In Defense of American Youth

“You don’t know who America fought in the War of 1812? How could you not know that??” My brother says this rather dramatically to our youngest sister, still in high school, who is impeccably dressed and a bit shy around his domineering personality. She failed to answer the Cranium question correctly. “You are so dumb.” After watching her shift in her seat to hide her embarrassment, I shoot him a disapproving glance and shake my head, offering her a reassuring smile. I know what he is thinking. Typical oblivious teenager. All she cares about is her clothes, purses, shoes. She knows nothing about the world. My brother actually takes pleasure in vocalizing his opinion of her, trying to rouse her to a fight with his performance of disgust. He usually concludes by asking her, as if to prove his own hunches correct, “So what the hell are you going to do with your life anyway, be a fashion designer?”

I scold my brother in private for his insensitivity, for my opinion is that even if she does have some “misplaced priorities” (like those resulting in academic probation, for example), his critique-by-insult approach is less than inspiring. But the thing is, my brother doesn’t even know my sister. He has no idea what she does know, what she cares about and thinks about. He has no idea that she asks me, sensibly considered the safer resource, questions like, “If conservative republicans believe in smaller government and liberal democrats believe in bigger government, why are the republicans the ones against gays and abortion?” And, amidst the reports of the growing war bill, “Wait, isn’t Bush supposed to be a fiscal conservative or whatever?” And my personal favorite, when she is frustrated with her caddy friends, “I know this is all stupid drama but I am still in high school so I should be allowed to complain about it because I’m really mad.”

My sympathies thus unmasked, it should be no surprise that I find the angry critiques of today’s youth unnerving and misguided. Our young generation has become the scapegoats for cultural critics everywhere. In Europe, their backpacking behavior and misguided sense of history results in their being labeled over-privileged, ignorant fools. In the Middle East, they are seen as indulgent libertines, a threat to religious and cultural purity. In their own country, they are chastised for their apathy, mocked for their naïveté and condemned for their partying. We want to blame them for the seeming breakdown of traditional values and sociability, for the slowed progression of our national output, even for the spread of disease and crime and violence.
It is no secret that our generation has very real faults. But we as a society need to see these shortcomings for what they are: largely, a result of our own actions and of the cultural shifts that have taken place. Generation Y has had to deal with a myriad of cultural changes taking root faster than any other string of changes in history, huge and unexpected changes from which people (yea, adults even) across the world are still reeling. American youth possess the financial status to enjoy the technological changes and the social status to enjoy the cultural changes, and are the most visible in the global media of television and film. Therefore, they are essentially the guinea pigs of a massive global experiment: what happens when human beings have large amounts of wealth, small amounts of family and community, virtually unlimited technological resources and interfaces to mediate contact with one another, and perhaps most importantly, when they have their myths and social structures theorized out of existence? It is no wonder many are crippled by confusion.

In contrast to the problems facing today’s youth, the identity crisis of the sixties was more straight-forward, more contained; it was essentially culture and counter-culture, a young generation rebelling against its parents, literally and figuratively. The parent was conformity, strict cultural and sexual mores, and the self-righteous yet previously successful foreign policy of the past. The child was truly individualistic, questioning boundaries of sex, race, and class, and in this new inclusionary ethos, skeptical of violence and war.

This generation, then, took to the streets against a well-defined enemy. Racism was codified in the law, Vietnam was a very obvious disaster, and the suburbs were a rather disturbing reflection of singularity. Moreover, their grassroots efforts, such as the civil rights movements and the war protests, were actually successful in effecting change. These massive popular successes lent credibility to the democratic process and fueled a confidence and unity that sustained that activism throughout the decade. This generation, instead of undermining American society, was in many ways the full realization of it. That is, the youth of the sixties actually brought to life ideals like the Declaration of equal creation and mutual tolerance, the rugged individualism and American dream. The America of our imaginations, in all its diversity and potential, was shaken out of its rhetorical mold.

