By Ehud Would

“Family Reimagined” is the perfect subtitle for this documentary on Generation X. Because it’s a complete snowjob. An obvious rewriting of history. Obvious, at least, to those who lived through it.

But you won’t see the subject set right in the pages of the sanctioned history books. Nor will you see it redressed in the pages of National Review, or Imprimis. Fact is, even in the domain of citizen journalism and opinion, Gen X is conspicuously alack for representatives to set the record straight; and as it pertains to the identity and experience of X, the other generations able simply haven’t much interest in doing so.

The documentary opens with cutaway statements from celebrities and vaguely recognizable liberals lamenting their childhoods in broken homes and under a crumbling marriage institution. Which, as far as it goes, is all accurate and apropos.

But from there, the documentarians proceed to entirely invert the matter.

It’s true that in the wake of women’s mass entry of the workforce (and corollary wage stagnation), the Pill, Abortion, No-Fault Divorce, and so called “Gay Marriage” we were impacted greatly. But in precisely the opposite way the documentarians construe it. As the narrator, Christian Slater, says, “Even if plenty of Gen Xers still feel otherwise, the majority support marriage equality.”

Em, sorry there, Slater, in 1988 — the period you’re focused on — only 23% of Americans favored, ahem, ‘marriage equality’!

Even in popular media of the time Michael J. Fox had no love for fags. Bill and Ted made liberal use of the epithet. Keanu Reeves even called the devil a fag! I mean, Xers uniformally used the terms “queer”, “fag”, “gay”, and the like, as shorthand for all things negative.

But you want to sell us on the idea that the Sodomite agenda to further deconstruct marriage was some sort of Populist movement of Gen X? Please.

Look, the whole gay marriage* agenda begins in earnest circa 1970. Gen X was in elementary school at the time. Sure, Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), as a class action, included some Xers, but they certainly weren’t a majority. Neither of the central parties to the case were Xers. And there was not a solitary Xer on the Court. But they want to pin it on us? There is some definite skullduggery afoot.

Let the reader recall that though this agenda seems like a tidal wave today, virtually no one of any generation supported it until very recently. To wit, both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama opposed gay marriage* during their tenure! Which should give you an indication of just how monumentally unpopular the thing was — that radical liberals didn’t even feel safe endorsing it publicly until the end of Obama’s second term.

Heck, as late as 2008 (and in California, of all places) when it was finally put to a vote, gay marriage* was beaten like a redheaded stepchild. 2008! In California!

So the notion that the clerisy is laying it to Gen X’s account — a generation to the Right of their parents on matters of family — is laughable.

Stranger still, they justify this narrative with reminiscence on our halcyon media influences — Leave it To Beaver, Ozzie & Harriet, Happy Days, and like shows which provided young Xers a loop reel of solvent family life against which to compare the threadbare vestiges of family into which we were born. As if these daily reminders of domestic tranquility over against its implosion somehow inspired in us a demand for further deconstruction of family. Speaking of Happy Days, these folks have jumped the friggin’ shark.

Those shows were supplementary witnesses to the intact marriages maintained by our grandparents. They provided a time capsule of the world immediately preceding us, and contrast between normative family and the broken institution we saw around us. Which only underscored the sudden fracture of our parents’ sexual revolution.

Repetitious exposure to the archetype of traditional family with mothers at home, and general domestic tranquility absent divorce, illegitimacy, miscegenation, or sodomy did not incline us toward an “expanding definition of family”, as the documentary suggests. Rather, fighting an uphill battle of despair concerning the moral collapse, we resolved to retrieve the old normalcy, as best we could. Continuing the deconstruction of the family by expansion of its definition was the absolute last thing on our minds.

The only thing which can remotely be construed in this direction concerning X is that many of us rebelled early on against the decimated family structure of our youth. If Bobby’s mother, whom he virtually never saw on account of her work and social life, after divorcing his father, insisted Bobby call her every new beau “dad”, and every new guy’s kids were supposedly Bobby’s new siblings, it denatured family to the point that Bobby resolved to see his friends more as family than his actual family. Because, from his vantage, his friends seemed less transient than the family at home. And the sort of shuffling of random kids into random houses where everyone is said to be “treated equally” did result in some of us — for a time at least — leaning toward the sociology of the gang, seeing our social cliques as more “familiar” than anyone else.

