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Joe Biden Is Gone . . .
We face an American Reichstag moment. Our next president must be from a new generation
Joe Biden is gone. Thank you for your service. And now, America, it’s time to do the rest of the job and retire our gerontocracy in favor of a President X. A president born in that odd gap between the high 60s and the low 80s. Here is why an Xer president will get America out of its present mess.
First off while we are often disruptive we are not “disrupters.” We are adults. In a pinch we can tie a tie. We are moderating in the full sense of the word — both tempering of the rash fires of public opinion and go-betweens for older and younger generations who often express themselves in infantile ways. We tend to keep our genitals in our pants and though we might stray in our inter-personal relations one divorce is usually enough for us children of the 70s.
We can multitask but also believe in the merit of doing one thing very well. We tend to show up on time. We remember when Democrats and Republicans sometimes voted for the same thing.”
That said, we are far from stodgy. We launched slacking, reinvented Portland and Seattle, and threw enough grunge into the mix to make losing ties at work seem like a good idea. Unlike boomer Al Gore, we did in fact invent the internet. OK, we didn’t, like, invent it, invent it — the US military did that. But we took it out of top secret hands and made it usable for the common good. We had to. We were latch-key parented by five dull channels of television and if we hadn’t let in a little fresh air we all would have died of cultural suffocation. We are not “digital natives” but we speak the language fluently albeit with a charming accent. We also possess the fading skill to sit in a chair and pore over analogue material sometimes for hours at a time.
On social issues we have serious and sensitive chops. We made up the term “politically correct” but did so with a heavy dose of irony. We believe in all the things being PC embraces — gender and racial equality, acceptance of a multiplicity of sexualities, broad religious and cultural tolerance — but we’re not jerks about it. We don’t go around…
