Everyone, everyone, wants to know what's the trouble with kids. Are we stupid? Are we brilliant? Why are we shooting each other dead in our high-school halls? Why are we addicted to a cornucopia of drugs and bad television shows? Parents fret, bureaucrats commission studies, teachers strike. But, in the meantime, a flurry of Canadian magazines, such as the first issue of Calgary's Go ("Twenty-somethings everywhere grabbing life by the balls"), the Vancouver-based Realm ("Creating work you want") and, from Cranbrook, B.C., GirlsCan ("Girls can do anything!") perpetuate the ideology of the self-motivated youngster who can do or be "anything."

The content of these magazines tends to be remarkably similar. They profile athletes -- say young Nova Scotia softball pitcher Melissa Ann Robinson, who writes in her GirlsCan contribution, "I knew through practice and will I could be as good a pitcher as I wanted to be" -- or regale us with minor pop stars, and, last but not least, enthuse over entrepreneurs -- P.E.I. kayak manufacturer Peter Moszynski (Realm), X.Treme D. Tours founder Cathy Therien (Go), Miss Teen Canada International Nicole Gagnon (GirlsCan).

In fairness, each of these mags has something to offer: GirlsCan lets youngsters write their own articles on their own experiences (the saccharine tone of these amateur essays can be grating, but that's a minor quibble when compared with fare found in such magalogues as Teen People or Teen Tribute); Realm, between the rah-rah bombast, is well-written and researched, and even occasionally dares to doubt the "success-is-just-a-way-of-being" mantra; Go, well, Go is all over the place, but 100 pages of non-stop enthusiasm for the 20-something prototype who loves kickboxing, kids, nature, the planet, work, play, making money and spending money certainly provides the rest of us mere mortals with plenty of full-colour fantasies to gawk at.

And yet, it's hard to ignore what these magazines share with the bloated desire of marketing execs to paint billboards and logos on the deepest darkest crannies of our minds. The world in which we can do anything is also a world with no place for the losers or for the ironic perambulations of the disaffected. Where is the poverty-stricken dreamer in a world in which "20-somethings" everywhere are urged to grab the testicles of the American fantasy and hold on tight?

In his queer/pagan/punk zine Salivation Army, Toronto writer/artist Scott tells of a place in which, "Once and for all: There is no scene." He writes of the untrodden, unexplored, unrepresented whose pot-hole minds have yet to be paved over by the road to success. Scott's vision is of the increasingly marginalized: "Don't be afraid," he tells us. "You will know each other by scent alone." Scott longs for an uncorrupted network that cannot be colonized by marketing forces or feel-good youth magazines.

It's the cheerleader who has always been the symbol of uncorrupted teen enthusiasm. Fourteen-year-old Torontonian Claire Batler recently sent me a nine-page zine that expertly navigates the divergent territory of the pompom bearer. The Cheerleader tells the story of a young woman who makes her way to Seattle to discover her life as a riot-grrrl rock star. Her tale is fraught with all the contradictions and ironies to which those who preach an unrelenting recipe of success rarely give voice. We quickly discover that our heroine can't write songs, has never been in a band, and is struggling with her self image. She attends a punk show and ends the dreamy zine with this devastating mini-soliloquy: "I could see myself up there. I was so cool. Tossing my head up and down, singing my throat dry, my dreadlocks flying up and down like the pompom of a cheerleader, the girl I want to be."

The cheerleader all of us kids are expected to want to be. There's the trouble.