The Ex-Generation

Teenage riot in a public stationGonna fight and tear it up in a hypernation for you
-Sonic Youth

It is damn easy to argue that a generation is not a generation at all. Generation X–-that evil marketing buzzword of years ago—just as any further generationalizing or psychographic sheepherding is an anomaly. Of course generation X in our midst is a freak concept if we hasten to suggest that the faux demographic is totally inappropriate for our own cultural milieu noting with alacrity that gen xers here might identify say, Introvoys as our Teenage Fanclub or Romnick Sarmenta as our Ethan Hawke. A generation be it X, Y, Z or what other mutation there is, according to Douglas Coupland, is where the we pronoun stopped. It was and is in fact a negation of collectivity. Even within the psychographic blanket, the only Xers or Yers who accepted membership are just hustling the brand to commercial, pseudo-literary or cultural renown. If there is anything left to denote in all honesty the collectivity of the Xers as would the present generation is that we are all the we-missed generation: We just missed Martial Law as our American cohorts missed Vietnam. We are treading whatever grounds not so much as a matter of choice as it is by default. In the meantime, we partake with guilty tongues the feast that our predecessors have thrown us—and without political self-identification, cynicism, boredom, and stupidity ruled us like sneering overseers.

This generation, whatever it is indeed, is what its social and cultural advances represent. It being axiomatically more a by-product of technology than of economics and public health paranoia, the dotcoms, the DVDs, the Internet, the laptops, the ever upgraded mobile phones are this generation’s greatest legacy and its face just as goatees, no wave and grunge, and Winona Ryder were to every self-respecting Xer. For anything else, the Internet has taught us even that people self-identify in thousands of ways—cultural, religious, geographical, intellectual, moral–-and that we in turn connect with one another in such many ways. We have found out to our chagrin that we are armies of one and with technology and information, we are molded and twisted to new forms–-into hardware components of the colossal computer that is our world. We have become dynamos of our computerized times; old ways and old wisdom have to be forsaken, our mind disowned even. Now that books are being uploaded to PCs and mobile phones, we should start burning libraries and museums and convert the spaces in our minds into new hubs, portals and dotcoms of automation and warp speed.

Notably, however, despite the technological largesse and the information interchange, our opinions and attitudes have become even more skeptical, stupid, less-informed, and pointlessly nihilistic than that of our forebears. In our fastfood orientation, we made everything online from dating to gaming in a manner hardcore slackers can only dream of. The online gamer is the new couch potato, deep-stuck in his plastic chair melting hours away, lost in reverie battling demons and nosferatus, meeting and mating with princes and princesses in the next level. While the potatoes of yore routinely spout occasional wisdom imparted by Beavis and Butthead or by the Simpsons, the gamers give us comfort that by World War III, we will have a surfeit of steady nerves, quick reflexes and brains stewed in Counterstrike and Ragnarok. Online dating, on the other hand, serves the primordial design of giving each creature a lay since in the dating super-highway, mass murderers are friendsters just like you and me. With the Internet offering us everything, lucre and crap alike, we have regrettably chosen the latter and called it: our gift, our enlightenment.

The relative ease this generation by default lives, with the net, the gizmos, the gadgets and all that, have made it averse to complexities and hardwork. Generations, so they say, are like teenagers–-they have to rebel against something—but while the weary, the knowing and the bored-before-our-time of the nineties raged against commerce and pop sensibilities, this generation rages against, well, not having enough memory in one’s favorite device. For whatever else, this generation have already reclaimed the mainstream, installed pop culture to the apex of civilization and made crass materialism its cerebellum. The coffee-joint cliques of the French Existentialists, of the Beat poets and of the latter-day grunge-masters are now being reenacted as huddles to trade ideas on Kris Aquino, Cueshe, PBB, the bitchy people in the next table and, well, the sheer cuteness of being there sipping designer coffee. We are so enamored with easy and effortless living and its appearances that we now completely eschew grit, smarts and dirty old tricks. It is actually a simple choice to make like opting for a degree in Marie France than one in Continental Philosophy, or like celebrating Kobe Bryant’s 81 points over Detroit Pistons’s vaunted defense, or like watching Sam Milby’s dumb Valentine’s flick instead of Scorsese’s The Departed. In our superficial eyes, James Yap is the fêted husband of you-know-who and not the flat-footed, fumbling Allan Caidic pretender. In our superficial culture, kitsch is simply not rubbish.

It is a strange twist indeed that this generation, a by-product of frenetic technological advances, has turned out to be another slacker generation teetering on boredom and unprecedented apathy. Despite our post 2001 realities ( EDSA II, 9/11 ), here is still not much of political self-identification that our local politicians have to force ad infinitum imagined political and social cataclysms so as to rally the cynical and the apathetic throng into yet another people power revolution. With the political system going haywire, the fingers stuck in keyboards and controls surfing web sites and PS2 cannot just be stirred not because their owners know better but because politics does not affect them anymore. Screw the poverty statistics and anti-administration propaganda, your everyday neighborhood slum-dweller may not be eating regular meals but his Nokia mobile phone is version circa today. Our relative peace and prosperity (our rapacious political opposition should beg to disagree since in their minds our economy is perpetually worse than Afghanistan, our peace situation worse than Iraq), have exhausted the flames of constructive counter-culture and meaningful political activism and, as it turned out, the critical sensibilities of our dynamic times have been reduced to ashes with them.
As before, funny things did happen. If Nirvana, Pearl Jam and other purveyors of anti-commercial aesthetic of the grunge-era have gotten rich against their will, our information overloaded-generation has gotten dumb and uninformed. The Jesus and Mary Chains, Pixies, Sonic Youth, Jane’s Addiction, and the Alice in Chains of the previous generations are now, what, incarnated as James Blunt, Nickelback, Creed and Avril Lavigne. MTV Pilipinas has no Alternative Nation anymore; MYMP, Nina and Cueshe drenched in fake rain and fake tears occupied the primetime. Dreary teledramas with out-of-sync dialogues, insipid game shows and trashy reality shows are heavily rotated in our TV screens. Notwithstanding the accessibility of everything, the Fight Club syndrome–-the plague of dismissal that hounded everyone who had a hand in filming Chuck Palanuik’s provocative tale—is brandished like a whip abbreviating Kubrador’s stay in the block while Judy Ann’s latest caper stayed in the tills for four long weeks now. This generation, whatever it is indeed, showed that it has not spared anything at all from making things clichéd—from goatees, tattoos, Nirvana, people power to, alas, good taste—to the extent that taking it to a task is next to having social and cultural identification with Hale, Cueshe and everything crap.

And that, even more than death, is truly and totally unacceptable.