From another post on Fark regarding the love of 'Europeans' for recently-cancelled ABC show 'Pan Am.'

I can see where the Europeans in question are coming from: it was a time where Americans were enjoying innovation and the general attitude was optimism. But that optimism rode a wave of egoism that got us '70s apathy, '80s greed, '90s speculation, and the '00s fear and delusion. In the course of fifty to sixty years we went from a lucky nation that was taking advantage of an unique economic situation to a nation of pathetic retardation and delusion that can't get anywhere close to examining its own bias.

It's a good aesthetic, but the reality beyond that is a harsh reality that the optimism portrayed leaves no room for. And the kick back to that reality is soul-shattering.  And that says a lot about America in the '50s and '60s:  we were content to enjoy our good fortune but we also had to create separate layers of reality to cover over the harsh reality:  you can see it today in '50s sitcoms where everything is just a bit too perfect, a bit too unreal that is being pushed (by either the creators or the audience...money's on the latter) to either justify the good fortune of not being in a war, or to attempt to subjugate reality in the ultimate perversion of the American Dream itself to actually co-opt reality and form our own.

The Apocalypse is inherently selfish.

I was reading a Cracked article (one that didn't have the 'X Ways That Show You Can't Trust Anybody' template activated) about apocalypse obsession.  The writer nearly got it right:  he mentioned that the apocalypse is ultimately a game that disenfranchised people use to prove their way of life is correct.  He's right, but he misses the chance to say something greater about human nature:  the apocalypse is the ultimate way to show how utterly selfish and self-serving the wisher really is.

The apocalypse is not freedom, it's selfishness. All apocalypse theories have one thing in common: the one who is making it up always survives and is somehow master of this new world that they alone will prosper in. It's the ultimate self-gratification where the inventor of the apocalypse has done everything right. It's indicative of how selfish and arrogant someone is because they require the end of everything just to play a sad game of 'I was right all along!"  But this is not a justified excuse.  The need to destroy everything to prove someone wrong is a toxic mindset that shows the rugged individualism in American life is poisonous to all, even the One that believes themselves above it all.  Humans are social animals who benefit from group activities and interactions.  When you are excluded from that pack, you turn weird.  You may have been weird in the first place, but something about our lives glorify individuality for all the wrong reasons.  We crave acceptance by not craving acceptance, an ass-backward, childish idea that shows how immature the thinker of imagined apocalypses would be.  It's nothing more than a pre-Columbine/'Carrie' notion of Showing Them All through violence.

One of the problems that keeps haunting America is the idea of individualism is a wholly good thing.  It's fun to think that you have absolute control of your life.  But even within man-made society, that idea is inherently foolish.  Nobody has absolute control of their lives:  at best it's a way to keep reaching for better horizons, at worst a way to carry unnecessary responsibility over things you have no control over at all.  It plays to the need of power in our daily lives that, ironically, is created by civilization.  It speaks to labor that has been horribly disconnected from product to such a point where meritocracy simply falls apart.  Cause and effect hasn't been shattered as much as it's grossly miswired to the point where hard work can only mean hard work and maybe something else, but perhaps not.

In this lens, individuality becomes a trap.  It ceases to be a useful part of the human experience and becomes a delusion used to lay every single thing that happens in the world to be the fault of one who wishes for it.  The word 'responsibility' is thrown about casually but without any sense of reality behind it.  It speaks a lot of a people who blame themselves for every little thing.  Reality does not play like that.  How am I supposed to be responsible for rain?  The absolutist thinking that pushes an unrealistic binary argument onto us--are we responsible for everything or nothing--rejects the nuance that within lies the truth.  And it leaks through to our imaginations of the apocalypse, externalizing the phenomenon as either Normal Society or some hyper-individualized apocalypse that's custom-made for lunatics unable to recognize the real issue but more than content to play in their little destruction, mistaking their survival as the ultimate last word in a bizarre and sad argument that ends with total isolation.