Albeit the gang-family to which many gathered was not much a matter of choice, but compulsion. And it proved at length no more substantive than the vague recombinant family structure which our parents had created at home. But it was the similarity between those models, their mutual arbitrariness and transience, which compelled us back to the only alternative — the Father Knows Best model which preceded the sexual revolution. Even if we came to it gropingly, and in very imperfect fashion, X straddled the divide in such a way as to see the old Christian Patriarchy vindicated by all impossibility of the contrary.

They also discuss Sherwood Schwartz’s consciously subversive show,The Brady Bunch. Assuming there’s no adultery or spousal abandonment in the mix, the concept of a widower marrying a divorcee and the merger of two otherwise similar families may not always be a bad thing, but setting it up as normative, or an ideal, certainly is. Fact is, by all accounts of scripture and statistics, not to mention plain horse sense, “blended families” tend to much more internecine conflict than intact mononuclear families. That much is beyond dispute. So Schwartz’s subtle attempt to blur the parameters of domestic life by depiction of the Bradys as hale and happy was a thumb on the scale pushing the embrace of things generally deleterious to family and society. If Schwartz and his ilk could convince Christian people that breaking up their families was okay because you can scotch them back together in recombinant ways without harm, it would indeed fuel the divorce epidemic as well as the proliferation of internally conflicted houses. Hence, between ‘76 and ‘80 we saw divorce become, in the words of the documentarians, “the new normal”. So it isn’t much of a stretch to say The Brady Bunch broke the American family.

The documentary in question even acknowledges this:

“TV, even though we want to beat up on it a lot, really was a leader in changing attitudes and creating tolerance for different family forms that we just totally accept as normal today. What I was seeing on TV, while I was eating my peanut butter and jelly sandwiches alone at home, was really the transformation of the American family.”=&0=&(Dalton Connelly, Gen X Yale Sociology Prof.)

So while they throw up their hands, insisting that their family programming was merely art imitating life, they conversely boast that their art was a prime catalyst for changing life.

Next they highlight the first “Pride” parade (which occurred in 1970) and construe that to mean the Gay Pride revolution was the creation of Gen X. Never mind that the oldest Xers would have been a mere five years old at the time.

Concerning the 1978 assassination of Sodomite Harvey Milk, the narrator says, “Young Gen Xers keep learning the same lesson — the pace of change is all too often, two steps forward, one step back.”

Guffaw!

No, to the extent that we paid any attention to Milk’s passing, Xers pretty uniformly said, “Just another fag for the fire”. The notion that while Gen X was playing “Smear the Queer” we popularly identified with queers is so bizarre it could only have been dreamt up in the STD-addled brain of a West Hollywood producer.

Then they segue into discussion of the first high orbit photo of earth as inspiring several globalist ditties (introduced and pushed by corporate media and schools), and the invention of “Earth Day”. Which they got some airhead actress to say was always considered X’s biggest holiday? Pahaha!

Have they forgotten X’s defining characteristic of cynicism? As the latchkey TV generation, we were distinguished as having been inured and uniquely numb to it all. Even as kids we mocked Earth Day as “one of the fake Post Office holidays”. Gen X is the least inclined to belief in the global warming scam. How much less in the case of government solutions to it? On average, Xers believe it’s all a giant grift. As studies have shown:

“When Uscinski and Parent examined how age was associated with conspiratorial thinking, they categorized the survey population by generation: The Silent Generation, Baby Boomers, Generation X, and Millennials. Gen Xers took the conspiratorial crown by far. Given what was going on in the world during their formative years, this sort of makes sense.”

~Ross Pomeroy, Conspiracy Theorists Aren’t Who You Think They Are 

Corollary to which, they further argue that it was Gen X, who, as a cohort, first embraced One-Worldism. Hang on — do they think we’ve never heard Lennon’s song, Imagine? Some of us have even read up on the World Federalist Society, to say nothing of the Fabian School and Comintern threat. We were Cold War kids, after all. Clearly, the globalist sentiment predates us. And for the most part, Gen X rejected those notions as just more hippie nonsense.

