Document Type
Article
Abstract
[First paragraph]
Over a year now since Barack Obama ascended the stage with a politics of sincerity, many progressives are beginning to suspect that our motivational speaker-in-chief may have awakened the wrong giant within. Plagued with mobs from the UFO-wing of the Aryan Nation, Obama's genial retreat from principle has occasioned a great deal of hand-wringing, but little historical introspection regarding the movements of the previous decade. Part of this absence is a problem of definition. "Generation X" by its very name marks a non-event, something without a self-generative name. To make matters worse, if Generation X were ever useful as a cultural definition, it's undoubtedly now reduced to the status of cliche. Its heroes are dead by their own hands – David Foster Wallace and Kurt Cobain – or have lapsed into obscurity like Richard Linklater and Douglas Coupland. Its central premise that disaffection can be funky has been co-opted by advertisers who would make you believe that cars can be ironic or Pepsi can be a voice of culture critique. Even now, the captains of the culture industries abandoned this mode of salesmanship: hope is primary marker of both presidents and soft drinks alike [1].
Repository Citation
Balthaser, Benjamin. "From Slacker to Revolutionary: Generation X and the Rise of the Global Justice Movement." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 10, no. 3, 2010, pp. 1–18. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol10/iss3/19