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A Gen X view of Obama as fiction

  • 06 November 2008
When I first saw Obama on the Internet I wiped away my tears and thanked God no one was in the room. Why did I cry? Perhaps I was so bereft of optimism that the smallest amount moved me. I was hungry for hope and his words felt like cool water pouring over a parched world. One of the reasons Obama’s rhetoric sparked my attention was because of the experiences of my generation, Gen X. For some, if not all of us, world affairs affect our soul in ways we are not always aware of. This is where epic literature springs from–the connections and disconnections between the inner life and the polis. Many in my generation were born to optimistic parents who survived or instigated the social revolution of the 1960s. The disconnect between what our parents told us was possible and the ‘reality’ that blasted from the media and in our daily life was like daily shock therapy and from an early age we were immediately suspicious of anyone who told us it was a wonderful world. The possibility of nuclear winters loomed over our birth and youth. Then Reagan and Thatcher came along and there was no-one to hang our youthful hopes upon. In adolescence the Berlin Wall fell–an ecstatic, even hopeful historical event–but imagine the confusion when our left wing parents cry with joy as each brick is passed down the line. That was it. But the hard left was dead and its fans were completely, and understandably, relieved. There were no good guys and bad guys anymore. Then, as young adults, the media told us we were pathetic, apathetic, cynical, spoilt and apolitical. They branded us a whinging generation who harboured poisonous resentments and were not liable to contribute to the wider social discourse. This doesn’t make you confident your small voice will ripple through the polis with authority. Some of us marched off to University thinking that’s where the action was; only to be told that there would be no more discourse because the great ideological battles had been fought and won. History was finished. Capitalism had triumphed and there was no bit of revolutionary activity or new thought that would stop its reign. Fukuyama told us that from here on in there were only ‘events’, not history and this was confirmed by the rest of the curriculum. Everything was post: post-feminism, post-modernism, post-Marxism, as
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