killing the American Dream?

You know, sometimes I think that even though the loud-mouthed conservative population in America may lead us to believe that our nation is one of people full of faith, we've become quite a faithless nation.

"No survey data can reveal the hurts inflicted by our wasteful, immoral wars foisted upon us by deceitful leaders exploiting our anxieties and gullibility. That only 2 percent may place them among our biggest national worries at the moment is a sign of sublimation rather than their discounting. As for the loss of faith in our institutions -- private and public -- from financial kleptomania and the compromised actions of government, it has become free floating. A constant presence that aggravates every fear and uncertainty." (Brenner)

Maybe we've finally killed the "American Dream." That whole highschool-career-family, white picket fence thing was all well and good for the conservative, high-moral Americans of the 1940s and '50s. I know the dissent of the 1960s was rooted and began in the '50s, but generally speaking, I think Americans had faith in the paradigm of delayed gratification by which they existed: get a job, pay your dues, and reap your consumerist suburbia dream reward later.

But now, in a post-9/11, mid-recession, Wikileak'd "information age," that paradigm is changed. I don't have any statistics to back this up, but I'm pretty sure that today's 18-35 year olds no longer have faith in the promise of delayed gratification -- in the promise of the American Dream. We like fast food, smart phones, and the internet: we like NOW. Boomer parents have given their children everything, including a sense of entitlement. But I'm beginning to think that our desire for instant gratification may not be solely the result of us being spoiled silly.

Maybe we want what we want right now because we don't have faith that the future holds anything for us. Maybe we feel like we deserve everything we can get out of life this minute because we can't trust our flawed institutions and chaotic world, and we can't believe that the best is yet to come. Maybe we've realized that our parents were disillusioned and the American Dream doesn't exist. Maybe we're finally killing it. Or maybe we really are just spoiled, spoon-fed brats.

Regardless, I think we need to accept that the old model is in need of an upgrade. I think the dominant ideology is slowly beginning to gravitate away from the old idea of the American Dream, and I think this is a good thing. Perhaps popular culture has taken to cultivating a sense of nostalgia for the 1950s because it's realizing that the old paradigm no longer applies. Yet, in the same way I think no one really knows what will formally succeed postmodernism, I can't say I really have any idea where post-American Dream social thought will go. But I'm pretty eager to see it happen.

"They say that dreams are only real as long as they last. Couldn't you say the same thing about life?"

I'm presently making a huge mistake:

I'm attempting to multi-task while watching Richard Linklater's Waking Life.

Bad move. Most of the film is dialogue/discourse, and most of the discourse is thick with philosophy and heavy ideas. A lot of the people are speaking quickly and I'm having trouble keeping up, since I'm not devoting my full attention to it. What I'm catching, though, I love. It's giving me a much clearer sense of Linklater and his aims in film.

Now that I've seen Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, A Scanner Darkly (which I really didn't like), and this, I guess I have to go back to the beginning of his filmography and see Slacker and Dazed and Confused. And I want to find subUrbia on VHS still, since I really enjoyed reading the play.

As far as I can tell, 1990s Linklater seems to be preoccupied with Gen X angst and 20-somethings coming of age. One thing I love about Before Sunrise and Before Sunset is that in seeing how Jesse and Celine grow and mature between 1995 and 2004, you consequently see how Linklater's grown. I also like that about Ethan Hawke. Ethan Hawke in Reality Bites and Before Sunrise is not the same as Ethan Hawke 10 years later.

A lot of people don't like him. I do. The more interviews I read with him, the more I respect him. Gen X-ers came of age in the mid-'90s and he had to do it on film for an international audience. It seems like he had to endure condemnation for that for so long, that looking back, he has a different kind of an attitude that seems to say, "I'm doing what I want, I'm looking for fulfillment, and if you don't like what I'm doing, fuck you." Very Jersey, haha. He did, if I recall, go to high school here. This is from an interview that came out right after he did Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.

EW: Do you feel more in the zone creatively now than you did at the peak of your infamy as a Gen-X icon 10 years ago?
Hawke: Absolutely. We as a culture love to celebrate people in their early 20s. But it's not a comfortable place to be in your mid-20s. You don't know who you are as a person. You're screwing up left and right. It's very awkward. I've found that the older I get, the easier it is to be the person you want to be. Self-importance has a stranglehold on people in their early 20s. That's the razor's edge you need to walk: to take yourself seriously but not too seriously.