The new generation, on the other hand, must deal with a world that is much more fractured, in terms of both its politics and its identity. On a philosophical level, the unifying myths of America, freedom, and progress have been destroyed. Revisionist history took the heroics out of the establishment of the nation and its security, exposing it for the complicated combination of evils and ideals that it was and is. Perhaps following Jacques Derrida’s lead, who exposed all of our ideas about ourselves and our world as our own creations, we have taken apart traditional identity categories such as gender, race, and nationality to make room for hybridity and sexual freedom and exploration. But in doing so, we have left a complicated maze of categorical terms in which many find themselves overwhelmed and lost. Even ideas about American potential, class mobility, and the American dream broke down as the cycle of poverty worsened and children struggled more, not less, than their parents. Instead of a clear-cut, evil enemy army, we now fight an ambiguous idea of terror, a loose brand of insurgents living amongst our friends in the hostile land. Deconstructing all of our stabilizing ideology is at once infinitely liberating and infinitely overwhelming.

The radical changes that the new generation faces are material as well as theoretical of course. Technological innovation is increasing exponentially, rapidly changing the way people live, and importantly, how they communicate. Because of the internet, cell phones, video messaging and the like, American youth have never had to make a faulty friendship work with their neighbor, because they have full communication and unlimited access to someone cooler that lives twenty minutes away. Things like chat rooms encourage anonymity and preclude accountability. One can have the benefits of companionship, like conversation and entertainment, without commitment or sincerity. There is actually less unity in these interfaces, though they profess more. Furthermore, our wealth has increased our mobility; we travel all over the world and encourage people to live in different cities for short periods of time in the interest of self-expansion. But these short stints have led to the breakdown of communities, enabling people to slip between the social cracks into depression, loneliness, and recklessness. Weakening our ties to each other unsurprisingly results in an increase of apathy. In terms of unity and activism, it is much harder to organize a protest amongst people one has never even seen. These are consequences that we did not foresee when we thought we were positively improving the lines of communication between people.

The final charge I have room to address is the laziness that seems to plague young people, and their concern with the trappings of pop culture instead of their education, their jobs, or developing skills. But we must realize that our own wealth and policies have created the conditions for this laziness to grow. We have an immigration policy that allows millions of foreign immigrants to suffer in the most menial jobs while our young people have enough of their parents’ money to avoid the job market all together. There is an abundant exploitable labor force that actually is doing the hard work of our young people, a fact that is crippling them daily when they are asked to do simple things like change a tire or clean a bathroom. Many young people never even had to clean their own rooms because their parents hired someone for that. Parents followed their natural inclinations to share their wealth with their children, and created a quality of life and sense of entitlement unheard of before. Can we really expect those youth to reject that generous hand in the name of hard work?

Moreover, our own media, run by the adults, not the children, generates countless images of opulent people and almost none of the work it takes to generate that wealth, misleading a generation of young people who, for various reasons not limited to broken families and single parent homes, were essentially raised by this very media. And if that wealth and financial freedom is the visible and desirable standard, even young people from outside of that class develop those values by association. I recently heard a young friend of mine from a middle class background tell her mother that she refused to use a payphone because it would make her look poor.

All of this confusion no doubt leads to distractions and fantasies. Our young generation is mesmerized by the displays of wealth they see in magazines, and having no practical idea about how to achieve that wealth, they find entertainment value. When technology brings everything to their fingertips with the click of a mouse, its no wonder they are not accustomed to walking to the store. And when we have bred such laziness and created such absurd conveniences, can we blame them for not knowing history? This is the first generation coming of age in a post-modern, post-feminism, “global” world and dealing with the consequences of new forms of communication and relationships. If they are confused and seek escape in the form of parties, they do so with the historical guidance of the drug culture of the sixties. They are playing with and learning their toys, still new and symbolic to them, but they are reaching out. They are trying to understand their ethnic identities, sexual identities, and political ideals amidst far more choices than were ever available before, and this understandably takes more time, but they are trying. They will recover; the world will demand it. They must certainly take responsibility for their faults, but we must take some responsibility too.