The futility of Foxing the Left

Recently MSNBC admitted they have a 'leftist' bias and has high hopes of turning into the Fox News of the Progressive Cause.  MSNBC isn't going progressive. We won't have news channels that accurate portray the viewpoint that most of America believes in because, at heart, propaganda of the 24/7 news channel variety isn't informative but instructive. If you need a 24/7 news channel to tell you want to think, then you don't really hold political opinions as much as you're a political fanboy. As such, any 'liberal' news channel will fail because they don't need a sounding board to be 'right' or 'correct' or to reinforce any pointless views that make you part of 'the team.' I don't need a team to tell me that my views are correct. That's stuff you need if you're a brainless lunatic that has to live in the middle of a cornfield because you're too fucking scared to interact with people.

The thing we should take away from this is that the Fox News pandering scheme is going out of style because it's unprofitable. Not enough eyes are watching the nonsense anymore, and the real power holders--the advertisers--are pulling out. There's a reason why you have infomericals decorating the channel, and it's not because of an easy buck. They're the only ones left, and they're the only ones who can bother. The bright side is that a lot of people are either getting sick of the negativity or have hit the wall when it comes to the antics being pulled. The brighter side is that news channels are seeing Fox News as an example of overreach instead of a profitable business model, meaning a possible change away from the fear tactics used for about ten years.

I can't like Dazed and Confused Anymore.

I can't like Dazed and Confused anymore. It was a big thing in my teenage years because everybody was getting stoned and the '70s retread (before the economy went to shiat) was a big deal. We wanted to live those halcyon days where you could just hang out, get high, and it was no big thing.

But it's an illusion. Just like the movie itself, it's just a reflection of the sad state of suburbia. Nothing has really changed despite the world moving on and rural America remains in this turgid bubble. Nothing changes, nothing ever grows. "If these are the best years of my life, I'm going to kill myself" is the only true line in the movie because it reveals the paradox of being an adult and being trapped in responsibilities of wanting to go back to being a child and wanting the idea of freedom but in more of a locked down fashion. And it's still true today, politically: a lot of the nation is in love with the idea of freedom and the word itself, but we all hunger for more locks and controls.  In a way, this showcases our national attitude:  not only do we crave for the false freedom that childhood provides, we see ourselves as only being free when we are young enough to have possibilities of anything but not old enough to act upon them.  We crave to be under the thumb of an authority figure, which throws every myth and idea about the '70s into severe doubt and skepticism.

Maybe the movie has some purpose still. But honestly, it's just hard to watch. At the very least we're watching a fashion trend that has come and gone. At the very most we're revisiting a nasty bit of Americana that seems unavoidable.

Die, die, the hipsters must die.

I think it's time we put the '90s into perspective.

A recent article lamented the aging of Generation X.  For the longest time I've considered myself part of Generation X, simply because it seemed to fit.  In my youth, I rocked flannels.  I grew up during the '90s with all the culture that went with it.  Technically, I am part of it:  I was born in 1978, right at the tail end of the 1961-1981 time limit. 

But the idea of generations is a stupid one, especially in a complex world.  My mother is two years out from being a member of Generation X.  I'm in the same generation, more or less, with my own mother (she had me when she was 18).  How does that work again?  In reality, it doesn't:  she considers herself a hippie, a side effect of the Woodstock/'70s Free Love styled thing.  But this realization of generations (especially how they neglect those who come at the end as some sort of weird addition that was along for the cultural ride) made me realize just how fucked up our ideas of the '90s were, and how monocultural they were.

Or rather, how sickingly white they are.

To hear people talk of the '90s today, you get a very good idea of how the culture was in 1991-1994.  To hear Gen Xers talk about it, the '90s died when Kurt Cobain's head was blown off.  Truth be told, I didn't know who Cobain was until he died.  I knew what Nirvana was--a sadder version of the arena rock/metal scene that labeled itself Alternative but was just part of the cultural malaise that came from the excesses of hair metal.  It was a way to purge our nation (well, the white/rock part of it) from the homoeroticism of the '80s by adapting a really strange sense of masculinity.  Leopard-print tights were replaced by flannel shirts.  Thundercat pastel boots were swapped with Caterpillar or  Doc Martens.  But the '80s labeled such excess and mock feminization as masculine, so the '90s attempted to label their traditional masculinity as 'ironic.'  They were trapped between two gender ideals so they chose to play to masculinity but 'not really.'  Suddenly the homoerotic gayness of David Lee Roth dancing around in a rainbow of colors with a perm that would make most people blush was distilled down to a Kurt Cobain douchiness that took away the spectacle but reaffirmed it as a joke.  Or rather:  it was 'real' but a joke if you were in the know.  Which is like saying 'I like this, but I only like it as long as you're not mocking me, then it's a joke."

