Matthew Elmslie's Blog

The Grounding of Group 6 is a teen novel from 1983 (when GenX was aged 1-22), written by Julian F. Thompson. It was his second teen novel of nineteen.

There’s a lot that can be said about the book, but let’s stick to the premise: five basically normal kids are sent away to a boarding school. Secretly, their parents have paid the school to murder them, because they’re getting in the way of the parents’ big plans in one way or another.

The dean says this about the kids, when discussing this unusual service offered by his school: “You’ve got the dregs, of course, the ultimate bad seeds, […] Guys like Hitler, for example–they were that same type, I bet. Others of them we can teach up here. They learn. A Six-er never would. Grounding is the only way.”

So yeah.

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The Grounding of Group 6 (Julian F. Thompson). Avon Books, 1983.

https://www.encyclopedia.com/children/scholarly-magazines/thompson-julian-francis-1927

Sorry for the lack of activity on here lately. No excuse, really. I’ll try not to let it happen again. (I will probably let it happen again.)

Cubie Burke (1964) was one of the first GenXers of note in music. His family, the Burkes, had a vocal group, the Five Stairsteps. When Cubie was three years old, he began performing with them, mostly dancing. He went over big with audiences and they marketed the act around him. He even sang lead on some songs, including “New Dance Craze.” But he wasn’t that interested in singing, and had stopped performing with the Stairsteps by the time they had their big hit in 1970, “O-o-h Child”.*

Cubie’s interests lay more in dancing than singing (although he did release a single, “Down for Double”, under his own name in 1982, which was still early days for GenX in music), and he eventually had a distinguished career as a dancer, dance teacher, and choreographer. Died young, of complications from an old brain injury, in 2014. He didn’t get the hit song. But he did what he wanted to do.

*”O-o-h Child” is a notable for-GenX song itself. It’s sung from the perspective of an older person telling a younger person, presumably a small child, that things may be terrible now but, someday, they’ll be better, and we’ll live to see it.

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Platforms; Pagan Kennedy. St. Martin’s Press, 1994. Page 131.
“The Five Stairsteps and Cubie – 1968 – Our Family Portrait”. Album review on funkmysoul.gr website.
“The Five Stairsteps”. Biography on last.fm website.
“Cubie Burke Dies…”; Bill Buckley. Article on soulandjazzandfunk.com website, 2014.

In the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic, mink farms in Denmark had to destroy their stock because they might have been infected with the virus. The poor minks were buried in a mass grave… for a while. Their corpses bloated and swelled, bursting through the too-thin layer of soil above them, as though they were zombie minks risen to claim vengeance on us all. Unfortunately, no such appropriate ending to our story was forthcoming, and the minks were reburied.

Perhaps this sounds like too trivial an event to include here. A temporary problem involving some dead animals in Europe? Who cares? The significance is that, at the time, we regarded the prospect of undead minks rising from the earth to set things right as, not the logical next step, but a logical next step. “Yes, of course, this makes sense,” we thought.

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“Culled mink rise from the dead to Denmark’s horror” The Guardian, Jon Henley, Nov 25 2020

Robbie Fulks (1963) is a singer-songwriter from the eastern U.S. His music is sometimes called alt-country and he’s got a sense of humour. In 1999 he released the song “Roots Rock Weirdos”, which had a prescient portrayal of its villain, Hank.

The song is about a dead night in a small town, where the only mildly interesting thing happening was an oldies band starting their act at a local bar. Suddenly a bunch of eccentric fans of old music, attracted by the sound, swarm the place. The bartender tries to restore order, asking them what their deal is. Their leader, Hank, starts to explain, but is soon off on a megalomaniacal rant promising the conquest of all culture by him and those like him. It’s a fun song.

These weirdos are antifeminist: they want all women in fishnet stockings and bright lipstick, and Hank speaks with the kind of too-online intonation that has definitely pronounced the word “milady”. They’re white supremacist: they talk in slang they consider Black but want every band to consist of four white guys. And they want nothing less than domination for their 1950s aesthetic. They want to turn the clock back. Music should be for them, not for young people, and they’re going to make that happen for the sake of Elvis Presley, their “fat dead cracker king”. Obviously, then, they don’t even respect Elvis. Obviously, then, they’re doing this for the sake of nothing.

The song puts a ribbon on this portrayal with a suggestion of Naziism by one of Hank’s people speaking in a German accent commenting on the song’s purity. Fulks couldn’t have known he’d be predicting anything with this song, but he painted a pretty good picture of the MAGA movement, years early. Substitute Trump in for Elvis; it’s a pretty good fit.

