Generation Hexed

Cartoonist Ted Rall has important information for you. He can explain why your twentysomething daughter got straight A’s in college and then took a job in a warehouse, packing crates.

He knows why that bright young guy at the office went surfing instead of to work--until he got fired.

He understands why Jerry Seinfeld isn’t funny to members of Generation X: “It’s nihilistic boomer humor. Jerry’s gotta be 40 at least.”

Gen-Xers (which he roughly defines as ages 23 to 37) do not relate to such frivolous, fictional nothingness on TV because the vacuum in which they actually live is too numbingly real, says Rall. And nobody seems to care. In his view, Gen-X is the most misunderstood group in America. He ought to know. He’s one of them.

But wait. We hear splish-splash and other water sounds gurgling through the phone lines. He’s either washing dishes for an hour while we chat, or he’s soaking rather noisily in a tub.

It’s the latter, Rall, 34, admits. The tub is a huge Victorian claw-footed vat. It stands in his New York condo, which is just behind Columbia University, from which Rall was once expelled for not doing any work. In fact, Rall’s whole resume typifies the Gen-X group for which his cartoons speak: a reluctance to finish school in the normal span of years, or to seek advancement in the corporate world, or to show much emotion about the things his elders, the baby boomers, often get all worked up about.

Rall purchased his apartment with proceeds from his new book, “Revenge of the Latchkey Kids” (Workman Publishing). It’s a collection of the cartoons and essays now making him famous by explaining the generation that he sees as almost, but not quite, lost.

“In my age group, it doesn’t matter whether you were born rich or poor. Either way, your father probably abandoned you, you probably owe a lot of money on student loans, there has never been a government program aimed at making your life easier, you never had decent textbooks when you were in school, baby boomers lock you out of all the good jobs, the corporate world has been downsized and plundered so that your family elders are out of work, and the media has ignored your existence totally.”

And that’s just for angry starters.

Rall’s cartoons also tackle such subjects as friendship, love, the judicial system and presidential prowess. He has been called a liberal for the way he jabs boomers who loot successful corporations while putting thousands out of work. He has been called a conservative for his almost retro stand on morals and family values. “If it were up to me and my friends, we’d bring the ‘50s back. I can’t tell you how many people I know of my age who are making the decision to have the wife stay at home and raise the kids. And how many of us think there should be laws to make divorce more difficult.”

As for President Clinton? “He’s the ultimate example of the worst traits of the baby boom generation. The self-indulgence, the smugness, the cynical exploitation of young people. Many in my generation think it atrocious that a 52-year-old guy would take advantage of an unpaid 21-year-old who was working for him.”

Satirist Stan Mack, whose work appears in such places as the Village Voice, recently said of Rall: “His attitude is so rotten, he’s well on his way to becoming a spokesperson for his generation.”

After holding dozens of jobs that he considered meaningless but necessary to support his cartooning habit, Rall is suddenly hot. His clunky line drawings and acid words mix satire, politics and sociology to capture the angst of the era to which he is attached. They are syndicated in 140 papers, and his cartoons and short essays appear in such major papers as the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. He has won the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Prize and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

So is he rich? Is he happy? Is he employed?

Are you nuts? Those are boomer goals to which most Generation Xers don’t even aspire, mostly because they believe they haven’t got a shot at them.

Rall’s high-powered cartooning credentials would lead anyone to think he’s finally struck the mother lode. But reality bites. A Rall cartoon has appeared in the New York Times for the last five weeks, he says, still splashing vigorously in his bath.

He gets $100 for each, but after the newspaper syndicate takes its cut and taxes come out, Rall winds up with $30 per cartoon. And, he says, the Washington Post pays only $10 per political cartoon--from which he nets $3.

No wonder he’s soaking at home on an ordinary weekday afternoon. He can’t afford to go out.

*

But his generation is used to dismay, he says. Its dreams were stomped on from birth. His own dad left his mother before he was 3. In fact, “the Great American Dad Disappearance began in the 1960s, and it’s been getting worse ever since. Divorce is the single most formative experience in the Generation X child’s life.”

These are the kids who came home after school to no one, with nothing constructive to do. They were the daddyless children whose most frequent fantasy featured a father who reappears.

