A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original review appears below. Jacob Birch is Director of Youth Ministries, Bridlewood Presbyterian Church, Toronto.
Ruskoff, Douglas, The GenX Reader, New York; Ballantine, 1994.
Once you acquaint yourself with Douglas Ruskoff s literary landscape of baboos, slackers, McJobs and cyberliterature, The GenX Reader becomes an interesting expositional anthology of what he calls, “the nightmare of a postindustrial, postmodern age.”1 That nightmare is my generation, Generation X. Born too late to have visited Camelot, too soon to have escaped disco, Generation X has often been portrayed by the boomer-dominated main stream media as a bunch of “whiners”2 and, “a bad generation.”3 To contend against this misrepresentation, Riskoff assembled a literary chorus of GenX voices, who all testify to the crowning attitude of our oft-maligned generation, survival. These voices include GenX guru Douglas Coupland, “Dazed and Confused” writer/producer/director Richard Linklater, Muslim gangsta rapper Ice Cube and, left coast rave promoter Earth Girl to name only a few of the GenX prophets found in Ruskoff’s volume.
While many decry Generation X as “the downfall of the Western World,”4 each of the pieces in The GenX Reader pulsates with what Ruskoff calls, “a testament to American ingenuity, optimism, instinct, and brilliance.”5 Despite soaring debt loads, splintering international relations, fracturing family systems, accelerating moral decline and the disintegration of Western culture, Ruskoff asserts that Generation X will survive by ingeniously rejecting it all through “a conscious effort to teach our compatriots how to remain liberated from the mind-numbing Muzak-intoned hypnotic demagoguery perpetuated so successfully on everybody else.”6 Ruskoff’s collection is nothing if it is not verbose.
Who should attend to this expletive-laden anthology of GenX cyberliterature? Anyone and everyone interested in reaching youth in North America with the gospel of Jesus Christ. A common thread throughout The GenX Reader, is the perception of spiritual need among the Baby Busters of Generation X. Richard Linklater, in a discussion with his hometown alternative magazine bOING bOING remarked, “It seems that most people have a need to transcend, to find a spiritual quality. It’s just how that gets answered. You can be a Bible thumper answering that need, or a new ager. We all find our own rituals and our own methods of answering the spiritual need.”7 The first step to answering that need, is understanding it. A good step toward understanding the spiritual hunger of today’s youth, is picking up The GenX Reader.
Endnotes
- Ruskoff, Douglas. The GenX Reader. New York: Ballantine, 1994 p.4
- Newsweek, Nov. 1993
- Atlantic, Dec. 1992
- Ruskoff, Douglas. The GenX Reader. New York: Ballantine. 1994 p.4
- ibid, p.4
- ibid, p.8
- ibid, p.49