I heard Catholics from Detroit are pretty cool

I decided that I had to blog this, to record it, if only because I can't get it out of my head--Jack White is the Johnny Depp of rock. Of music in general, if you will. That is, if Johnny was a musician, he would look and sound like Jack White, doing everything himself, mixing genres and style, and filling his lyrics with both captivating arrogance and disarming humility. If Jack was an actor, he would pick roles that are brooding and then crazy and then downright fun as hell, and make them all his own with an array of interdisciplinary influences from characters both classic and obscure. And, as Michele so wonderfully added, if Jack dies a sudden and tragic death and becomes the subject of a film. . . you know who would play him.

As Jack white walked out on to his hyper-stylized stage at Red Rocks--red carpet, white palms, black trim--wearing a flared black jacket over red pants, and a Victorian style top-hat, he looked like a hipster version of Johnny's new Willy Wonka. And as he danced around, song after song, sometimes singing, sometimes wimpering, sometimes screeching, I realized that, like Johnny among the Hollywood crew, there is no one hotter and more interesting to watch in front of a microphone.

Although there are many similarities that I could list, such as their working-class roots, their interest in religious and cultural mythology, and their affinity for European models, there is one in particular that fascinates me, and particularly in Jack White: they both exude that aura of passionate, solitary, wild, tortured artist-hero, yet they are both unquestionably devoted to their women. Johnny has run away to France with his lover and is a doting father to his children (one of whom is named Jack, by the way). And although Jack is apparently married to some British model, and had a brief relationship with "Renee" (can I say tragic mistake? eew), he is very clearly, deliberately, devoted to Meg White.

And for the most romantic of reasons. It's no secret that Meg is as good a drummer as any marginally experienced percussionist. But if you ask Jack, her sticks are the only one to back up his songs for the White Stripes. Her style is the only one appropriate for his music. For him, her lack of skill becomes "an innocence and childlike quality" that helps anchor and define their band. And he'll do whatever it takes to make her shine. On stage, he whispers instructions to her between songs. He writes a few for her to sing in her quivering, slightly nervous voice. At times, she can't keep up with his furious strumming, and he will look up, slow down, adjust to her incompetency, and pretend like he mistook the tempo change. You can almost hear him coaching her--don't worry, Meg, your effortless style is exactly what I need here. You're perfect. He gazes at her with such affection, and not without cause. Which brings me to my other point: Meg is as hot as he is behind her drum kit. She bounces with every step on her bass drum, her long hair flowing and her red scarf giving her a classic movie-star aesthetic. Is it a coincidence that Jack is obsessed with that aesthetic in Rita Hayworth? We'll never know.

All I know is that somehow Jack is right to insist on playing with Meg, and right about her style and particular kind of "skill." She's awesome in her innocent, childlike way, and the perfect compliment to his self-assured dominance. It's quite a sight to see.

On Batman (Begins)

Superheroes represent (I think) our fantasies of possibility, our strengths and virtues magnified by fictional means. Spiderman was bitten by a spider. The Fantastic Four were exposed to some cosmic radiation while in space, and Superman was born on the planet Krypton, sent to earth as his home planet exploded. The Incredibles, a recent incarnation of the superhero, are essentially a separate race, born only from Incredible parents and very different from their "normal" counterparts. These other heroes are not meant to be thought of as human--why?

Perhaps we create supernatural causes for superheroes' powers because we can't expect from ourselves the kind of powers and virtues that our superheroes possess. Admittedly, their superhuman powers are beyond our capacity to even hope for. Their virtues, however, namely their relentless devotion to justice and the public good, even at the expense of their personal lives, and which is more often than not anonymous, is within the realm of human possibility, though most often not within the realm of actual human desire. As such, this kind of extreme virtue (i.e. selflessness) is something we may safely tuck away as something "superhuman," something fictional, something heroic. And we can thus escape this way from real responsibility.

