Quotulatiousness

July 19, 2024

The rise of the reactionaries – Gen X poised to pounce and seize

Filed under: Cancon, Economics, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Andrew Potter tries to explain why Gen X are much more likely to support conservative policies than the groovy fossil Boomers and the painfully Socialized Millennials and GenZ’ers:

Generation X Word Cloud Concept collage background
Best Motivation Blog: What Generation Is X

As North American politics continues its rightward lurch, it is becoming increasingly commonplace to note the outsized role of Gen Xers in pushing this trend. In 2022, a Politico essay tried to explain “How Gen X became the Trumpiest generation“. That same year, an essay in Salon lamented how “of course Gen X was always going to sell out and vote Republican”. Writing in The Line last year, Rahim Mohamed wondered “how Generation MTV became Generation GOP?” These aren’t outliers – there is a whole sub genre of cultural commentary devoted to trying to explain just why Gen Xers are so right wing, compared to both their Boomer predecessors and the Millennials and Zs who followed.

This raises a couple of questions, the first of which is: is it even true? And if so, why?

On the facts of the matter, it appears that members of Generation X are, on the whole, more conservative than other generations, and this is especially true in the United States. For the past three or four years, polls have consistently shown that Gen Xers are more likely to see the country as going in the wrong direction, more likely to disapprove of Joe Biden, and more likely to support Donald Trump and vote Republican, than any other generational cohort. And while every generation tends to become more conservative as it ages, it is a tendency that accelerated under Gen X.

Pollsters have found similar support for these trends in Canada. An Abacus survey conducted last August found Gen Xers had the highest level of support for the Conservatives, with 41 per cent of those surveyed intending to vote CPC. And just this past June, the pollster Frank Graves released a series of charts tracking sentiment in Canada on a number of issues, including national attachment, social cohesion, and voter intention. He found significant intergenerational discord, with members of Gen X showing the highest level of support for smaller government, and Gen X males having the highest level of support for the CPC.

So why is this the case? How did the generation that fought (and won) the first culture war against conservatives, that launched the antiglobalization movement, that made heroes out of left wing icons like Kurt Cobain and Naomi Klein, become the most right wing cohort of all? Did we follow our Boomer parents’ hippies-to-yuppies trajectory in selling out? Or is there something else at work, beyond crass financial self-interest?

There’s probably at least something to be said for the “crass self-interest” angle. Despite the long-standing claim to being the first generation to do worse than their parents, the truth is, Gen X is raking it in. Starting right around the pandemic, Canadian Gen Xers quietly overtook Boomers as the generation with the highest average household net worth. It may also explain why alone amongst the generations, members of Gen X list “cost of living” as their most salient political issue, in contrast with both the older and younger cohorts who identify things like climate change, health care, and the environment as the most important issues facing Canada.

May 2, 2024

QotD: Fomenting inter-generational hatred

Filed under: Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Dear Millennial:

“You’re in a heap o’ trouble, boy.” Or girl. What follows are the reasons — or at least the big ones — why you’re so thoroughly screwed, along with some suggestions for self-help at the end.

You tend to loathe Boomers and Generation X, I know. I don’t actually blame you for that, at least not entirely. Some of you, though, the Millennials who lump all the above together, without exception, strike me as singularly stupid and ignorant.

Moreover, the reasons you have for loathing them are somewhat misplaced. You tend to think — not without some reason — that the Boomers, especially, robbed their future, which is to say you, personally, to pay for largesse for themselves in the present.

It’s true enough, but it is neither the really awful thing they did to you nor does the complaint portray you in any particularly favorable light. “Those damned Boomers; they took everything and now there’s nothing left for us.” Yeah … you know what that sounds like? It sounds like the whining of one group of thieves over the success of a better or, in this case, merely luckier group of thieves who got to the big haul first. Yes, it really does.

Sorry, but the damage the Boomers and Xers did to you wasn’t primarily fiscal. No, no, the damage they did – or allowed – was to you, as a person. That’s the real crime. They didn’t just rob you of some money in advance. They didn’t just vote for a series of politicians and political programs and giveaways that ran the economy into the ground.

