Recently in touchstones Category

"If I'm going to die," Steve Irwin said in a 2002 interview, according to the Associated Press, "at least I want it filmed."

Of course he did. He was a Generation Xer. That's what we do: wild, crazy, dangerous shit, and if possible, we get a friend of ours to videotape it. Irwin was lucky enough to make a career of it -- his only true Xer peer may have been crazy skateboarder Tony Hawk (the more ordinary crossgenerational craziness of NASCAR racing and pro football don't count), or maybe that professional jackass Johnny Knoxville -- which only means he was at the far end of the risk-taking, entrepreneurial bell curve of Xer behavior.

Geeks of all generations are getting in on the video action now, throwing up video tributes to Irwin that are proliferating at an astonishing rate -- and getting in on the entrepreneurial action, too -- but of course it would come down to an Xer, Chicago Tribune Internet and TV critic Steve Johnson, to be the first to question the instant deification of Irwin. We Xers are nothing if not our own harshest critics. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

This continues to make me cry:

Is it easy being a shill, Kermit? Do you lie awake in the dead of night afeared that that rattling outside the window is the ghost of Jim Henson come to eat your soul? Or is your soul long withered and shriveled?

I ask merely for information.

Meanwhile, I choose to remember Kermit and the Muppets as they were -- over at FlickFilosopher.com, I'm giving away four DVDs of Muppet movies (you have to be a micropatron to enter) -- or as their spirit lives on in the hearts and minds of geeks. Like the 12-part (and counting) Seremuppety by walkerboh, over at deviantArt, which is, naturally, Joss Whedon’s Serenity as told in the Muppet style:

Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3 / Part 4 / Part 5 / Part 6 / Part 7 / Part 8 / Part 9 / Part 10 / Part 11 / Part 12

Cuz it's not easy being Mal...

Twenty years today since the space shuttle Challenger disaster. Is there another particular cloud formation -- aside from perhaps any given mushroom cloud -- that resonates so horribly as this one?

I’m hardly the first to note that this event is the single defining moment for Generation X: “The world stopped when the Challenger exploded,” says Bryant Adkins at In the 80s (though this appears in an essay that requests we not call him an Xer but a “child of the 80s” -- as if that would change anything that we all are). Everything2.com has a section called Where we you when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded? -- and while the anecdotes are all spectacularly banal (“I was out shoveling the driveway, and when I came back in, Mom tells me, ‘Something happened to the space shuttle’”), I find myself nodding and recognizing myself in them.

My story: I was a junior in high school, but for some reason school was closed for the day so I was home. I watched the launch and then either turned the TV off immediately after the blast-off or the network cut away before that fateful throttle up, and when I came back a little bit later to watch a movie (geez, and I remember this, too: it was a Marx Brothers movie I’d borrowed from the library), I learned what happened and was riveted to the tube for the rest of the day.

I remember when I got bitten by the video-game bug. It was one glorious Christmas morning late in the 1970s, and Santa had left a Coleco Telstar Arcade under the tree. It had three games and they were all basically Pong. And oh my god was it a revelation, that you could control things on your TV. I was hooked.

In high school, my honor-society pals and I traded hints and tips for all the Infocom text-adventure games, passing notes about how to get the Babelfish. (I’d have gotten in on the sharing of the actual games, too, except I was already on the wrong-but-better side of a technology gulf: Today, I’m a Mac devotee while everyone else is on PCs, and then, I had a Commodore 64 while everyone else had Atari 2600s.)

I never really got into the first-person-shooter craze, but I was in a definite minority. At the now sadly defunct Internet magazine I used to work at -- *cough* Yahoo! Internet Life *cough* -- slow afternoons around the office were filled with the shouts of the geek editors shooting up their fellow geek editors over the office network.

Today, we still revere the lowly Pong, we can download Zork for free, and soon, we’ll be able to snack on Doom, The Movie, starring Karl "Eomer" Urban and The Rock. Of course.

Social, economic, health, and environmental disasters on all scales, produced by human hands. The 1980s were so crammed with ‘em that even in this double-size Touchstones, I still didn’t have room for:

o 1980: U.S. boycotts Summer Olympics in Moscow
o 1981: attempted assassination of the Pope
o 1982: Tylenol product-tampering scare
o 1983: Marine barracks bombing in Beirut
o 1984: Bhopal chemical disaster
o 1984: Soviets boycott Summer Olympics in Los Angeles
o 1985: Crack cocaine appears
o 1987: October stock-market crash
o 1988: medical waste washes ashore on Long Island
o 1989: Exxon Valdez oil spill in Alaska

They say that we Generation Xers have no sense of the future, that we live in the now without regard for consequences -- famously, more of us believe that UFOs are alien transportation devices than believe that Social Security will be there for us when we get old. (And that was before the current administration started futzing with it... which only confirmed our fears.) But even if that UFO tidbit is not true, it rings true, which is why the meme spread so successfully.

Xers generally are not hopeful for the future, but is it any wonder, when the years of our adolescence or very young adulthood were spent watching the world seemingly fall apart through a wide variety of stupid human failures, from sheer incompetence (drunk ship captain runs oil tanker aground) to outright maliciousness (Tylenol scare)? One man with a gun or a bomb, one tiny O ring, one little plan to sell weapons to the enemy... This is why we make and consume stuff like The Matrix and Lost: Of course planes crash. Of course the machines are going to enslave us. What else should we expect from them?

I don't remember the first two events, though older Xers will. But I was old enough -- and already cynical enough -- in 1981 that my first thought upon hearing that the Americans being held in Iran had been released was: Well, isn’t that awfully suspicious, all those hostages getting set free at the very moment of Ronald Reagan’s presidential inauguration.

Even if it weren’t so damn easy to be cynical about the political situation today, I think we’d still be seeing the explosion of political bloggers dissecting civic bullshit -- people like Duncan Black at Eschaton and John Aravosis at AMERICAblog, the writings of both of whom I devour daily. We were primed for it. This is how you create a generation that has no confidence in its leaders: you make sure their first lessons in social science include an American war of aggression failing miserable, a president resigning in what should be shame giving a victory salute as he scurries from the White House, and another president flaunting his dirty trickery from the very moment of his installation.