X-ed Out

Or, why Cuomo can't exist without Mamdani and vice-versa.

There’s no better antidote for a certain notion of American exceptionalism than the passing lane of your local highway, out among the plodding confederacy of white-knuckled dawdlers grimly clogging the nation’s arteries because they prefer a left-hand view. It’s a perverse notion of liberty that allows for the mindless crippling of a thoroughfare by the literal slowest among us, provided it fucks things up equally for everyone.

Which brings us to the limping geriatric platoon that refuses to unshackle the rest of America from its wheezing shuffle into the abyss. The Boomers have been taking their share of shots lately, so let me concede up front that the current state of affairs is not entirely their fault; we must also, of course, blame the Millennials.

Stick with me. It’s always worth remembering that fully half of Boomers were too young to meaningfully partake in either their generation’s defining revolutions, Civil Rights and Free Love, or its defining catastrophe of Vietnam. Which means that nearly 40 million people ingested the era’s relentless self-mythologizing almost entirely through pop culture, even though in reality that cohort’s most significant formative trauma, besides the eye-rape of ‘80s fashion, was nothing worse than the Carter-era doldrums—the hangover from a party they weren't even there for. Though to be fair, considering these last-half Boomers were the first to grow up in front of color television, their delusions of grandeur certainly must have seemed so real.

Fast forward a couple decades and these self-absorbed fabulists became the first helicopter parents, constantly looming over their understandably anxious, overweening brood: Millennials. Millennials are the Boomer’s prodigal children, who, as in the parable, demanded their inheritance early, squandered it, then strolled home to cries of joy and open arms. The older generation always finds Millennials to be adorable and very clever—recall everyone from Kissinger to George Schultz to Betsy DeVos chucking bricks of money at Elizabeth Holmes and Theranos, or all the early Boomer investment in everything from Facebook to Glossier to Sweetgreen—but still think it’s a bit hasty for them to be out in the world making big, consequential decisions; if it’s all the same to everyone, they’re just going to stick around for another minute, keep an eye on things, make sure everything’s running as it should, everyone’s getting their fair shake.

Overlooked in the parable of the Prodigal Son, of course, is the responsible eldest child, the one who simply shrugged at all the family drama and went dutifully to work, otherwise known as Gen X. And at the risk of what the Brits call “special pleading,” seeing how I fit squarely in that generation’s aloof rear guard, isn’t a Gen X sensibility exactly what the culture needs more of at the moment?

If you want to understand what the rest of us have been forced to watch, interminably, play out on the national stage, in corporate boardrooms, and over the airwaves for the last decade, it’s the original helicopter parents refusing to stop hovering even as their insecure, entitled progeny walk blithely into the largest wealth transfer in human history, complaining all the while that nobody’s had it worse.

Gen X’s great collective eye-roll has always been a way of saying, everyone calm down, nothing is worth getting this worked up over. Don’t be a dick; live and let live. Plus, for all the sins of mall culture and Koons-ian ironic pop-art, at least Gen X took the notion of integrity seriously—a term neither late-stage Boomers nor Millennials even have in their vernacular. Millennials were so naturally adept at selling out because their establishment Boomer parents, the ones who fueled all that ‘80s greed and excess, taught them from the beginning that selling out is the point. It’s Gen X’s particular hell that we find ourselves trapped in a largely plastic culture where everyone’s a spokesperson because everything’s for sale.

And, not to get too grandiose about it, but our famously fleeting, irreplicable analog-childhood-digital-adulthood existence makes Gen X the Zeitgeist generation of a truly pivotal era in human history, the medium between the before and after, able to see backwards and forwards between radically different worlds. But instead of being valued for that Janus perspective, we’re instead imprisoned in a grotesque hall of mirrors not of our making, a grumpy Cassandra sidelined amid the constant preening and histrionic bickering between history’s most self-aggrandizing generation and its most coddled.

So, you know, whatever man.