No, they stole from you — or allowed others to steal from you — some key elements of personhood, especially the ability to engage in critical, logical thinking. That’s right, you were not educated, whether in kindergarten or in the kindergartenesque, safe space segregated, snowflake sanctuary schools we call colleges and universities. Yes, these institutions of miseducation were supposed to teach you how to think. Instead, they taught you what to think and stunted your native ability to think. If you ever start to spout bright green feathers? Yes, this is the reason why; your teachers demanded that you become a parrot.

Tom Kratman, “It’s Up to You, Millennials. Deflect or Be Doomed”, Milo, 2017-12-06.

April 18, 2024

QotD: The intergenerational blame game

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

I believe it’s related to pensions, Medicare, and the whole Social Security scam. Boomers paid into these funds with the naive but innocent understanding that their money would be returned. Instead, the government spent it on other frivolities such as wars for Israel and keeping the Federal Reserve happy, so there’s no money left, and naturally the younger generations will have to pay. I believe that the elites want to get the younger generations so angry at the Boomers that they cut off what was promised to them — so angry, they dream of the day that Boomers get murdered in nursing homes.

OK, Zoomer. Two can play this game. Keep in mind that the little magic trick I’m about to perform here does not mean I’m blaming your generation for any of these things, because I’m not a Generational Astrologist. I’m merely taking what you do and flipping the script:

    Yours is the generation of “woke culture” and Antifa. As much as you yabber about how the Boomers let the culture slide into liberalism, atheism, and degeneracy, your generation is far less religious than the Boomers. You lean heavily socialist and encourage “punishment” for Halloween costumes you deem “offensive”. While the world is burning, the Zoomers’ top three voting issues are emotionally laden trifles such as “mass shootings, racial equality, and … treatment of immigrants”. You are far more anti-racist, anti-“hate”, and pro-LGBT than any generation that preceded you. This is not my opinion — it’s a statistical fact supported by every survey and poll I’ve ever seen.

    Therefore, every Zoomer is personally responsible for Drag Queen Story Time and the fact that there’s no wall on the border, because you just sat there and LET it happen. Three trillion dollars have been added to the national debt since Trump’s inauguration, and you Millennials and Zoomers just sat there and LET it happen. The tech giants are doing purges of people for thoughtcrimes, while your generation hides behind goofy fake names and clown avatars and LETS it happen.

    That’s because every member of every generation is 100% responsible for what happens on its watch. Get down on your knees and APOLOGIZE!

    And if you don’t repent immediately and bend to my shaming tactics, you fucking deserve all the righteous pain the generations after you will rain down on your selfish head.

See how stupid that sounds when it’s applied to you?

People hate to admit they’ve been brainwashed. But sorry — you’ve been brainwashed.

Politicians enjoy a little generational warfare if it suits their needs. They’ll even instigate it. And as far as I can tell, this sudden emergence of a generational identity-politics civil war is a divide-and-conquer tactic that has worked wonderfully.

Jom Goad, “The Myth of Boomer Privilege”, Taki’s Magazine, 2019-11-03.

March 25, 2024

QotD: Generational politics

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The major theme of my writing is guilt — how blaming others is maliciously used as a disabling mechanism and how people and cultures toss it around like a hot potato. No one, unless they’re masochists or are trying to earn social-approval points, ever wants to accept guilt — they want to tie it around someone else’s neck and let them sink to the bottom of the lake with it. This is why I believe Christianity has such perennial appeal — because Jesus takes the rap for you.

I’ve been making this point for years, but you’ve all been too busy projecting your guilt onto others and blaming them for all your problems to listen to me.

The reason I get fixated on certain topics is because they in some way powerfully reflect this theme of misplaced blame. This may burst quite a few of your bubbles, but the fact that I’ve focused on the endless bashing of whites for years is not a sign of how deeply in love I am with white people but rather a fascination with the fact they’re getting blamed for many things that demonstrably aren’t their fault. It’s the same reason I focus on the gender wars — men nearly aren’t as awful as they’re being depicted, and women are nowhere near as innocent as the current narrative says they are.

If you haven’t been paying attention, there’s been escalating intergenerational hostility across our fair land, and people are increasingly identifying with dumb, media-manufactured generational names — AKA Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen Z — as if they were scientific categories that are predictive of human behavior rather than arbitrary designations along the lines of Virgo, Capricorn, Scorpio, and Leo.

It’s some weird new metastasized form of identity politics. And, since it comes with the turf, these groups are blaming each other for all that ails the world.

