gearing up to punish you...
...expert on West German politics, Merkl was teaching at the University of Gottingen in 1990 and was able to witness this incredible transition firsthand...
...Trickier still is the authors' bald condemnation of American public schools...
...April 1993 LC 92-42281 ISBN 1-55542-539-9 $25.95 ORDER FROM Jossey-Bass Publishers 350 Sansome Street • San Francisco, CA 94104 415...
...Gays find themselves grappling with the political and social ramifications of their homosexuality...
...Delightfully, Williams and his co-crashers become increasingly dismissive of "2boomers" as our fearless duo treads deeper into its grand theory...
...It is another basic error to confuse a group of people with the media and merchandising others direct their way...
...It's a classic error of pop sociology to invest the Capital-C Culture with the wisdom of the times...
...Books of Global Importance Berlin Witness An American Diplomat's Chronicle of East Germany's Revolution G. JONATHAN GREENWALD "For those who think diplomats only read the local papers and write thumbsuckers on policy minutia, here's the antidote: a lively, insightful personal account of the roots of revolution, reported by a U.S...
...The decline of union power combined with the decrease of high-paying, blue-collar jobs has meant an almost crippling dearth of opportunity for those without specific job skills...
...If anything, most young Americans I know tend to identify themselves as members of ethnic minorities of some sort, if that's what they are, or as scions of a fading WASP culture if they are not...
...After showing how 13ers have rejected the Boomer sixties esthetic, Howe and Strauss note that "like tie-dyed Marlena Baxter, making a living selling falafel to Grateful Deadheads, or like bell-bottomed Olivia D'Abo, cast as a hippieish girl in The Wonder Years, 13ers know how to present a Boomerish front when it works to their advantage...
...Howe and Strauss pay requisite lip-service to the multicultural question...
...A leading U.S...
...I told miss stern what he did, and she said that there were things about gary Mine that I didn't know and that he was just expressing himself and that if we stop him from expressing himself then he'll only get worse...
...It is also difficult to ignore how the public education system was left to deal with issues of sex, drugs, diet, race, and class that the rest of society seemed uninterested in grappling with...
...Fewer people listen to what older folks consider rock music than at any time in recent memory...
...There is nothing particularly new about older generations treating youth as some kind of outlying faunal manifestation (Howe and Strauss are, as they remind us throughout the book, Baby Boomers...
...433.1767 • FAX 415...
...Elsewhere: "You just have to imagine"—do we really?—"a TV-glued 13er audience nodding in response to Jay Leno's line about why teenagers eat Doritos Tortilla Chips: 'Hey kids...
...It is better, I think, to blame tough economic times for our generation's—indeed, most Americans'—hard-headedness than to suggest we have some kind of moral failing...
...This failure may explain the recent profusion of independent filmmaking, small presses, and self-published magazines, which have formed a kind of American samizdat in opposition to mainstream vanilla...
...they are turning to hip-hop, hardcore rap, hippy rap, house, techno, grunge, folk, country, heavy metal, death metal, funk, and even so-called neo-lounge music...
...Richard Hell and Voidoids wrote their anthem "Blank Generation" in the mid-seventies, with the nihilistic refrain, we "can take it or leave it each time...
...What is interesting about people in their teens and twenties is what is interesting about America: our helter-skelter diversity and our consequently profound, even tragic, differences...
...Environmental Protection Agency, Steven Cohen and Ronald Brand present straightforward, practical advice on implementing TQM in government settings...
...I think this generation stuff is all bullshit...
...To be fair to Howe and Strauss, there are broader points you can make about my generation...
...Now, the same principles of TQM used in private industry are creating a quiet revolution in the public sector...
...Marc Fisher, Chief of the Bonn and Berlin Bureaus of The Washington Post 392 pages 24 illus...
...Social turmoil stayed outside the school house doors...
...In Howe and Strauss's account, "[Baby Boomer] students were expected to give 'right' answers and compete hard for grades and college admissions...
Vol. 25 • June 1993 • No. 6