Did it make you feel vulnerable to revisit [your] novel [when adapting it for film] after being so criticized for its self-absorption?
If you're me, there's a lot of advantages that come with it and a lot of disadvantages that come with it. People never hesitate to tell me when they think I'm an asshole.

So aren't you tempted to bury that part of yourself and hope people forget?
I can't. I buck at that. I was too young to be held accountable for how you felt about me when I was 23. I enjoy life too much to let myself be defined by that.

Are you happy with how it turned out?
It was a weird opportunity to get to make such a personal film in such a corporate age. To use cinema for self-expression in an age when everything is supposed to be a commodity for sale, I felt so privileged, and all of that was such a luxury. People who don't like my film don't like it passionately because they get this idea that self-reflective art is an act of egregious narcissism. And if that is true, what do we say to Emily Dickinson, Jane Austen, to Proust to Whitman? You start to take a certain pride in their hatred of it. But the truth is, I'm really not only interested in self-reflective art. There's also a bunch of other stuff I'd rather do.

That's encouraging.

I understand why people denounce anything that even hints at self-importance and -involvement--I do it too. But part of me thinks, what is art for, if not for expression? And what's wrong with a little self-reflection, when so many people go through life without ever stepping back and really looking at themselves? Or without anyone ever really looking at them?

I'll probably look back at this some day and laugh at how self-involved and self-reflecting I was. I kind of am already. I'm okay with that. Everything is absurd, and sometimes all you can do is laugh at it all.

Jack Kerouac: "the originator of blue-collar cool"

First. Follow-up to that last post:

Check this out. Look at the photo caption, and the second paragraph. That's the Civic vs. the 13er. Right there.

On a completely separate note, I was leafing through an old GQ from last year - GQ's 50 Most Stylish Men of the Last 50 Years, I believe it was. Lots of great pictures in that - so classy. I pulled two pages from it and stuck them on my bulletin board. The first was a series of photos of Cary Grant, arguably the most stylish of them all. The other featured a wonderful picture and bit on Paul Newman, praising the simplicity of his wardrobe choices, and on the other half, Jack Kerouac. This is what they said about him:

Flower power was all well and good, but Jack Kerouac often wondered aloud how the Beats could’ve given birth to such Technicolor bravura. Kerouac’s look was broken but unbowed—as he once said: “ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way.” And yet his aesthetic is everywhere today: That Brooklyn hipster rocking overalls under his Carhartt jacket while reading Hart Crane? That kid in San Francisco sporting scuffed oxfords and a frayed collar, with Madame Bovary stuffed in his back pocket? They’re paying unwitting tribute to the man who exploded the 1950s world of straight-white pretensions, rejecting the notion that class was synonymous with value. An uneven artist perhaps, and a troubled one to be sure, but unequivocally a man: the originator of blue-collar cool.

Kerouac and his fellow Beats floated around the cusp of the G.I. Generation and the Silent Generation, by Strauss and Howe's definitions. Though technically a G.I., Kerouac belongs with Ginsberg and Cassidy in the Silent Generation of artists that came of age in the G.I.'s "get it done" world.

I love that description of Kerouac. It's so true. That description, in particular, reminds me of a particular turn of phrase in Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night. Dick Diver is talking to Rosemary about a WWI trench and battlefield they are exploring.

'All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high explosive love,' Dick mourned persistently. 'Isn't that true, Rosemary?'
'I don't know,' she answered with a grave face. 'You know everything.'

In my mind, that is what Kerouac did: he blew up the beautiful lovely safe world with a great gust of high explosive love--in the best way possible. He was only one of many to do so, but still. He coined the term "Beat" in reference to Neal Cassady, but people today remember him as the frontman of that generation.

Kerouac was utterly brilliant. Born to Canadian parents, he grew up speaking French, became fluent in English, and I believe was well versed in German as well. He spent his school years reading every American, British, French, German, Russian, and Sanskrit classic he could get his hands on, reading translations only of the latter two. He went to Columbia University on a football scholarship, only to break his leg during the first game his freshman year. He ended up dropping out, I think, and then came his first of two stints in the Navy. It was after that that he met Ginsberg, Burroughs, and the others. Cassidy was his real inspiration, though; Dean in On the Road (which, I'll admit, I haven't read) is fashioned after him. It was for him that Kerouac came up with his 30 Essentials for the Belief and Technique of Spontaneous Prose, which he employs in some of his later works. Even just his journals are amazing. He changed the way people thought about writing. The scope of his influence in general--I can't even begin to imagine how many people, how many artists of all kinds he and his work have affected over the years.