It’s dumber than astrology […] but this intensely stupid way of framing the world refuses to die.

Jom Goad, “The Myth of Boomer Privilege”, Taki’s Magazine, 2019-11-03.

October 20, 2023

QotD: The Gen-X-Files

Filed under: Government, History, Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Just to take one small example, The X-Files was hitting its stride in 1994, and I was smack dab in the target demo: Nerdy college dude. And yet, all the show’s basic assumptions rubbed me wrong. Mulder was obviously supposed to be cool, but as I saw it, the show went out of its way to make him look like a loser — no girlfriend, no family, not even a pet, spanks it to porn (an at least somewhat risqué thing to imply on network tv, even at that late date). More than that, though, was the show’s attitude towards the government. You’re asking me to believe that the government — Bill Clinton’s government — is competent enough to keep an alien conspiracy under wraps?

I wasn’t in any way political back then. If forced to pick a side, I’d have been reflexively liberal, like all college kids are. I didn’t know the first thing about what was going on out in the world, let alone in the corridors of power in Washington, but even I found that pretty farfetched.

More importantly, the zeitgeist I saw was rapidly changing. X Files creator Chris Carter was born in 1956 and grew up in sunny SoCal (his wiki entry makes sure to give us his favorite surfing stance), so he more than most probably wrestled with the dilemma of how to bring Flower Power into Ronald Reagan’s 1980s. Hence the weird disconnect of the early 1990s, when Bill Clinton got his groovy, greasy, chicken-fried hippie self into the White House: The same people who, in their own college days, had nothing but hatred for the CIA and their domestic Mini-Me, the FBI, were all of a sudden kinda sorta coming around on the idea that The Feds are our friends — since, you know, the Feds are now us. It’s probably not a coincidence that Agent Mulder, FBI, was the star of The X-Files.

Explains a lot about “Gen X”, don’t it? When every single authority figure in your life, from the President on down, tells you to Fight the Power, the only way out of the clown show is to be, you know, like, whateverrr about everything — learned helplessness, 1994 version.

But smoked-out, flannel-clad, and apathetic is no way to go through life, and so we turned into a generation of suck-ups and toadies. Oh, the lunatic Marxists in the Teachers’ Unions want to encourage kids to “transition” in elementary school. Dude … you know, like, whateverrr. The college kids of 1994 are the middle managers, the Deep Staters, the lever-pullers of 2021. It’s working out about as well as you might’ve expected. You don’t need Agent Mulder to solve this mystery.

Severian, “1994”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-04-15.

September 17, 2023

QotD: One of the most successful propaganda campaigns in history

Filed under: Education, Government, Health, History, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

[In the 1960s and 70s, mob-controlled cigarette smuggling seriously cut into tobacco taxes.] What the PTB should’ve done at that point, of course, was simply repealed the taxes, learned to live within their means, and stopped trying to nag their citizens into good behavior …

Ok, ok, is everyone done laughing yet? Go ahead, get it all out of your system; I’ll wait. Everyone back? Ok, moving on:

What the PTB actually did, of course, was a multi-level propaganda campaign. It was brilliant. It took a few years, of course, but the evidence is all around you. Quick: When’s the last time you saw anyone smoking in a mainstream movie? Even period films about the Forties, say — the ones where they take infinite pains to get just the right period-appropriate shade of Formica on the diner’s countertops — ignore the obvious historical reality of people puffing away like chimneys.

Indeed, it’s all but universal now, and has been for a long time, that characters who smoke are the bad guys.

Here again, look at college kids. I hate to keep beating this dead horse, but it’s really the best example I know of the phenomenon. Any time I taught the Early Modern period, I had to mention the massive economic and cultural effects of tobacco. So I encouraged kids to try it for themselves — everyone here is over 18, I said, so it’s perfectly legal. Want to know what all the hype was about? Just run down to the gas station, buy a pack, and light one up!

Around the turn of the century, I always had a few smokers in class, so I could say “bum one off So-and-So”. Even that would get me a few uneasy chuckles. A few years later, and not only were there no smokers in my classes, but the kids would be actively uncomfortable with the suggestion. By the end of my teaching career, when I couldn’t care less anymore, I was openly taunting them about it. You people have no problem with potheads, I’d say. I bet well over half of you are on Ritalin, Prozac, Xanax, Klonopin, shit that’s bad for you, in ways we don’t even understand yet, but you’re balking at one cigarette? It’s unsafe? Oh, come on, some of you are going to leave here and go light up a completely unfiltered ditch weed, and as for the rest of you, you know all about crazy sex fetishes I’ve never even heard of. You get blackout drunk at the football games every weekend, but oh no, you can’t have one cigarette, it’s so unhealthy.