I'd like to argue, though, that Batman is a somewhat unique superhero, in that nothing supernatural or other-worldly happens to him, and that therefore he poses a bit of a challenge to us rather than a means for escape and admiration. (I should add that I see him as unique within the superhero/comic book genre, one I admittedly know little about but I think my argument still works, and not necessarily within the much broader category of cultural icon human heroes, like Zorro, the Lone Ranger, or John Wayne.)

Batman Begins tells the story of Bruce Wayne before he was Batman, of the tragedies and fears and resources that inspire him and enable him to become, or rather to fashion himself into Batman. He does not get bitten by any bats--he only has to conquer his fear of them to exploit them as an aesthetic opportunity. He does not find himself a victim of radiation or cell-altering electricity or venom for his superpowers--he instead studies a powerful and ancient form of martial art in what seems like Mongolia and becomes some sort of ninja. And perhaps most importantly, he is not from another planet nor is he of a separate or superhuman race. On the contrary, he is very much human, and possesses emotional and physical limitations as such. So how does he become Batman?

Well, you could say he has two things most of us haven't got: a great idea and virtually unlimited resources. He has a mansion near caves from which he can carve a secret workshop and storage area, and master the art of repelling. He is heir to a company whose science department made and kept a bulletproof suit, a material with structural memory he makes into wings and a cape, and a car that out performs any vehicle on earth. He has the leisure time to cut bat-shaped ninja stars out of metal, and to spray paint his suit just the right eggshell black. He has the safety net that allows him to make his token hippie pilgrimage to the East to learn and exploit theory mysterious wisdom. And, he has a loyal butler to get him out of trouble when he needs to keep his cover. Viewed this way, his situation is still crazy and fictional. Most of us simply do not have these resources.

But, he is closer to normal than we may think, closer than most superheroes are anyway. We can all potentially conceive of a great idea. And, as post-industrial technologically savvy Americans, we've got quite a few resources, and certainly the potential to increase them. Therefore, all that really separates us from Bruce Wayne, then, is the extent of his massive fortune.

So what does this mean and what does this make Batman? It makes him our contemporary american capitalist hero. With acquired wealth (capital), limited trade skills, no scientific knowledge or means to create any of his materials and anecdotes himself, yet with ample leisure time and a lot of creativity, he manages to create an attractive, admirable, and successful crime-fighting superhero. He is the entrepreneurial business-finance major that becomes CEO of a biomedical company who capitalizes off of the many years of study and hard work by any number of professions and skilled workers, such as doctors, physicists, programmers, engineers, and chemists. He becomes the hero under capitalism for his spark of ingenuity, the winner of the most wealth, the most fame. He gets the most publicity for his idea, while all the brilliant and skilled scientists often go underappreciated, their years of toil often unnoticed. All hail the entrepreneur, the venture capitalist. Long live Batman.

So what is the positive, productive challenge? Well for one, to use all of our available resources in the most creative and utilitarian way we can, putting them together in new combinations to maximize the utility of all that our brilliant minds can collectively create. For two, even though Bruce Wayne is the spoiled rich kid with unlimited money, we can learn to expect (may we demand?) that kind of dedicated virtue from our wealthy, and make contributions where we can within our means. In the movie, this means teaming up with our superhero's cause like charming little Katie Holmes does working nobly and diligently for the DA's office. And most of all, the movie seems to ask that we appreciate the system for making this kind of star-status even possible, for enabling the accumulation of wealth which could potentially result in a massive acquisistion of virtue...creative virtue. Only in America. :)

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: Thoughts on Jonathan Safran Foer's new novel