It's a forced irony that doesn't have the strength of its own convictions.  In a way, that's what most of the '90s were like:  it was trying to have it both ways.  The pomp and excess of the '80s combined with the ability to realize you were being watched yet still maintain the detached idea of being cool.  In a weird way, it was really like the '50s paranoia.  No, I take it back:  it was like a Jane Austen novel where everybody conforms and can be ruined by the everpresent threat of rumors but relies on a bizarre system of conduct where everybody is pretending to pretend.  It's a weird system where we're all so detached that nothing really means nothing.  At least we got the postmodernism part right but were missing the true, sad point of it.

Bizarrely enough, the 1991-1994 idea of the Hipster '90s is very white in hindsight.  The execution of our '80s homoerotic selves (and shamelessness, come to think of it) was the real purpose of Alternative Rock, and the culture that came from that can hardly be considered iconic of the decade.  The real icon was the invention of the Internet, the antithesis of the image we like to think of the '90s.  Instead of having our celebrities play a violin for their irony (using a straight razor and an arm instead of a fiddle and a bow), celebrity became a culture where everybody can play.  Free access to everybody was the name of the game and it made everything else fairly obsolete.  The hipster culture was deriding the idea that there was nothing new while the Internet showed that the celebrity culture, as a whole, was pointless and retreading old ground while a goldmine was in the audience themselves.  While celebrity culture went on antidepressants, everybody else was realizing how awesome everybody else was.   But my real point was that the hipsterism of the '90s wants to define a coffeeswilling, flannelwearing, terminally depressed state of being that was hardly the case for anybody.  People speak of the '90s as some kind of Alternative Rock paradise.  The biggest hits were Vanilla Ice and MC Hammer.  Revisionism that places Johnny Depp and Winona Ryder as the king and queen of some mythical '90s ball is just that:  Depp didn't come into his own until halfway through the fucking decade while Ryder bombed out at nearly the same time. 

In short:  anybody who relates to 'Reality Bites' as the embodiment of the '90s is possibly still recovering from overmedication.  If anything, it was a complex decade that was full of variety that a lot of people are now trying to gentrify.  It was a weird decade that was effectively split into two parts:  pre- and post-Internet.  People are trying to exaggerate the pre-aspect because they don't want to give up that illusion of white dominance.  Remember the LA Riots?  That doesn't exist in the Depp/Ryder idea of the '90s.  Remember Tupac?  Biggie?  'Friday?'  This Depp/Ryder '90s doesn't even adknowledge Sayles or Spike Lee in the madness, nor the meaning behind their coming to be.  If anything, the idea of a hipster '90s is inherently racist at its heart.  It's when a lot of angry minorities--rightfully angry, mind you--started making a lot of angry music.  You're not going to see Hot Chocolate or Funkadelic in this vision of the '90s, mostly because Ice-T was taking over metal's demise to make 'Cop Killer' or a variety of black artists breaking the subservient roles and really making their names known. 

So, in short, the idea of a hipster '90s still pisses me off.  Mostly because I existed in a sphere that was only that.  And it wasn't fun or cool being miserable like that.  It's inherently bigoted and ugly, a sort of penance for something that didn't need forgiveness.  It was opposition for its own pointless sake, and it's just there to put forth a singular view for a decade that did a lot to break boundaries.  It was more than Cobain blowing his head off, Courtney Love appointing herself Queen of What-the-fuck-ever, and a bunch of white people moaning and whining and making depression a fashionable trend.  It was also a time of a lot of cool and important things happening, and the lens that a hipster views the antidepressant decade seems to remove all color from a complex portrait of how it was to be alive in that time and place.  It's nothing more than a brand of white suburban fear that erased the 'usurpation' of a dominant white culture into something wholly different by margainalizing everything that isn't white-friendly.  It's like someone is trying to relieve a dire past by turning down the color knob and pretending the world is as stark as a monochrome picture without realizing (or wanting to realize) that more stuff was happening than they could ever imagine and preferring to live in that Zanax-riddled delirium.

Is America worth it anymore?