Such is the power of propaganda, and it’s the only repression that works for the PTB when they’ve truly set their faces against a behavior …

Severian, “The Mob, Faux-tism, and the Ever-Rising Costs of Compliance”, Founding Questions, 2021-02-02.

September 14, 2023

QotD: Going to “the mall”

Filed under: Business, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

“How was the mall?” Mom would ask when you got home.

“Eh, it was dead,” you might say.

“What did you do?”

“Nothing.”

Neither was true. Every trip to the mall had a routine. You’d swing by the sausage and cheese store for samples. You’d go to the record store to leaf through the sheaves of albums, nodding at the rock gods’ pictures on the wall, content in the cocoon of your generation’s culture. Head over to Chess King to see if there was something stylish you could wear on a date, if you ever had one; saunter casually into Spencer Gifts to look at the posters in the back, snicker at the naughty gifts, marvel at some electronic thing that cast colored patterns on the wall. Then you’d find a place, maybe by the fountain in the center, and watch the world go past in that agreeably tranquilized state of mall shopping.

Dead? Hardly. Okay, maybe it was the afternoon, low traffic. No movie you really wanted to see, the same stuff in the stores you saw last week. Of course you’d go back tomorrow, because that’s what you did with your friends. You went to the mall.

A dead mall is something else today: a vast dark cavern strewn with trash, stripped of its glitter, its escalators frozen, waiting for the claws to take it apart. The internet abounds with photos taken by surreptitious spelunkers, documenting the last days of once-prosperous malls. We look at these pictures with fascination and sadness. No one said they’d last forever. But there wasn’t any reason to think they wouldn’t. Hanging out as teens, we never thought we’d outlive the mall.

James Lileks, “The Allure of Ruins”, Discourse, 2023-06-12.

March 15, 2023

QotD: The coming generation isn’t the Millennials … it’s Gen X

Filed under: History, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The reason this matters is: The whole thing now — St. George Floyd, the Kung Flu, the Seattle “autonomous zone”, all of it — is being portrayed as the revolt of the New New Left against the Old Left. It’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez vs. Nancy Pelosi (born 1940) … but lost in all of this is the fact that the next generation to take power won’t be the Millennials, it’ll be the Gen Xers. Those people born between 1965 and 1980(-ish)? You know, the “Slackers”? Did we all just kinda, umm, forget about them?

That’s your next layer of political and social control. The youngest of us are in their late 30s (again, using the broadest definition); most of us are well into middle age, and some of us are plunging headfirst into late middle age. The chiefs of police, the military’s senior staff officers (including, by now, some general and flag officers), the CEOs and CFOs … they’re not Millennials, they’re Xers.

Admittedly we’re a forgettable bunch. We didn’t get a chance at natural, healthy teenage rebellion, because our parents, the goddamn Boomers, claimed a monopoly on rebellion, so we had to be all, you know, like, whatever about it. The Boomers thought Andy Warhol was a serious artist and Bob Dylan a talented musician; is it any wonder that Kurt Cobain’s godawful caterwauling was the best we could do?

All of that is water under the bridge, of course. But here’s where it gets really, really meta: This great social upheaval is, for us, a copy of a copy. It’s people who were actually alive in the 1960s cosplaying The Sixties™ — just like they did the entire time we were growing up. Just as we had no template for teenage rebellion, we don’t really have a template for riots and whatnot either. Some of us have decided to crank it up to eleven — all of the most obnoxious Karens are Gen Xers — but lots of us … haven’t. I really have no idea just what the majority of my generational cohort is doing right now while our most vocal idiots are out Karening, in much the same way I have no idea what the majority of Silents were doing while the Chicago Seven were out doing their thing.

All I know is, there’s an entire layer of political power between AOC and Pelosi. We haven’t really seen it up until now, but it’s there. Is Gen X finally, at long last, going to get its shit together? I suspect that the real drama is still waiting in the wings.

Severian, “Talkin’ ’bout My Generation!”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-06-11.