Jonathan Safran Foer, after living through the September 11th attacks, did what any young American novelist would do--he used the tragedy to create what is essentially a magic-realist novel about a nine year old boy. There are no terrorrists in his novel. There are no stock brokers. There are no firemen, no flags, no President Bush proclaiming solidarity from sea to shining sea. There is just Oskar, his family, his neighbor, and the myriad of colorful New Yprk residents who happen to share the name Black. There are, of course, other characters here and there that make the plot the not-so-linear narrative that it is. But the point is, Foer wrote a novel about the World Trade Center attacks--the viciously political attacks, the attacks that led (however injustifiably so) ot two wars, and the attacks that glaringly exposed the polarized political climate of this country--that was almost totally devoid of politics.
Most of the reviews I read take this for granted and focus on Foer's delightful yet unnerving sense of humor. Because his style is so flippant, so effortlessly funny, and so painstakingly artful, many think that JSF is doing a disservice to the gravity of the attacks. One reviewer concluded that JSF comes very close to capturing an emotional moment but that "too many times he's undone by his cleverness." Another decides that his style is so distracting with all the pictures and colors, an linguistically is so "Extremely Loud" that it prevents the reader from getting "Incredibly Close." These positions seem to imply (am I wrong here?) that aesthetic complexity and recreational tempo-changes within the novel diminish the possibility for effective, sincere, "realistic" narration. Nevermind that what people are invriably hoping for here is some kind of authentic through fictional portrait of grief. They seem to agree that JSF overdoes it, that the form obscures the content, and that te content is particularly important in a case such as this.
A less skeptical take on JSF's form is Michael Faber's, who in The Guardian, relates how the Hiroshima bombing is "used to audacciously comic effect, highlighting the was historical enormities always end up jostling for space with mundane concerns. Thus a painfully serious topic is given a whimsical spin in order to make a painfully serious point: Foer's enterprise in a nutshell." Yes, Michael Faber, that's nearly it: our minds have trouble accomodating enormities and are constantly bombarded by other things, like a ubiquitous media and a post-modern variety of experience. Yet the reason that enormities fight for space in our consciousness is not so much that they are cometing for space with the mundane but that they are fighting to exist there at all. That is, the human mind is so incapable of grasping and containing any enormity that our minds replace its failed attempts to do so with the only other material it can contain--the mundane, the quotidian, and above all, the personal.

All this being said, I have to wonder when we are going to realize, or better yet, accept, that Foer's style, in all its glory, its silliness, and its cryptic hyperbolies, is exactlythe way our / his generation experiences grief, and more and more, the only way we can. If we grant, as I do, that we are incapable of experiencing the actual grief of another, let alone any collective grief, and that therefore our only access to grief is through our own experience, then his apolitical novel can be read as extraordinarily apt. He uses a nine year old boy as a protagonist to drive the point home, that politics is secondary to personal loss, but it would be no less the case for any self-conscious middle aged intellectual. Does that make sense? His is a novel about loss, and more specifically a loss without faith. And, in using what is arguably the biggest political event of our time (us post-slavery, post-holocaust folk that is) as a backdrop, a foil even, Foer highlights, besides the by-now-cliche point that the personal is always political, that all we have is the personal, and that only from the personal do we imagine the political. This is not to diminish the political, only to emphasize that the political emanates from the personal and thus owes its entire existence to it. therefore, Foer's novel captures a singular reality of the attacks, the only reality which is the reality of one / each person's loss, which we know becomes the basis for collective action.

Ultimately, ours is a generation that defines itself, more than any other, in terms of imagined histories, ones that we had no part in because we have so few to call our own. We understand our world through movies and are comfortable with constant over stimulation. We may be in the middle of a serious talk and a call phone rings an Outkast song, and we are comfortable continually shifting between the serious and the ridiculous. Perhaps this is because we realize that everything, underneath it all, is ridiculous as the constructed subjects that we are. But my point here is that this doesn't make us feel any less accutely, or make us any less sincere. It may be a new way of accomodating grief, but it is still grief. And just because we can be interrupted doesn't kmean we weren't on task. Being jaded by history and continual overexposure does not prevent the possibility of quthentic modes of being and feeling. In fact, I would argue that the increasingly complictated forms of expression lend themselves to increasingly complicated states of awareness, and that, after everything, we are better off. And this is the succes of Jonathan Safran Foer's new novel--in showing his generation that the possibilities for experiencing grief can be silly without demeaning, can be a conglomeration without being distracting, and most importantly, can be personal without being selfish.