The epithet "Generation X" stuck like unshakable toilet tissue to the shoe of every young person in America.... Along with the insulting moniker--their "X" is this century's scarlet letter--went the awful image, hardening fast on them like lacquer. They were shiftless, indifferent, and, if their attention span lasted long enough for them to start something they could give up on, quitters. They only watched mindless TV or MTV, which was separated out as a kind of refined degree of mindlessness, listened to nihilistic and unharmonious rock and rap music, disavowed solid American values and conventions (like marriage, religion, and, you know, employment)....

In January 1993, I wrote an Op-Ed for the L.A. Times ... saying that the personification of Generation X was a deliberate propaganda campaign intended to make young people seem less desirable to employers, thus preserving jobs and career options for the Boomers, and slowing the next generation's succession to power. I implored young readers not to be distracted by the attempt to categorize them, and not to fall into the easy and understandable trap of becoming cynical.

-- by Bob Guccione, Jr., Editor and Publisher of SPIN Magazine . Reprinted with permission from the foreword to Marketing to Generation X by Karen Ritchie, New York : The Free Press, 1995.