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https://robbiefulks.com
The Very Best of Robbie Fulks (album)

This post contains a lot of things that I don’t want to go unsaid. But you’re free to skip it if you don’t think it’s interesting.

When I was a kid I once read something that referred to the Baby Boom generation, and explained what it was. I asked my father, if that’s the Baby Boom generation, what generation am I? (I was born in ’71.) He thought about it and said, “I guess you’re part of the extreme tail end of the Baby Boom.” That didn’t sound right to me, and my father didn’t even sound convinced, but I can see where he was coming from. First, both he and my mother had been alive for the end of World War II. Therefore their kids must be part of the postwar baby boom, right? Also, the Boom was the only generation anybody knew about at the time. There were Boomers, and then there were, you know, all the other people.

Skip ahead to my university years. One of the things I did in university was to get way big into Ayn Rand.* As such I read Jerome Tuccille’s book, It Usually Begins with Ayn Rand, which is about the New Right movement in the 1960s. The upshot of the book was that those people were crazy.

And this didn’t make sense to me. I knew that the hippies and leftists on campuses in the sixties were crazy. But I had thought–as an Ayn Rand type, of course I thought–that they were crazy as a result of the ideas they held. But Tuccille’s book showed me rightists, who had very different ideas, but were crazy in the same ways. Furthermore, I could look around my own campus, which had both leftists and rightists, and none of them were crazy. I mean, not really crazy. So what was going on? I couldn’t figure it out. I concluded that there must have been something in the air back then. Again, not really satisfactory.

But then, a few years later, I found Strauss and Howe’s 13th Gen in a bookstore. It caught my eye because it had cartoons and margin quotes; good job, marketers and layout artists. Eventually bought and read it, and from there went on to their first book, Generations, where they laid out their whole cycle theory in full. And it answered a lot of my questions. The students on campuses in the ’60s weren’t crazy because they were leftists or rightists; they were crazy because they were Boomers. (I am simplifying.) The students now are different because the generations are all different ages now. It made a lot of sense to me.

It still does, but: I’ve always kept one foot back out of complete immersion in the generational cycle theory. Yes, it makes sense, but lots of things that seem to make sense turn out not to be true. Yes, it seems like generations are a meaningful idea, but you can’t tell anything about anyone from what generation they are. And, yes, there seems to be a historical pattern, but how much of that is confirmation bias? So I think Strauss and Howe are on to something, but I’m open to the idea that they’re not.

When it comes to this project, I am relying on two basic, indisputable facts and one proposition that I am confident about. The facts are

It is possible to study the people born between 1961 and 1981 as a groupIt is possible to study our current time period, starting in 2001, as an era
and the proposition isIt will be interesting and worthwhile to do this.

Some more ground I want to cover here… One criticism of generational studies is that the stereotype of a generation is formed by the upper-class white people and celebrities of the generations in question. And it is a true criticism. It is a known problem. I will do my best to work against it; I’m more interested in stating facts than reinforcing stereotypes. I will try to cast my net widely. But the famous and the infamous will probably still get more coverage than the non-famous.

The birthyear range I’m using for Generation X is 1961-’81. That’s because those are the birthyears Strauss and Howe use. Other sources use 1965 as the start of the range, because they define the Boom as running from 1946-’64, because they are treating the demographic phenomenon of the postwar baby boom as the definition of the generation, and they are not looking at the generational personality. I don’t expect to change anybody’s mind about this, but anyway that’s my reason.

It should be obvious by now that whatever this all turns out to be, it’s being shaped by my personal point of view. I am aware of that, and up to a point I’m comfortable with it. It’s an experiment. But it’s also playing to my strengths. In 13th Gen**, Strauss and Howe say about GenX that while we are “…notably weak analysts and logicians, [we] are notably good diarists, good at describing [our] feelings and observations. (That’s precisely what open education taught [us] to do.)” Whether it’s true for you or other Xers I leave as an exercise for the reader. But it is at least partly true of me. And, just to be clear, my personal point of view does extend to politics.

I wrote earlier that I wasn’t going to introduce a whole lot of generational-cycle jargon here, and I’m not. I think the last thing I should mention, at least for now, is that Strauss and Howe see this era, this about-twenty-years-long period, as a Crisis era. By which they mean it’s a time of drastic societal change in which society has to come together and try to solve one big dangerous challenge, renew its institutions, and sweep away all the remains of old stuff that doesn’t work anymore. These Crisis eras happen about every eighty years; the most recent one before this was characterized by the Great Depression and World War II.

