This data is credited to the Census Bureau, but presumably only the raw population numbers—the “Homeland Generation” is not, apparently, an official census designation.The choice to use it, then, fell to the people handling communications for the White House.
These people would have been presented with a number of options, none of them appealing: Generation Z. Post-millennials. Plurals. These are early and over-eager names concocted by marketers, and it is obvious. Gen X didn't know it was Gen X until it was teenaged; the first millennials were old enough to roll their eyes at the term as soon as people started using it earnestly. Coinages are deliberate. Winners are decided in retrospect. There was no need for the White House to use a distinct name, here, except to fill a blank label in a chart. Not the current administration's problem!
This was what a political operative might call an unforced error. The Homeland Generation is not just an unnecessary choice but a jarring one. Its optics are conspicuously clumsy considering that optics are the sole concern of this document. Read it from the perspective of a non-American to get the full effect: The "Homeland Generation" sounds paranoid, xenophobic, and ready to fight. It's almost like something out of speculative fiction, what a writer might call the first generation of people after some great collapse shattered the modern world into nationalist tribes. It would be very useful in this context—it would convey fear and selfishness and reversion, instantly, to use such a darkly coded word. It's the kind of name you would give to a lost generation, seeing as the "Lost Generation" is already taken. The reader would get it. (...)
The name doesn't have some clever double-meaning, and there's nothing arch about it. The Homeland Generation is a generation named in language of a terror-obsessed era that it was too young to experience acutely; a generation subjected to crushing surveillance by suddenly and unaccountably insane parents, fixated on their own pre-war-on-terror, pre-millenial childhoods. The Homeland Generation: It's what it sounds like! The first sentence of the next section in the piece, by the way, which was published in the Harvard Business Review, begins: "If you are a marketer planning the next generation of consumer products or services…"
by John Herman, The Awl | Read more:
Image: U.S. Government
