Generation X

I fret.

I watch "House of Style" with Cindy.

The opening strains of "Hey Nineteen" make me want to get up off my sedentary ass (which can be found, increasingly, parked in front of a semi-carcinogenic VDT), and boogie.

I vaguely remember 1979. Somewhere, some deposed dictator was languishing in the jungle, dreaming of all the privileges of the technological age, B-52's and Chinese take-out, because that was the kind of decade it was shaping up to be. I am technically a member of Generation Y. the first generation in need of an oppressive religion. Still, I've been a witness to the fairly recent generational culture wars, a subject with which Michael Lee Cohen, the Harvard-educated author of The Twenty-Something American Dream, is refreshingly unconcerned.

We've all heard the stories by now. We know about "Generation Sex," about "the new" cynicism, about annoying leather kids all oozing concordance. You might as well face it. All you really want are drugs, alienation and cramped cannibal love in the unforgivable anteroom of the Fly.

Cohen acknowledges that one of the more "irritating lessons" he learned in the course of writing the book was that "contrary to my knee-jerk response, the previous efforts to define the twenty-something generation are not completely inaccurate." Fortunately, he goes to greater lengths to challenge the "them" responsible for formulating the shaky Gen-X hypothesis. He contradicts the image of twenty-somethings as "slackers" and "whiners" not with his own philosophical treatise, but with the stories of an amazingly diverse group of young people.

In a section called "Believers," Cohen interviews a group of men and women who, despite their sometimes difficult lives, have an abiding belief in a simplified version of the American Dream. They want, in Cohen's words, "the house, the car, the kids." He talks to several married couples, all living in varying degrees of contentment. He also paints an interesting portrait of Rod, a painting contractor who grew up in a "solidly middle class" home, but is having genuine problems maintaining the same quality of life his parents had.

The notion of ours as a generation with fewer opportunities for financial success than our parents is not entirely exaggerated. Their realism has become our own private neurosis. Don't say career, kids, say Weenie Barn. But The Twenty-Something American Dream contradicts the prevailing image of twenty-somethings as a generation of impoverished bohemians. Having heard "give me liberty or give me death" in many a fifth grade history class, some of us may have dreamed, however foolishly, of one day being the ones up against the wall when the revolution came.

Adam is proud to be one of the ones hiding behind the wall, dreaming of a cushy Fortune 500 job and the ultimate savory tofu. An unrepentant yuppie, Adam gives his analysis of the "Decade of Greed": "I don't think that greed is bad," he says, "Risk is bad, and the Eighties were really a misevaluation of what risk was... They were using the wrong paradigms. I don't think greed itself is bad. The maximization of value is ultimately what makes... society great."

The author also makes a conscious decision, however, to challenge the idea of the twenty-something generation as a bunch of self-indulgent white kids with chips on their shoulders. In an extreme contrast, he gives us a portrait of Anthony, a LA gang member. "It's Vietnam out here," he says of the neighborhood where he was born, but he finds himself undeniably drawn back to it. After several moves around the country, he says he has made the decision to stay. The most important quality of "Same City, Different Worlds--South Central Los Angeles" is its uncompromising look at the city's disturbing reality.

Of course, Cohen also gives us the obligatory sideshow. Flannery O'Connor has said that she doubted "whether the texture of Southern life" is more inclined to the grotesque. After reading about some of the people Cohen, a Dallas native, meets, I began to doubt O'Connor's wisdom. We get a sample of graffiti "art" from a bad poet named Dirk. We get a someone named Dale's take on the AIDS epidemic, "Basically, its a combination of a virus from a goat and a cow that creates the HIV virus." We get Suzanne, a Vaiden, Mississippi native, speaking on impending apocalypse: "I haven't seen any signs of the Antichrist. But it's kind of scary 'cause everything that happens in Revelations is happening right now. Like you can't tell the difference in the seasons."

The Twenty-Something American Dream is surprisingly compelling. Cohen's greatest asset is his willingness to let his subjects tell their own stories. He rejects the seductive dream of capturing the generation's collective consciousness. But it remains a tempting prospect. After all, who could possibly deny that universal generational ethos on the cusp of articulation in "Saturday Night Fever,' when he tells his sadly doomed dancing partner, "I'd dance wit' you, but you ain't, my dream girl or nothin.'"

Cohen's book ends with a brief section, rather blandly titled. "Observations," in which he tries to form some of his own conclusions based on his experiences. He makes a decent effort to acknowledge the complexities of his subject, but the chapter is occasionally marred by digression. We don't really need to hear any more about Americans' distrust of the federal government, or what the author dubs "democrophobia."

Cohen ends on an honest though not necessarily optimistic note, declaring. "The people in this twentysomething generation see the challenges, but they do not have a clear vision of how to overcome them." It's a fitting end. This is probably the last Generation-X book the reading public will be able to take. It's probably time to move on. After all, every generation thinks it will get to be the one to wreck the country.