If you are under 40, you know the profile, he says. While your dad remarried and got richer, more miserly and more remote, your mother worked harder, got poorer and more worn out. Your own educational opportunities and horizons dwindled in proportion to her poverty, Rall says.

He cites studies proving that the majority of divorced men, even those with highly paid jobs, do not continue to pay court-mandated child support. And only a minuscule number ever pay more than the court requires. Which means no money for braces, lessons, tutors, college, cars or dates. “Perhaps more disturbing than their astonishing cheapness was the revelation that they spent so little time with their kids. By the time their former tax deductions became teenagers, the vast majority of ex-fathers had stopped visiting them. And spare me the letters from you model divorced dads who got screwed in family court, adore your kids, and are denied visitation rights by your vindictive, greedy ex-wives. Like men raped by women, there aren’t enough of you in the whole country to fill a phone booth.”

Rall tried to reconcile with his own remarried father when he was 28. They had been incommunicado for years. The man sent a plane ticket, picked up his son at an Ohio airport in a brand-new Chevy Suburban, and drove to a motel for a weekend summit from which they didn’t surface for 48 hours. What happened in there?

Nothing at all. As Rall Jr. tells it, Rall Sr. mostly watched TV from morning until night. Where had he been all the years his son needed him?

“Like many American men, my father believed he had divorced me along with his wife.”

Boomers--the enemies of Generation X--had everything relatively easy when they were kids, Rall says. First and foremost, they were allowed to be kids. But in the late ‘60s, society’s notion of childhood started to change. Generation X has been “under attack ever since, at every stage of our lives.” He counts off the calamities:

* The courts started trying children as adults.

* Tough love began to spread. “If your kid is suicidal and angst-ridden, what should you do? Throw him out of the house. Send him to jail. The ‘70s, when we were coming of age, is when the suicide rate started to shoot up.”

* Draft registration began when Generation X was turning 18, at which point the drinking age was raised to 21. When Xers turned 21, the age at which they could rent a car went up to 25.

* Boomers and generations before them had gone to college without accumulating much debt, but due to Reagan budget cuts, Gen-X was the first generation to come out of college burdened by huge debt.

* “And, of course, the job market we came into was the first real wage squeeze since the Vietnam War.” The boomers, he adds, have it all--good jobs, security--”and show no signs of giving it up.”

Rall has had as many as three jobs at a time. As a trainee at a Wall Street brokerage house after he finally graduated college, he earned $10,000 a year and, to make ends meet, drove a taxi at night and did telemarketing in his spare time. “I had 35 crummy jobs in quick succession after that.”

Millions of his generation are today in that same boat.

Their elders can’t understand their “whatever” attitude, why they have no loyalty to the corporations for which they sometimes work. Rall has some answers, he thinks:

“Bosses have proved over the last 20 years that they have no loyalty left for their workers. So why should the workers have loyalty to them? No matter how hard you work, or how good you are, you can be fired at a moment’s notice, with no severance pay. In my father’s generation, people worked hard and put up with a lot of crap because they knew that something was waiting for them: a retirement plan.”

He asks, “So why make an effort? If you get fired, you can always find another bad job.”

*

Janet Clayton, Los Angeles Times vice president and editorial page editor, says of Rall: “He’s wonderfully incisive. He has a way of looking at the world that is rarely articulated in editorial cartoons. He’s both cynical and hopeful at the same time.”

But Rall’s attitude leads some mainstream editors to consider his work “too far out” for use on a regular basis. They prefer him in small doses. He has been looking for a full-time newspaper job for years now, he says, and hasn’t had a nibble. With typical pessimism, he seems to ignore the fact that most newspapers do not hire editorial cartoonists on a full-time basis.

And now, he says, something even scarier has started to happen. Employers are skipping over Generation X to hire those one generation younger. “The baby boomers’ own children are starting to grow up. And any decent jobs that are available are going to them, because the boomers want to hire people who remind them of their own kids.” It’s called generational leapfrogging.

But enough of this pathetic breast-beating. Rall has apparently marinated himself into a better mood. “Everything I’ve written until now viewed Generation X as victims . . . put upon, mistreated and ignored. Those things are true. But my next book will show how we are finally coming into our own, how we’re going to take over the country, if not the world.”