The Young and the Clueless: To be young today is in itself an act of defiance. You’re the target of both the whiskey-drinking old farts and the pot-smoking middle aged farts. Some people will presume you’re an idiot because you weren’t around for WWII. Other people will presume you’re an idiot because you weren’t around for Woodstock.
Earlier this year, the conservative American Enterprise Institute held a pop culture symposium, dominated by a succession of old male Madonna-bashers. (Have any of them ever heard any other contemporary performing artist?) The panel purported to encompass a right-to-left spectrum: 50-year-old Republicans who whined that we’ve gone to hell since the golden age of movie censorship, and 40-year-old Democrats who whined that we’ve gone to hell since the golden age of Dylan.
More recently, Ken Kesey made very snide remarks about “the MTV generation” having no attention span, being somehow unable to digest a traditional narrative. If that’s the case, howcum you see the bombastically long products of Sidney Sheldon and Jackie Collins in so many campus lunchrooms?
There’s a common assumption, based on unsupported charges in Neil Postman and Jerry Mander books, that you kids today aren’t reading anything, and that the younger kids in back of you won’t even learn to read. In truth, according to the book industry’s own figures, bookstore sales boomed in the ’80s and are holding better in the ’90s recession than many other retail sectors. The big bookstore chains are granted prime mall space precisely because they do such good business. Books for children and young adults showed the most spectacular rise of all. (Total book sales might be down, if you include school and library purchases affected by government budget cuts.)
The thousands of ‘zines produced across the country, and the hundreds of spoken-word and “poetry slam” events in hip bars, prove that this is a generation more, not less, devoted to the word. Not since the ’50s beats (a much smaller minority of their era) has a generation worked so hard at documenting itself in print, with so little encouragement from its elders. Instead, the Volvo-drivin’, NPR-listenin’ English profs eagerly swap horror stories in the faculty lounge about how stupid you are because you wear different clothes than they do or because you didn’t come to college already knowing all about their favorite ’60s heroes.
Then there’s the charge made by self-styled “radicals” for 20 years now, that all college students since them are fascistic zombies. As if every college class forever must be compared to those three brief years of (mostly futile) Vietnam protests, that quickly wound down in ’71 once the Army stopped trying to draft college boys.
I’ve seen plenty of campus political activity in the last 13 years, from big marches to backstage organizing, about everything from apartheid to nuclear power to the gulf war. These were mainly people who didn’t have their own hides on the line, but who were disgusted enough to want to do something.
As opposed to being too disgusted to want to do anything. The opposite of activism isn’t pacifism, it’s defeatism. I find it in too many folks of all ages. Not voting is the exact same thing as voting for Bush. You can’t change the system by leaving it as is. That’s like stating that, as a protest against the injustice of the rain, you’re not going to fix your roof. Too many members of my own generation, the Pleasure Islanders of the early ’80s, thought they were preserving their purity by being politically chaste. Instead, they (and we) wound up getting, well, you know… (More about that later.)
