Gen X is moving and shaking...

So, I’m putting together a list of movers and shakers of Generation X, which I’ll share soon and will continue adding to forever. Prior to last week, Anderson Cooper of CNN would not have been on the list -- I’ve always found him infuriatingly shallow, and not in that people-are-misinterpreting-GenX way, but as in actual infuriating shallowness. But last week, in his on-the-scene coverage of the devastation Katrina left in her wake, Cooper (Xer, born 1967) was a new man:

On September 1, during a live, on-air interview with a water carrier for the Bush administration, Cooper had this to say:

Excuse me, Senator, I'm sorry for interrupting. I haven't heard that, because, for the last four days, I've been seeing dead bodies in the streets here in Mississippi. And to listen to politicians thanking each other and complimenting each other, you know, I got to tell you, there are a lot of people here who are very upset, and very angry, and very frustrated.

And when they hear politicians slap -- you know, thanking one another, it just, you know, it kind of cuts them the wrong way right now, because literally there was a body on the streets of this town yesterday being eaten by rats because this woman had been laying in the street for 48 hours. And there's not enough facilities to take her up.

Now, the point really isn’t to whom Cooper was talking or even what he was so angry about -- what knocked me off my feet (I was watching this as it happened) was how dramatic and sudden the paradigm shift was: We went from "journalists" who’d drunk the Kool-Aid -- whatever the Kool-Aid of the moment was -- toeing the party line -- whoever the party was -- to, well, actual, genuine, human anger, like we haven’t seen in my memory. We’ve seen decades of bullshit from the rich and powerful go, for the most part, unchallenged, even uncommented on, by the people whose jobs it’s supposed to be to do those very things, and now, literally overnight, they’ve found their backbone. Even 9/11 didn’t have this affect. As a commentary essay on BBC News noted, "last week the complacency stopped, and the moral indignation against inadequate government began to flow..." (Jack Shafer at Slate has a nice rundown of the wakeup.)

CNN’s Miles O’Brien has also noticeably awakened from his coma -- he’s definitely a geek and may be an Xer; I haven’t been able to learn his date of birth, and I’m terrible at guessing people’s ages, but he looks like could be on the Boomer/Xer cusp.

It’s too early to say if this sudden reappearance of a vigorous watchdog press will endure to amount to anything useful, but if it does, we may look back at Katrina as the moment when Xers reached the kind of cultural maturity needed to begin really shaping the next era of American (and global) history. (Which isn’t to say that other older journalists weren’t getting plenty pissed and not letting corporate HQ shut them up; Jack Cafferty on CNN and Geraldo Rivera on Fox have been downright quivering with indignation) Anderson Cooper, we may then recognize, will have been one of the standard bearers.