Gen X – Memphis Flyer

Greg Cravens

About Chris McCoy’s cover story, “Best of Enemies” …

Thanks for a good article. Having known Mr. Buckley and written at length about him, I can assure you that this infamous moment with Vidal was highly uncharacteristic. In fact, he had great friendships with many of the leading liberal/left-thinkers of the era: John Kenneth Galbraith, Murray Kempton, Norman Mailer, Al Lowenstein, etc.

Vidal, on the other hand, managed to alienate seemingly everyone with whom he engaged, including Mailer, Podhoretz, Truman Capote, and Robert Kennedy. I look forward to the film, but the reality is that Buckley set the standard for civil discourse for decades, but for his exchanges with Vidal.

George Shadroui

About Susan Wilson’s column, “Gen X Marks the Spot” …

Generation X is considered to be anyone born between 1962 — sometimes 1961 — and 1981.

wutisay

I’ve heard 1964 ended the baby boom. So I’ve considered myself a boomer for years. You’re messing with my claim to curmudgeonliness.

Brunetto Latini

About Bruce VanWyngarden’s column, “Master Debaters, Near and Far” …

I like the Trumpster being in the midst of the current slate of GOP presidential candidates. There’s never a dull moment with Trump’s politically unorthodox behavior and tactics he uses against the cowering blue-blood establishment — milquetoast Republicans and the in-the-Democrats’-back-pocket media.

I think there’s deep resentment of the political scum in Washington, who have been governing over the last nine years or so against the will of the majority of Americans. Trump’s ever-rising poll numbers are indicative of their angst and disgust. The more Trump rants about illegal aliens, closing our borders, Marx-Obamacare, tax rates and structures, foreign enemies, the higher his numbers.

The RNC, DNC, and media have to be scratching their heads about Trump’s poll numbers. None of their playbooks have instructions on how to deal with non-politicians like him. Especially ones worth $10 billion.

Will Trump make it to the White House? Not likely. But candidates are definitely paying close attention to Trump — his poll numbers and his tactics — and they’re taking notes. Needless to say, the next 14 months of American politics should be interesting and entertaining.

Nightcrawler

Abortion was certainly a major topic during the recent Republican debates. There were passionate denunciations of abortion made by most of the candidates. But I think much hypocrisy is shown by these “pro-life” candidates who are so concerned with protecting unborn life but who seem to lack compassion for people after they are born. The candidates would all repeal Obamacare and offer no plan to help the 50 million people who would then lack access to health care. The suffering of millions of Americans and the deaths of thousands of others each year because they lack health coverage does not seem to be a problem for them. These candidates and other conservatives look at the poor as deadbeats waiting for government handouts, when the overwhelming majority of poor people work and pay taxes. Poor people struggle, because they are paid wages a person cannot live on. Sister Joan Chittister recently said a person can be against abortion but not deserve to be called “pro-life,” because they do not care about a child after it is born. She said instead of being truly pro-life that these people are really just pro-birth. I would characterize all Republican presidential candidates as pro-birth, not pro-life.

Philip Williams

The fact that Trump can rise in the polls after supporting a single-payer heath-care system at the RNC debate ought to establish once and for all that the Republican base is driven more by animus than by any concern for policy. He can run to the left of Bernie Sanders if he wants, as long as he keeps saying mean things about women and minorities.

autoegocrat

I am a Gen Xer. I’m neither proud of that nor defensive about it. It just happens to have been when I was born. I remember a time when AIDS was called GRID. Heck, I remember when Ayds was a chocolate diet pill. I remember when Tab used to have saccharin, Madonna had talent, Bob Geldof wasn’t a knight, and rock stars didn’t brag about sobriety. I was fully present for the Iran Hostage Crisis, the energy crisis, Gulf War One and Gulf War Two: Electric Boogaloo, and the L.A. riots.

And YET, many of my contemporaries seem to think we grew up next to Beaver Cleaver with mom in the kitchen, dad smoking away in his Packard, and a kooky neighbor who called kids scamps.

What happened here? True fact: Nine out of 10 Facebookers aged 40-55 will begin at least one post with, “Back in my day … ” Back in my day what? You had to walk to the video store instead of watching Netflix? Your choices of yogurt were either strawberry or blueberry? Your cellphone was the size of a suitcase?

According to every other post on Facebook, my generation never played in our school clothes, never interrupted adults, roamed the neighborhood like packs of wolves (okay, that one has merit), minded our P’s and Q’s, always did our homework neatly and promptly, and emptied chamber pots without being asked.

Raluca Tudor | Dreamstime.com

What fresh hell is that? Is the secondhand smoke finally kicking in? Is aspartame really killing our memory? We were the first latchkey generation. Our moms weren’t home baking cakes. They were out working to afford Guess jeans and Esprit sweatshirts for us. We grew up in cities, not Mayberry. We sprayed our hair stiff with Aqua Net, wore shoulder pads that made us look like the Razorback defensive line, and snuck our parents’ Winstons and Riunite Lambrusco. We played soccer, not kick the can. Get a grip, people. We had video games. We were the first gamers! We also had VCRs (except for that one family who had Betamax) and home computers.

What has happened here? Are we that frightened of our present we need to create a past which never existed for us except in reruns we watched on cable while we stuffed our faces with pizza rolls? JUST LIKE OUR KIDS DO NOW? I get that each generation wants to play Shut Up, You’ve Got It So Good You Just Don’t Know.

You know who got to play that game? My granny who was born in the 19th century. Not even my granny. Her youngest sister, who was the one who had to carry the lantern to light the way to the outhouse for all her older siblings. My grandfather who grew up in Hot Coffee, Mississippi, during the Depression and ate so much poke he had to dip rags in coal oil and tie them around his ankles to keep the cutworms from eating him. HE could play that game. What’s the worst thing we say to our kids? Back in my day, you had to get up to change the channel? HORRORS. As a friend said, nostalgia is a big fat liar.

It’s scary out there. I think as we get older and things get weirder, we want something familiar to hang on to. Because the thing is, now we have all the weirdness shoved in our faces through E!, Twitter, and CNN. The National Enquirer is downright quaint. The Dowager Countess asked Robert if he was in his pajamas when he showed up for dinner in one of those newfangled tuxedos. And Robert couldn’t fathom getting Rose — that crazy flapper — a wireless.

It’s this idea that the good old days were really good. I don’t want to go back to no air conditioning, no birth control pill, and separate but equal. It isn’t that I want to ignore history — quite the opposite. I don’t want to look at it through gauze and a haze of Giorgio. Besides, it seems very middle-aged to go all cranky neighbor on kids these days and their hippity-hop music and their bra straps showing. Things, by the way, my generation created. I suppose that since we didn’t have the early lives we wanted, we’ve recreated them through annoying memes. We went Walter Mitty on our past.

Now, we’re not as bad as Boomers. You guys are the WORST. Apparently, you weren’t out inventing AIDS and the Internet. No, you were slamming screen doors, baking pies, collecting snails, and generally not doing anything that contributed to global warming. You were all peace and love and pot rather than Reaganomics and Enron. Get a grip. There’s an app for that. I said, THERE’S AN APP FOR THAT. NO, NOT LIKE AN APPETIZER, MOM! I kid.

But really, you guys are the worst.

Susan Wilson also writes for likethedew.com and yeahandanotherthing.com. While not Memphis natives, she and her husband Chuck Elliott have lived here long enough to know Midtown does not start at Highland.