January 2, 2023

QotD: Academic incentives and the Bobo lifestyle

Filed under: Economics, Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The road to tenure takes only left turns, you’ll recall, because only “original” “research” gets published, and since Shakespeare ain’t writing no more sonnets, the only way to be “original” is through radical politics. As above, so below — since nobody’s going to upvote or retweet a sentiment like “Things are pretty much ok the way they are,” social media becomes little more than competitive #wokeness.

[…]

Here again, academia provides the answer. But first, let’s talk about David Brooks, the “conservative” infamously aroused by Obama’s perfectly creased pants. There are few sillier people than David Brooks, but “take wisdom where you find it” is my motto (well, that and “mihi dare vinum“), and he really knocked it out of the park with Bobos in Paradise. No, seriously. […] A Bobo, in other words, is a Gen Xer who could compete with the Boomers on their turf … but since he also took the Boomers at their word when they went on (and on and on and on and on) about Sticking It to the Man (an all too common generational failing), the Bobo sees the Boomer’s luxury car / vacation home / trophy wife conspicuous consumption as unbearably gauche. So instead, the Bobo spends $500 on a can opener because it’s good for the environment or is handcrafted by paraplegic Brazilian Eskimos or something, anything, so long as it a) obviously costs a shitload, and b) has some kind of Save-the-World rationale attached to it.

Academia reinforces this. Lots of Gen Xers went into the ivory tower for precisely that reason. Y’all know that the average professor hauls in nearly $200 large, right? The median income for an American worker in 2019 was approximately $46,800. I was in History, not math, but even I can see that the eggheads take home over four times what the average Joe makes. Which sets up another lifestyle contest. When you’re a) richer than sin, b) surrounded by a caste on slave wages, and c) ideologically committed to seeing yourself as The People’s Champion, the only way out is to live Bobo-style. Sure, sure, I have a $500 can opener … but Maricela the cook is really empowered by using it, because it was made by transgendered aborigines Of Color.

And since those Bobos are middle aged now, they’ve indoctrinated two generations of students with this garbage. And those two generations also came up with social media, so now you’ve got the heady combination of lifestyle and persona striving. That’s why the DC crew do what they do. Competitive #wokeness is the only way to go … and since they’ve got their $400-manicured mitts on the levers of power, we all get to be the bit players and stagehands in the big Broadway show that is their special unique wonderfulness.

Severian, “Why So #Woke?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-07.

December 23, 2022

QotD: Wokeness as a lifestyle

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

The quick and dirty version is: Since the goddamn Boomers will never, ever retire — they’ll keep patting themselves on the back for Sticking It to the Man until they’re lowered into their tie-dyed, patchouli-reeking coffins, even though they’re all hedge fund managers and live in McMansions — the subsequent generations had to find a new area in which to compete for social status. Thus lifestyle striving for Gen X, and persona striving for the Millennials.

For Gen X, think of my personal candidate for “everything that’s wrong with the 90s, all in one place,” the 1994 movie Reality Bites. Don’t rent it unless you’re current on your blood pressure meds. It’s four of the 1990s’ most insufferable people (Winona Ryder, Ethan Hawke, Ben Stiller, Janeane Garofalo) quipping about being slackers. Well, except Stiller (also the director), who plays the grasping, uptight, sold-his-soul-to-The-Man yuppie foil to the other three. Stiller is the Gen Xer who chose to compete in the oversaturated career arena; he’s cartoonishly evil. The rest of them hang out in coffee houses, polishing their image. They’re lifestyle competitors.

For Millennials, and whatever we’re calling the upcoming generation (“The Lobotomized Snowflake Posse” is my suggestion, brevity be damned), well, just look at social media. Even lounging-around-Starbucks lifestyle competition is out of reach for people who went $100K in the hole for a Gender Studies degree. The only currency they’ve got is effort — hey, didn’t Karl Marx say something about that? — so Twitter becomes their full time job. Xzhe with the most followers wins.

Severian, “Why So #Woke?”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2020-01-07.

