MCARP has a post on 3:40 a.m.  about Court TV becoming TruTV that got me thinking.  You know how dangerous it is between my ears, but I went there anyway because fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

Anyway, I thought about how not having a television to speak of and without cable, I’m sometimes at a loss to understand popular culture and its references.

One thing I think I do understand about the youngest adults I’ve observed, at least a portion of them.  I’m thinking now about the customers at Sauced, Sidecar and Starbucks in the under 30 age group, but still likely out of high school.  The guys are wearing cargo pants that hang down below their underwear waistband and are cut off below the knees, sneakers and a thrift store shirt that is often too small.  They are pierced and tattooed.  They may or may not carry a backpack with an iPod and a laptop.  Some of these fashionistas also wear all black and all very tailored, topped with a snap brim or porkpie hat.  The music-driven upper middle class nihilist who actually knows the word instead of just not giving a good flying rusty f***.  All the girls wear thrift store clothes and these are often deliberately crappy and often from the era of their parents’ Baby Boomer salad days.  Ugh.  The 70s and 80s.  They think school is stupid because anything you’d want to know, you can just Google.  They are substantially right.  They are also pierced and tattooed.  They wear scandalously short skirts and then modestly put leggings on underneath, or even a pair of jeans or perhaps they’ve perfected a “look” of their own eccentricity. 

They are very open about sexuality and gay, bi, whatever is just that: what ever.

I think I “get” part of what’s happening with this subgroup about whom I generalize so broadly.

They are saying that they are never going to be Lindsay Lohan or some such in the way they look, they aren’t going to try, they want to be judged on something else altogether.  They are asking we look past looks and judge them on “better” values, at least a different value.

I think they are telling us that the whole Clinton thing all the way through Mark Foley is just bullshit.  Sex just isn’t that important to get all twisted up.  Sexuality is not a lifestyle or a choice, it’s just who you are and how you’re wired.  Get over it.

They think our obsession with education is misplaced and that school is not relevant to their future.  You may think that’s wrong, and maybe it is, but it’s the view I think they have.  They may go to school and do well, but they have no respect for school, even when they are playing the game by all the rules, because they do respect relevant education.  Not a contradiction.  They don’t see school as a particularly efficient delivery system.

They’re sick of our materialism.  Having clothes and a car and a house matters, but there are limits.  The consumption can become conspicuous.  I think they see materialism much like they see sex.  It’s important, it matters, but jiminey cricket folks, let’s have some balance and perspective.  I think there’s vegan and green versions of this.

I also think they are somewhat nihilist.  I think they really do think that they’ve been left a bad hand and that it’s beyond their ability to, shall we say, relieve life of its quality of suffering.  It — whatever it may be — just really doesn’t matter.  Go to school make good grades or don’t, it doesn’t matter.  Dress in clean clothes or not.  Doesn’t matter.  I don’t think they are true nihilists.  I don’t think they are as blase as the existentialists nor even the “beats” they sometimes mimic in their black attire.  Very few of them are philosophic about it.  I think they are saying, however, that a great many things we grownups think matter, just don’t.

This is not my point of view of life, but I can’t say it’s wrong.  I might bemoan these messages I think I’m “hearing” from this group, and I might wish they were more optimistic about their future.  They say Social Security will fail in 2017 and there’s nothing we can do about it and the world will come to an end, amen.  About when these kids are in their prime, well, there won’t be any prime because there won’t be any oil and the clouds are going to rain fire anyway.  We’ve told them that this is their future.  This is not likely to make one optimistic.

And even if it kills them, all this Social Security and terrorism and environmental collapse, even if it kills them, it still doesn’t matter because it seems sure that we’re all going to hell. 

We grew up in a great country and we were astride the world.  They are growing up in a time when we are the warmongers of the globe. 

Politics is corrupt and Hollywood is decadant, and who cares and why not.  If Mom and Dad can vote Republican, go to church and still get drunk, does it really matter what anyone says they believe or think?

Look.  We’re a hulluva lot more powerful and rich than they are and we can’t keep guns and drugs out of schools and we can’t stop airplanes from crashing into buildings.  What the hell do you expect of them?

Or, maybe it’s just plain old teenaged oppositional behaviors.  That whole kill your father Oedipus thing.

Nevermind.

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