They also tell of how dazzled Gen X was by the royal wedding of Charles and Diana.

While it’s true that we have reference to it, it is only for the wall to wall coverage on every news station at the time. But it was not X who insisted it to be a defining mark of our generation. It was the media.

If anything, the solemnity with which the royal wedding was treated may have reinforced on a subconscious level, a juxtaposition to the callous disregard of the institution so prevalent in our parents’ generation.

Mostly though, we just wanted it to be over so we wouldn’t miss regularly scheduled programming.

And the sadness later professed at the royal divorce again only testified to realities which were otherwise commonly denied — that marriage is a holy institution not to be severed except upon divinely-defined grounds. Because any other stance renders the initial marriage which the world treated with tremendous sanctity and import, meaningless.

Returning to film, the narrator says of The Breakfast Club, “The Brat-Pack gives us a new image of what a family can be.”

Harkening back to what we said about X’s dalliances with friends-as-family, they intimate that, in spite of our differences, proximity and shared anxieties makes us all equal, and therefore, all family. This again, is the social ethic of the gang — a notion which incidentally spawned a market for deprogramming services. Yeah, when we were kids there were actual hotlines broadcast on TV and radio for deprogramming services. Whenever kids spurned their kin, calling friends their “real family”, clergy and youth counselors were called upon to deprogram them. It was a big deal at the time; and, as we can see in productions like The Breakfast Club, encouraged by, and I’d argue, inserted into the culture, by Hollywood and shadow government. In order to redefine family so broadly as to make it mean nothing at all.

As an aside, it is interesting to note, however, that The Breakfast Club’s cumbayah ethos bridging the gap between nerds, jocks, preppies, and goths is, racially speaking, an inhouse affair. Why? Because you can really only have a story about the reconciliation of such cliques if we’re talking about Whites. Because Blacks and Browns have hardly any such eclectic divisions. Unlike Whites who aggregate into differing tastes of music, film, books, dress, and sports as varied as Wrestling and Water Polo; to say nothing of hobbies like guitar, coin collecting, or model ship building. Minorities are much more uniform. Blacks all follow the same sports — Basketball and Football, and maybe Track and Field, but little else. They almost all listen to Rap, Hip-Hop, and R&B. They have no equivalent sub-cultures to Whites. Except in the odd case of one of them habituated to White culture through abduction-adoption, or byway of a single White mother raising her little mulatto indiscretion in a “nice neighborhood”.

Nonetheless, they wouldn’t be able to remake this film today without diversifying it. That is, making it less White. Which, on account of all the reasons mentioned above, would only detract from its plausibility, and add to its unease; thereby rendering the reload inferior to the original — a conundrum Hollyweird is yet to figure out. Diversity ruins reboots. In no small part because, according to liberal orthodoxy, cross-racial reconciliation always means endless justified violence on Whites and our ultimate erasure. Which turns even comedies into nothing but ethnic revenge fantasies.

From there they stumble into the AIDS epidemic, pondering the risk vectors — “Haitian refugees, heavy drug users, hemophiliacs” — but strangely omitting the central locus of the disease among Sodomites. As if the whole thing was so mysterious. Ridiculous. We all knew it was principally a Sodomite disease from the outset. Because, even if it could be contracted by other means, it was still almost exclusive to Sodomites, and to a lesser degree, Blacks. And the correspondence between those two groups was also evident to anyone with half a brain. The fact of Black preponderance for homosexuality and bisexuality is well enough known. And the hyper-libidinousness of both groups is evident also in their elevated STDS in general.

So, much as the clerisy wish to portray it as inscrutable, these things were no mystery to any serious person in 1978 any more than now. Because AIDS was, and is still, principally a Queer — and to a slightly lesser extent — Black disease.

Slater says Jerry Falwell “shocked” us by saying AIDS was a punishment sent from God on Sodomites and others who would violate His law. Which is probably the most orthodox and vanilla Christian sentiment uttered by Falwell in his life. Yet they want you to believe this was unthinkable to Gen X even though it was completely obvious and generally taken for granted by us at the time.

And for all their shaming our reservations concerning HIV-positive people,

the CDC still admits HIV transmission does sometimes occur between people by unknown non-sexual means read more