June 14, 2022

QotD: Generation snowflake

Filed under: Economics, Education, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Think of all the traits and characteristics, most of them negative, associated with the Millennials in the popular mind. They are said to be unrealistic and have both the inflated expectations of life and the inflated perceptions of selves. They think the world owes them a living – a good one too – though without necessarily too much effort. Things came very easily to them when they were growing up; when that suddenly stops – when the reality finally intrudes – they get angry, frustrated, lost: the world is deeply unfair and is conspiring against them. They are narcissistic, self-possessed and self-obsessed. They expect instant rewards and instant gratification. Having been told their whole lives how special they are, they tend to be over-sensitive and find it difficult to cope with criticism or obstacles. They’re lazy, flighty and easily distracted. Remember: these are all generalisations, but stereotypes stick because they ring true.

So no, no surprises here. Their collective personality makes the Millennials unusually suited for the flirtation with socialism. They are a great match; if this was Tinder, Marx would be getting super liked all the time.

Socialism is the response of a spoiled child when faced with the world that does not genuflect to its every wish the way their parents did – the world as it is must therefore be evil and has to be changed to something radically different. Gen Y, of course, did not just magically became the way they are – they were brought up like that, so we all bear the blame and the responsibility for a generation who resents not being managers in their 20s and not being recognised as special anymore by all their elders. Clearly, the capitalism has failed when I’m not showered down with money after I graduate from my double in media and gender studies.

Arthur Chrenkoff, “Socialism as a Millennial religion”, The Daily Chrenk, 2019-02-19.

June 12, 2022

QotD: Zima

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

    There was, however, something perversely enticing about a drink that seemed to come from a post-apocalyptic wasteland in which color did not exist. There was an ingrained assumption that Zima must be expressly targeted at somebody, but nobody knew who that was … Zima was ridiculous … but did that actually mean it was brilliant? The only viable conclusion was “sort of”.

It’s true at first blush, but so douchey that you want it to be wrong just to spite whoever wrote it. I’ve never wanted a Zima more in my life than I did after reading that passage. But at second glance, it’s laughably false. Ask anyone who was in college in the 1990s; they’ll tell you exactly who Zima was “expressly targeted at”: Frat bros who were expecting female company. Because it was clear — no, really, it was beer(-ish) that looked like club soda — it somehow seemed like “diet beer”. Which meant your female party guests were almost guaranteed to have three or four more than they should.

In other words: Zima was the midrange panty dropper. Not as classy as white zinfandel, not as trashy as Boone’s Farm, there was no other possible reason to have it in your dorm fridge, but it somehow had plausible deniability when you offered it to her as a light refreshment. If Klosterman ever had sex at any time between January 1, 1990 and December 31, 1999, he knows this. There’s no way he doesn’t.

Severian, “A Meta-Review”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.

June 4, 2022

QotD: A smidgen of forgiveness for the Boomers

Filed under: Humour, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

For as much shit as I give them — and as much as they deserve it — I can forgive The Boomers quite a bit. In all previous history, having your entire world accommodate itself to your every whim was a privilege reserved for the more puissant monarchs of the bigger kingdoms. But starting about 1963, American life completely recalibrated itself around the passing fancies of ordinary suburban kids.

That has to mess with your head a bit.

In the same way, no previous generation had ever seen their youth commercialized and sold back to them in middle age, and that’s what messed with our heads. The passing fancies of those ordinary suburban kids in 1963 all involved sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll. We — Gen X — wanted those things too, but since by definition nothing is lamer than your parents, we had to be all, like, you know, whatever about it.

If you can grok the concept of a 45 year old telling you — with complete, almost heartbreaking sincerity — not to trust anyone over 30, you can grok the 1990s.

If you can’t, I don’t recommend trying. It’s like an anti-koan — if you solve it, you’ll achieve a lower consciousness. But if you’re determined to experience it, get really, really, really drunk and watch Forrest Gump a few times back to back. Really experience it as a work of art … because it is. It’s meticulously constructed. Forrest Gump is a mildly retarded man who stumbles, through dumb fucking luck, into fame and fortune through every significant event of the last half century. (He even has a huge dick, although that’s a detail from the source novel that got left on the cutting room floor).

Is there any more perfect metaphor for My G-G-Generation than that?

That’s what we grew up with. That whole generation was what some wag said about George Bush the First: Born on third base, thinking he hit a triple. And, of course, by merciless application of cold logic: that was also us. The only difference was that while the Boomers were congenitally incapable of seeing it, we were congenitally incapable of getting over it. So, you know, like, whatever.

Severian, “A Meta-Review”, Founding Questions, 2022-02-24.

