Decius wrote:

What do you think?

I have a rather different take on the whole thing. Willan concludes by saying

Until we can find our own vision to aspire to, maybe Borf and Andre the Giant are all we have.

We are clearly meant to identify with the emptiness the author feels, his lack of place or purpose. Or, rather, not his but "his" in the collective, generational sense. I largely agree with the facts being presented, but interpret them differently.

But I'll come back to that in a moment.

I feel like I should start by saying that I've never really grasped the notion of "generations," since it always seemed to me like people were being born an dying pretty much all the time and that this general cyclic meta-grouping was kind of arbitrary. That is to say, one's "generation" has everything to do with common philosophical themes and popular media and that it's basis in date of birth hardly regular enough as to be predictable.

Therefore, I'm going to roughly group my 28 year old self in with the 21 year old author and use pronouns like "we", "our" and "us". I'm not gen-X -- again, to the extent that I understand the meaning in the first place -- and gen-Y, as I've heard, is so indistinct and non-descript that it essentially captures the same sort of existential no man's land the author so dishearteningly expounds upon.

Further, and it may not need to be said, but I'm really only talking here about the United States, perhaps even being broad enough to include "the West" as a larger element, but certainly not the entire world. The author states

... this hailing of "American youth" displays a paradoxical lack of awareness of our generation even as it tries to pin us down. There's no such thing as "American youth" -- or British youth, come to that, these days. That's exactly what we're not -- a body, a set.

and I think his essential point is correct. There's little enough cohesion among youth of a similar age which would permit such a generalized reference to have any real meaning. I'm going to discuss this further, but one of the reasons for that, I think, is that the concept of "similar age" has itself changed lately. In ages past, 10 years difference in age was probably less of a gulf than it is today. I am certain that the day-to-day experience of college now is substantively different than when I left a mere 6 years ago. But I think this is a small part of it.

While arguing that modern youth are not "a body, a set" above, Willan does bring up the notion of collectivism and particularly the way in which the internet fosters that sort of anonymous social interaction. I don't think he's quite making incompatible statements here; he's arguing that the anonymity is what strips us of our icons -- our Ginsburgs and Kerouacs -- and establish the emptiness of our generation's social fabric.