more millennials - the smackdown finally comes

Finally, someone says what I've been thinking about all the millenial praise going on right now. (Robert Landham, "Generation Slap" in Radar Online) It's those Boomers again, praising the Ys as much as they buried the Xs:

The boomers' decades-long spin campaign against Generation X has entered a new phase as they've begun to promote Millennials at our expense. Lest you think I'm paranoid, the proof of their plot to elevate the so-called "Internet generation" can be discovered by anyone who knows how to use Google. As it turns out, my generation founded the company. So, to prove my point, let's Google back in time to provide a little context.

On Monday, July 16, 1990, the largely baby boomer–run Time published a cover story called "Twentysomething." It was the one of the magazine's best-selling covers in history, and introduced Generation X—we were known as the baby busters then—to the public, largely defining how we were perceived as a generation. Those who read it will recall that the piece possessed the journalistic muster of a Dateline story on poisonous dog food imports from China. In short, "Twentysomething" was meant to alarm the public into believing they'd raised a generation of stoic nihilists who, as one interviewee stated, were destined to be America's "carpenters and janitors." The only thing preventing us from flushing America's future down the toilet was our lack of initiative. We were too slack to flush.

Reminds me of a statement by Michael Hais in the FDL Book Salon thread on Millennial Makeover (comment 197):

In our PPT presentation, Morley and I show Time and Newsweek magazine covers taken from issues ten years apart–the former when Gen-Xers were teens and the latter when Millennials were teens. In the older picture, all of the Gen-X teens were dressed in black, none were smiling, and none were looking at any of the others in the pictures. In the newer cover, all of the Millennials were dressed in bright colors, smiling, and toching one another. It surely captured the individualism and pessimism of the X’ers and the optimism and unity of the Millennials.

What a dumb statement. Those covers are STAGED images. Boomer-constructed stereotypes of the generations after theirs. It's like Reality Bites, where the footage the Xers shot the whole film is re-cut into an acerbic, nihilistic hit job on their generation. (Done, as Lanham notes, by a few sellout Gen-X traitors catering to corporate Boomer types.)