Another Excerpt From “Pasadena 1984” - About Generation X

I was ready to quit teaching. I’d lost my enthusiasm for baby-sitting bored teenagers, trying to instill a taste for history in students whose consumption of intoxicants prevented remembering what they had for breakfast. Generation X was strikingly different from Baby Boomers. Alex P. Keaton was an epitome—as were my own children, Matt and Sandra. White kids were sullen, resentful, and conservative. They preferred alcohol to pot smoking, but they consumed whatever chemical was at hand.

Gen-X dismissed Boomer anti-war activism as a scam to avoid military service—middle class college students spouting flatulent rhetoric until the draft ended. Hedonism replaced altruism. They were half right. In the early seventies. far left politics went off the rails in silly bomb-throwing fantasies of destroying the “establishment.” In truth, self-proclaimed revolutionaries were useless, sitting on their butts polishing their dialectic while avoiding real work. All they exterminated were the mellow feelings of Woodstock: the death of peace, love and rock and roll.

Upper-class prep schools produced arrogant, entitled children. Janelle overheard a couple of female students warning against parties with Flintridge prep students as they might be drugged and raped in their spacious homes. She reported to the police and was told, “Kids from good families don’t do that. You’re thinking of Pasadena.”

Across the railroad tracks black students were angry at missing out on America’s bounty. They knew what the election of Reagan meant. It wasn’t lost on them that he started his first campaign blathering about states’ rights in Philadelphia, Mississippi, walking distance from the earthen damn where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. They perceived racism used to manipulate a willing audience, not an insensitive blunder. Pandering to KKK murderers has that effect on their targets.

A generation after the Watts Riots the gubernatorial election exposed the Bradley Effect. Former LA mayor Tom Bradley led early polling by a large margin, yet he lost, suggesting that white people lie to pollsters. Blacks remained at the bottom of the economic ladder. Last hired; first fired. The inner city was an abscess of poverty and unemployment—worst for young men. Their best economic opportunity was the burgeoning drug trade. A new version of cocaine, “crack” was cheap and easy to move. It launched mercantile wars that brought the Crips to Pasadena and created a black market that the CIA used to fund clandestine activities.

From the American Revolution until the mid-nineteen seventies, the American standard of living doubled every twenty years. No longer. Based on meager economic growth after the ’74 crash it would take one hundred and forty years to double. The top fraction of the population skimmed off the new wealth the economy generated, and Reagan’s tax cuts on the wealth made that a certainty. People of all races were left out. In the words of Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Reagan borrowed a trillion dollars and threw a party.” He actually borrowed more than two trillion dollars.

Gen-X realized that the worst was yet to come. No longer would each generation be better off than the previous one. Instead of airy hopes of making the world a better place they followed Alex P. Keaton. As the Brits say, “I’ve got mine, Jack.” After a decade of economic stagnation, selfishness made sense. The economic recovery following the end of the Vietnam war had left out ninety percent of the population.

None of the recovery of the early eighties trickled down the food chain. Personal income had not grown for a decade and would continue unchanged for decades more. Reagan’s sunny optimism covered up his devastating policies. Cutting taxes on the rich and expanding the military robbed ordinary people. Reagan continued to beat up on straw men: welfare queens and chiselers, code for undeserving black people.

Most families needed two incomes to make ends meet. The economy had undergone a secular shift from manufacturing to knowledge-based work, requiring skills that few possessed. A tiny ultra-rich minority ran everything, pitting middle class whites and blacks against each other, a zero-sum economy from hell. The War on Poverty was lost, and the war on labor had brought stagnant wages. To pay for consumption, personal debt soared. Despite twenty years of Medicare and Medicaid, millions of Americans had no access to health care. A serious illness meant bankruptcy.

Welcome to 1984.