allysonkrieger
runonsentence.com
amkrieger@hotmail.com
650 703 7109

back to portfolio

originally published on WildWeb, 6/20/99

Moment Envy
A Generation Seeks Its Defining Experience

By ALLYSON KRIEGER / I never wanted my generation’s communal moment to be the O.J. verdict (too racial), the Challenger explosion (too raw) or Princess Diana’s death (too remote). The clichéd "where were you when" just never seemed right for any of these. Instead, I always looked at the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy with a perverse kind of admiration -- as national time-stands-still events that tie a people together and, like family enduring massive tragedy, force an entire country to forget its differences. When I turned on the TV Saturday morning and heard the news about JFK Jr.’s plane, my stomach lurched. Our moment had finally come.

Those of us born just out of the '60s consciously or subconsciously yearn to relate to that pivotal, crushing decade. Vietnam, Charles Manson, Altamont, the Kennedys, race riots, Haight-Ashbury. Counterculture began, Andy Warhol founded pop art, conspiracy theories bred dissension. Americans coming of age in the '80s – Generation X, if you’ll pardon the label – long to connect with the enormity of a time when actions really meant something. A time when what you did, and what you chose not to do, could affect the world. Author Alex Garland, whose first work "The Beach" is often tagged as Gen-X’s signature novel, explained the conundrum in a 1997 Salon interview:

"I think there is a sense that the world is a completely known quantity these days. It doesn't hold a great deal of mystery .... If you were born in 1920 or 1930, you might have fulfilled that longing [for experience] by, say, joining the army. And now, post-Vietnam, joining the army for me and my peers is not really something we'd consider."

In Garland’s novel, Vietnam is symbolic. His main character, Richard, fantasizes the war. Actual danger escalates the euphoria Richard feels by perpetuating the fantasy; the more real the danger, the closer he is to experiencing the gravity that was Vietnam. "Collecting memories, or experiences," Richard writes, "was my primary goal." On Richard’s list of things necessary to reach that goal was a brush with death, inspired by Vietnam stories he’d been told, and no doubt movies like "Apocalypse Now" and "Born on the Fourth of July."

Whether it’s Vietnam, or protests, or politics, there’s a sense of need this generation has to experience a unifying, cultural moment. It’s this that leads many Gen-Xers to romanticize – no matter how misguided – recent history.

If you had to boil down the '60s to one, solitary, defining moment, what would it be? What images come to mind? Undoubtedly, it’s the assassination of John F. Kennedy. It’s the grainy film of the car easing through Dealey Plaza; it’s Jackie in her pillbox hat; it’s a 3-year-old John-John saluting his father’s coffin. For us, the experience-deprived generation, our collective conscious looks for a way to connect to those images. Call it moment envy.

For the '60s, JFK represented the zeitgeist of the era. He stood for change, liberalism, new ideas and optimism. He was irrefutably the decade’s idol. The same could be said about his son for the '90s. Instead of pursuing politics – an arena that holds much less glamour and mystique these days – JFK Jr. pursued the pinnacle of this decade's culture: a glossy, opinionated, marketing-ready media vehicle. He himself could be said to be searching for experience, by way of thrill-seeking, extreme challenges and dangerous hobbies. Both men paid for their pursuits with their lives.

Like the mystery behind Marilyn Monroe’s overdose, Princess Di’s car crash or, most aptly, his own father’s assassination, the circumstances of JFK Jr.’s death cloak the event with a fog of uncertainty that may never disperse. We have questions, we have burning needs to know: Was it pilot error? Did pure hubris let him think he could fly in the bad weather, with a leg injury, without a flight plan? Of course, the notion of what could’ve been hangs heavy in the subtext of every news story and personal account. Did we just lose our country’s next great leader?

What is clear is that the moment of national fixation and, eventually, national mourning, has made another generation part of the Kennedy’s lurid legacy. Unlike the Michael Kennedy baby-sitter scandal that made us feel like we inherited the seamy side of Camelot, JFK Jr.’s mysterious disappearance and tragic, untimely death instead connect Generation X to the '60s in a way we never able to before. It creates a tangible, tragic bond – a cord of sorrow that finally lets us grieve unified for dreams of spirit and imagination. The assassination, the salute, the curse and, more importantly, the experience – the legacy no longer belongs just to our parents. Now it belongs to us.

Do you agree that JFK Jr.’s death gives this generation an experiential link to the '60s? Does Generation X have moment envy? Tell us.

WildWeb | July 20, 1999