Slate’s Jack Shafer, whom I’m guessing is a Boomer, is looking for the first sign that Xers have arrived in positions of power in the media... by which he seems to mean the print media, because the rise of Xer Anderson Cooper at CNN is pretty much the first nail in the coffin of Boomers in TV news, I think. So he polled a bunch of under-40 journalists (not me, alas) about what they think will be that Boomer death knell in print:
The Simpsons should produce a heap of references in headlines, movies, music, and ads, predicts Chris Suellentrop. While cross-generational, the show's most devoted adherents are post-boomers. Suellentrop suggest such Simpsonia as the words "cromulent" and "embiggen" and variations on the phrase, "I for one welcome our new overlords."
To which the only possible reponse may be a hearty Nelson Muntz-esque "Ha-ha!"
The whole thing is great -- check it out. I particularly like the response Shafer quotes from one of his Xer poll participants -- Matt Labash, who appears to be a thirtysomething writer at The Weekly Standard -- who has this to say:
It's such an icky boomer-like exercise, obsessing over your own demise. It's understandable I suppose. By now, your health is failing and your prostate has grown to the size of a tangelo -- especially considering how you abuse yours. But we don't think that way. Not because we're younger. But because we know the Rapture is coming soon. Plus, unlike the boomers, the post-boomers aren't so generation-centric. Not since Douglas Coupland died.
Labash is right about that Rapture-coming-soon business -- we all feel it.
Anyway, as I’ve emailed Shafer to say, we’ll know Xers have arrived in positions of media power when Bill Paxton's definitive line from Aliens appears as a headline: "Game Over, Man." It's perfectly Xer: deliciously, circularly self-referential, in that it is uttered by a character clearly making reference to video games in a movie that clearly subsequently inspired the quintessential Xer genre of video games -- first-person shooters -- while also embodying the Xer ethos that might be characterized as a shrugging "WTF?"
In fact, we'll know for sure that Xers have arrived when "WTF?" appears in a headline, followed, perhaps, by a smiley. :->
Lemme know if you see clearly Xer-ish headlines in print media: Wired doesn’t count -- I’m talking The New York Times, Newsweek, National Geographic, that kind of thing. If there seems to be lots of them, perhaps I’ll start a running post to track them.
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