It’s been over 23 years since September 11th, 2001, and the Crisis is still going strong. These eras are usually around twenty years long, but this one is already somewhat longer and may turn out to be a lot longer. How can this be resolved? I will first note that Neil Howe, in his 2023 book The Fourth Turning Is Here, says that the Crisis started with the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. I disagree, but Howe’s timeline fits his theory better. Anyway, these are the possibilities for what’s going on:

Howe is correct, the Crisis started in 2008, and it will presumably end sometime around 2028the generational cycle theory is wrong and we shouldn’t expect any of this to fit any patternthe generational cycle theory is valid but we don’t know as much about it as we think we do and this long Crisis isn’t a problemthe generational cycle theory is valid, but something happened to break the cycle and we are now in uncharted territorythe generational cycle theory is valid, the Crisis started in 2001, it has already ended, and we are just having an unusually rocky start to the next era

We will find out together. That’s one feature of generational analysis: it’s much easier to do it in retrospect. Let everything happen, and then, twenty or thirty years later, look back at it. But I think there’s also something to be said for on-the-ground reporting.

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*That’s me. Never met a crackpot theory I didn’t like. It’s neither an interesting nor a necessary story, but, just so you know, I’m not way big into Ayn Rand anymore
**Page 77

First, I plan to put some kind of post on here about once a week. Maybe more often, but no less often. That’s the plan; we’ll see how it goes. (This isn’t this week’s.)

Second, just in case anybody was wondering, the amount of writing I put on here that has been produced by ChatGPT or any other kind of AI is now and will remain exactly zero. This will be my strictest rule and the one I will most happily obey.

Here’s how I decided to create this project. One of my correspondents e-mailed me once to ask me if I knew of any good quotes or passages by anybody in the Lost Generation, advice for the youngsters, type of thing. (The Lost Generation were born from 1883-1900. They’re the same generational type as GenX.) I had some stuff around by Groucho Marx and Cornelia Otis Skinner and others, and looked through it all, but didn’t find anything good. Fun to read, but it didn’t let you in on anything. I eventually sent him a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay which was kind of what he asked for. But the real problem was that the Lost Generation just didn’t seem to pass on advice like that.

In their GenX book, 13th Gen, Strauss and Howe have a section on the Lost generation, where they have some sidebar quotes from Lost figures about their people. I read some of those sources too: Malcolm Cowley, Randolph Bourne. And it was the same. They were very concrete and day-to-day, without any reflection or abstraction. Nothing you could really get a lot out of.

And I wondered. What have we learned ourselves, that we would want to pass along to those younger than us? (To be sure, anybody who comes to GenX looking for enlightenment deserves whatever results they get.) Despite our reputation we really have picked up a thing or two in our times, and some of us may even be still learning. Someone should collect that material. And I’m someone. The idea evolved from there, but I hope that that original core is still visible in what will come: the collected wisdom of Generation X.

Here is more information about what I’m going to be writing next.

It’s going to be nonfiction about Generation X and about these times we are in. It’ll be a blog at the start and I intend there eventually to be a book and for the two things to be largely the same but different. Like Alanis, I haven’t got it all figured out just yet.

For the purposes of this work, Generation X is everyone born in Canada or the USA from 1961 to 1981, and the era I will be focusing on starts on September 11th, 2001, and ends sometime in the future. GenXers range in age from 43 to 64 as I write this.

I’ve written before about the works of William Strauss and Neil Howe and their theory of a cycle of generations. This work will be informed by that, but not primarily about it. I will keep the generationhead lingo to a minimum and leave it out wherever I can.

I will do my best to not be restricted by preconception or stereotype. I will do my best to research conscientiously. Let the lamp affix its beam.

Every now and then there will be stuff about me. There are reasons for this. It’s intentional. But it won’t be a major ingredient in the stew.

And maybe we’ll have a little bit of fun along the way.

More to come!

Hi. Giving you a little peek behind the curtain as I wake up this site from its long winter’s nap.

I was doing pretty well updating Palace Guard for a while there. I had no idea where all the story was going, mostly, but I was having fun finding out. Then my son got sick. I don’t want to go into the details, but this was taking up a lot of my mindgrapes for a long time there, and I couldn’t focus on writing at all. He’s fine now, and after some resting time, I want to get back at it.

But I’m not going to be getting back to Palace Guard. I am going to do something else. I may eventually revisit Palace Guard; my motto when it comes to Internet Decisions is “never say never”. I’m sorry if that disappoints or frustrates you, and if so, I thank you for engaging with it enough to care in the first place.

What am I going to do instead? That will be revealed. Stay tuned! It won’t be long. I’m back at this now and I want to be serious about it.

And it’s spring!