Just a thought here:  is living in America worth it anymore?

I'm currently a thirtysomething man finishing up his M.A.  I live in Michigan, which has been hit hard by the economic collapse of the last decade or so.  I have a lot of student loan debt that cannot be discharged yet enough experience to find a job to qualify for 'forgiveness.'  I also realize that in the economy we live in, I cannot really 'live' without being privy to a lack of medical care via insurance, affordable housing, and public transportation.

In short, I'm realizing that maybe I shouldn't even stay in America.  Other places have their problems, but we're easily the worst first world country out there.  Even people in Europe with their own austerity measures are realizing how utterly bad America really is with its focus on nothing but profit and demonizing any opposition as a moral/personal failure.  Five will get you ten if I don't get a comment saying 'but this is LIFE, why don't you adapt like the rest of us?'

This, however, is not a reasonable explanation.  This is the type of bullshit nonsense that condescends without any basis.  It's the same shit our parents would give us so we give up just as fast as they did so it reinforces their own lack of life.  Crab mentality--the idea of pushing others down so you achieve a shit equality of being constantly stepped on--is the name of the American game.  The idea that we're all equal to be stepped on.  It's a weakness projected as a virtue, and it's not even an answer.

So is America worth staying in?

Somehow, I think it is.  But we need a lot of improvement.  And honestly, I can't fault anybody who would leave.  If I had sense, I would have bolted Michigan years ago to find a better place in the sun with a better climate.  There's a difference between fighting the good fight and wasting your years while change comes from outside of you.  I'm not sure which is really the best way.

Then again, that's never stopped anybody from being able to yell about what's wrong to find what's right either.

"They are quite aware of what they're going through."

From a discussion going on about how John Hughes shaped a generation.  I disagree, but elaborate (somewhat):

Look at how teenagers were represented in film before this: they were always selfish brats unaware of the 'gift' given to them of an unmarked and bright future. They were always stupid and in need of a condescending adult to lead them by the nose into Adulthood. All of their concerns were stomped out or brushed aside and had to be set on the Correct Path no matter what. They were essentially emotional cyphers who didn't understand The Real World and were reminded of that fact constantly so they were dependent on an older (and hence wiser) person to guide them.

Hughes understood that was bullshiat. Teenagers are fiercely independent people who are figuring out the world. As the quote goes, 'they are quite aware what they're going through.' It's a daunting thing: they're damned by adults because adults see what they were like and often play Time Traveller in trying to 'correct' those things without taking into account how insulting it is to be told how to live by someone who claims to have known you your entire life yet is unable to grasp the changes in your psyche that make you quite different. On top of that, you're filled with all these horror stories that are told to you as instructions instead of reasoning with you. You're an adult but a child when it comes to adults talking down to you and combining this with a reach for independence and the adults' own regret creates nothing but stress. On top of that, you are expected to know exactly what you want to do in life and focus solely on that in the four short years at high school and be content in that. Not to mention learn how to work, interact with people correctly, and deal with all the social pressures like that.

Hughes understood that. You can see all of these at play in The Breakfast Club, and that's why it works so well. The comedy is a bit outdated (like the fashions), but you can see a microcosm of life that speaks true for a lot of us. You can see the adults trying to live their lives again through their children. You can see how authority comes from repressing one's own sense of doubt and retarding one's sense of growth. You can see how teenagers, aware of the world they're being pushed into, are frightened of living their life outside of the confines of their current lives because the adults in authority in their lives have never escaped that mentality. They're still hanging around the school, as a worker or a parent, stuck in the same sad holding pattern of American life: too afraid to strike out on your own but horrified of staying and becoming one of them.

Did Hughes shape a generation? No, because if he did we would probably have a better understanding of the insanity of the American way of life and the repression and regrets that shape it much more than it should. But what he did do is show that teenagers aren't just hormonal brats. They're dealing with a world they're seeing for the first time, and it's a very dark one full of pitfalls and authority figures that know just as much as they do. The illusion of adulthood is shown for its first time and the pressures to 'be somebody' are running up the lack of experience that all teenagers have. Hughes showcased it well, and while he didn't shape a generation, he at least gave cinema a reason to treat teenagers as human beings instead of retarded children usurpers of the Baby Boomer generation.