Popular Culture Review Vol. 13, No. 2, Summer 2002 | Page 45

Baby Boomers and Generation X 41 that some people did bad things, but there was a clear explanation given for that kind of behavior: they were bad people. Wondering, I found that in Huckleberry Finn some seriously bad things — things like the possession and mistreatment of black slaves, like stealing and lying, even hke killing other people in duels — were quite often done by people who not only thought of themselves as exemplarily moral but, by any other standards I knew how to apply, actually were admirable citizens. Tom and Huck did not hve in a simple world. The world they lived in was filled with complexities and contradictions — was, in short, I was surprised to discover, in many ways quite a lot like the world I appeared to be living in myself (Morrison xxxiv). In a world where Xers have the technology to talk to anyone in the world about any topic they choose before they even reach puberty, the ability to shelter kids from reality is no longer possible; we must struggle instead to find ways to introduce them to the complexities of their situations as early as possible. In many ways Huck Finn represents Bridgers, either as the inner city kid learning to jump out of bed and hit the floor at the sound of a drive-by shooting, or the decadent upper class Manhattanite yuppie pictured in Less Than Zero, overdosing on cocaine at a glitzy party. As Morrison further describes: Although Huck complains bitterly of rules and regulations, I see him to be running from not external control but from external chaos. Nothing in society makes sense; all is in peril. Upper-class, churchgoing, elegantly housed families annihilate themselves in a psychotic feud, and Huck has to drag two of their corpses from the water — one of whom is a just-made friend, the boy Buck; he sees the public slaughter of a drunk; he hears the vicious plans of murderers on a wrecked steamboat; he spends a large portion of the book in the company of “[Pap’s] kind of people” (Twain 166) — the fraudulent, thieving Duke and King who wield brutal power over him, just as his father did. No wonder that when he is alone, whether safe in the Widow’s house or hiding from his father, he is so very frightened and frequently suicidal. (Morrison xxxiv) So who is this generation, and what do they believe? Initial writings from people like Douglas Copland portrayed this new generation as lost. Net surfing, nihilistic nipple piercers whining about McJobs. Latchkey legacies fearful of commitment. Passive and powerless, they were content, it seemed, to party on in a Wayne’s Netherworld, one with more anti-heroes such as Kurt Cobain, Dennis Rodman, the Menendez brothers. These portrayals were wrong but generally