"A Little Background on Our Oft-ignored Gen X Is in Order."
A Book Review from Thaddeus McCotter
On American Greatness, Gen Xer and former Congressbum Thaddeus McCotter reviewed The Gen X Handbook for Middle Age: The Pursuit of Health, Success, and Human Fulfillment!
Like Lisa De Pasquale, the author of The Gen X Handbook for Middle Age: The Pursuit of Health, Success, and Human Fulfillment, I am a member of Gen X, though I am a bit older, having just passed the 60-year age milestone. Possessing many of the traits of my generation, I did not think I would enjoy a book written for aging Gen Xers—i.e., me.
As is her wont, Ms. De Pasquale—the author of books such as I Wish I Might and The Social Justice Warrior Handbook, among others—proved me wrong. Her book is a delight, without a bit of self-congratulatory generational hokum. (Looking at you, Baby Boomers.) I shall count the ways, but first, a little background on our oft-ignored Gen X is in order.
Having largely come of age under the Reagan era, Gen X acquired the practical, somewhat conservative political orientation that came as a result of his administration’s practical accomplishments in war and peace—including sparking a booming American economy and laying the groundwork for the emancipation of enslaved Eastern Europe and Russia, itself, from the yoke of totalitarian communism.
As a consequence, the leftist Baby Boomers loathed us almost as much as they loathed the Gipper. Unlike the self-absorbed Boomers, my Generation X was never heralded by aging “New Left” politicians, the media, or Madison Avenue as either vacuous “slackers” or greedy materialists who cared more about changing hairstyles than changing the world.
Of course, Gen X did not care about such barbs from the callow, self-indulgent hippies who wasted their salad days wallowing in sex and drugs and ushered in the malaise-riven “Me Decade” of the 1970s. We were too busy working to waste time caring about their expectations and demands. Indeed, Gen X was the first American generation to be smaller than the one that preceded it; consequently, we disrupted FDR’s pyramid scam and, ergo, were compelled to prop up the Boomers’ increasing benefits from the Social Security trust fund.
Yet, in having witnessed the Boomers incessantly trying to relive (recapture?) their youth and risibly trying to make it more meaningful than a bunch of entitled wastrels cravenly “doing their own thing” at the expense of everyone else, Gen X acquired an aversion to looking backward or even thinking of itself as a generation. Considering oneself a member of Gen X was far down the list of self-identifiers, and we did not want to emulate the Boomers, who, at the drop of a hash pipe, would saunter off on dead-end trips down memory lane to reach Alice’s Restaurant for a self-congratulatory dollop of underserved self-admiration. Our “whatever” generation exuded and lived the derisive “okay, Boomer” ethos long before it became a meme. (Heck, long before there were memes.)
Within this cultural context for the ever-practical, not particularly introspective Gen Xers, De Pasquale had to thread a tiny needle with her new book, The Gen X Handbook for Middle Age: The Pursuit of Health, Success, and Human Fulfillment. Fortunately for her fellow Gen Xers, she most definitely and entertainingly did.
Great review!!