With the mud flying between Boomers and Millennials, it's easy to overlook those little beanie-wearing guys in the middle: Generation X. And that's not fair, because they're as much to blame for this tyre fire as everybody else.

The Last Stand of Mr. America couldn't be a better example of that generation's mindset, its art and its failures. It's disaffected with a capital F, its ideas of alienation and frustration those that now pretty much form the starting point of any modern analysis of why it is you feel so bad today. And yet it views itself as impotent, as any action taken against the system being either pointless or so dramatic that it can only be described in terms of violence and hate and bodily fluids.

It's all quite angsty.

So yes, Generation X does deserve some of the hate going around because they saw everything wrong with the world and did nothing about it. And in their defence, they did feel bad about that, and they did solipsise on their hypocrisy, but then they went out and bought another video or went backpacking to support the orientalist exploitation of the non-western cultures they so lionised.

And being aware you're being a dick doesn't stop you being a dick, or at least taking really-quite-achievable steps to offset some of your dickish footprint.

The book is funny and it's consciously cool, but that disaffection - that duck-out voice of a generation - is also really, really annoying. ( )