February 2, 2022

Neil Young revives the PMRC

Filed under: Business, Government, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jim Treacher invites you on a trip down memory lane to a time when musicians like Neil Young were [gasp!] against censorship:

If you’re Generation X or older, you might be getting flashbacks over this whole “Neil Young vs. Joe Rogan & Spotify” contretemps. On one side, we’ve got a popular public figure who’s expressing his thoughts and opinions, just as America’s Founding Fathers told us we get to do. On the other side, we’ve got a bunch of miserable old fuddy-duddies who want to shut down free speech because they believe it hurts people.

In other words, Neil Young just revived the PMRC.

If you don’t know what the PMRC was and you’re too lazy to google it, here’s the short version:

Back in the ’80s, a senator’s wife named Tipper Gore got sick of her kids listening to music she didn’t like, so she started an organization called the Parents Music Resource Center. The PMRC compiled a list of songs they found unacceptable, including “Darling Nikki” by Prince, “We’re Not Gonna Take It” by Twisted Sister, and “She Bop” by Cyndi Lauper. Then Tipper used her political connections to convince the Senate to hold hearings about this supposedly dangerous music.

A lot of Americans decided they liked what popular entertainers were saying, and a handful of busybodies tried to put a stop to it. “If we don’t want to listen to it, nobody should get to listen to it. We need to protect the helpless unwashed masses from themselves!”

Sound familiar?

But then this happened:

If you’ve got a half-hour to spare, you can watch Dee Snider’s entire Senate testimony here. By the time he was done, the PMRC had been exposed for the meddling, hypocritical clowns they were. Their brief moment of relevance was over, at the hands of a guy who looked like Bette Midler transitioning into a Wookie.

The PMRC did get a consolation prize, though: the “PARENTAL ADVISORY” sticker you can find on a lot of cassettes and CDs from the era. Y’know, the sticker that made kids want to listen to what was inside because their parents wouldn’t like it.

Over the next couple of decades, the PMRC ended up helping a lot of artists sell a lot of records. Like this one:

I remember seeing that CD cover for the first time and thinking, “Damn … this must be awesome.” And it was! If not for Tipper Gore, NWA might not have become superstars and Dr. Dre probably wouldn’t be a near-billionaire now.

November 23, 2021

QotD: Generation X and the 1990s

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When I retired, a retro 1990s fad was just gearing up on campus. It was an Uncanny Valley kind of experience. There they were, dressing like day-glo lumberjacks and listening to knockoff BritPop, but still plodding around campus with that peculiarly late-Millennial affect. You know the one — half secret policeman, half cringing mouse. Unpleasant, but it got me thinking about my own college years back at the dawn of the Clinton Era. We really screwed the pooch, didn’t we?

I’m referring, of course, to Gen X’s patented brand of “irony”. We’ve talked about this before, but here’s a quick recap: Every middle-class kid born after about 1965 was raised to believe that Authenticity was the thing, the only thing. Just do what you feel. Question authority. Don’t listen to The Man!

The problem, of course, is that we were told this by The Man.

It had a weird, telescoping effect. On campus, you were surrounded by people who actually were hippies, plus a whole bunch of wild-eyed fanatics who were sure they would’ve made truly excellent hippies if they hadn’t been in elementary school at the time, plus a bunch of kids — these would be your classmates — who thought of “Woodstock” as a brand name, a kind of backpacking-through-Europe, taking-a-year-off-to-find-myself experience that everyone has as a matter of course before settling down to the serious business of making partner at the law firm.

In short: Our parents were stuck in adolescence, and, being adolescents ourselves, we didn’t understand that “Rebellion” wasn’t something the hippies invented. We wanted to experience sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, too, but since the Baby Boomers treated those as their exclusive property instead of what they actually are — i.e. the natural impulses of teenagers in all times and places — we had to be all, like, you know, whatever about it. […]

That was the 1990s. Faced with a paradox that everything your parents say, do, and believe is lame — according to your parents! — the only safe way is to make sure nobody can figure out exactly what your attitude is at any given instant. You might end up working 90 hour weeks at the office to pay the nut on the McMansion and the Volvo the same way they did, but at least you’d be, you know, ironic about it. The ketman of the suburbs.

See what happens when you listen to your elders, kids?

Severian, “The Virtue of Hypocrisy”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-01-19.

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