Kerouac's poetry drips with the sounds of jazz and blues, and his fascination with Buddhism comes out often. Much of his work is informed by his travels around the country, and all of it was essentially taboo when he was writing in the 1950s and '60s. That was a period when most post-war G.I.'s and Silents were trying to raise straight-laced Boomer babies. It was that era I mentioned in a previous post when men were trying to maintain their wartime masculinity yet succeed in the corporate world, and women were trying desperately hard to fit the model of the perfect, feminine wife. Sloan Wilson, Betty Friedan--they both wrote in opposition, but Kerouac and the Beats--they lived it. They rejected the values society chose for them, taking a darker, seedier route instead. Even though the lifestyle and culture they chose is not one I'd chose for myself, I can't help admire the way they did their own thing when conformity was a demand that, seemingly, most Americans surrendered to.

That's the other thing that's great about that GQ piece--at the end of each section, they include a style tip related to the person they wrote about. At the end of the Kerouac segment, they wrote:

Personal style isn't about buying the trendiest labels or most expensive suits. It's about establishing a look that's all yours and sticking with it.

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Now playing: She & Him - Why Do You Let Me Stay Here?

"Just doing my civic duty, sir."

So last week for American Government, I read two passages. One was by a man named Robert Putnam, who proposes that there is a direct link between "social capital" and "civic engagement," and government performance. Social capital is "features of social organizations such as networks, norms, and social trust that facilitate coordination and cooperation for mutual benefit." Basically, it's all the good stuff that comes out of actively participating in social communities, whether it's a church group, a labor union, the PTA, the League of Women Voters, bowling leagues, the Elks, Boy Scouts, or the Red Cross. Being involved with one of these groups is "civic engagement," and according to Putnam, the more "civic engagement," the higher the voter turnout, and the better the performance of the government.

The other part of Putnam's theory is that civic engagement and thus social capital has been in decline since the 1960s and '70s. Membership in organizations like those mentioned has decreased significantly, and though membership in other new organizations, like the Sierra Club or AARP, is high, membership does not require direct activity. "Their ties, in short, are to common symbols, common leaders, and perhaps common ideals, but not to one another." There is no social trust, and there is little sense of community or connectedness.

Putnam attributes this decline to changes in women's roles in the community, changes in the economy, changes in residential stability, and changes in technology and entertainment. There is less "neighborliness" among Americans, and they are less trusting in general. Women are now a substantial part of the labor force, people move around a lot, the economy has increased in scale and community-based businesses have largely been replaced by franchises and corporations, and people spend their leisure time in isolated activities. People play on computers, watch television shows and movies, play video games - all of these things are so simple to do alone. Even listening to music is now a personal activity - instead of gathering around a record player to listen to the latest single, people listen to their MP3 players and iPods.

I found this interesting because of a book I read a few years ago by two men, William Strauss and Neil Howe. They suggest that American history can be seen as a series of generations, and each generation fits one of four types. American history, then, is a repetition of cycles that consist of these four types: Idealist, Reactive, Civic, and Adaptive. Each generation of a particular type shares characteristics and traits. Each life stage of a generation is about 22 years: youth, rising adulthood, midlife, and elder life. Idealist and Civic generations are dominant, while Reactive and Adaptive generations are recessive. Each generation lives through social moments: secular crises and spiritual awakenings. Dominant generations come of age and enter rising adulthood during a social moment, exerting greater influence on the public world, while recessive generations' first social moment is as a child, influencing the private world more.

It makes a lot more sense when put in practice. The whole thing seems like it tailors history to fit the pattern, rather than history happening to fit the pattern. Example: the most recent cycle to be completed fully was the Great Power cycle: the Missionary Generation, the Lost Generation, the G.I. Generation, and the Silent Generation. They lived through the Missionary Awakening (the "3rd Great Awakening" that prompted agrarian and labor protests, muckraking journalists, and progressive and socialist movements in the early 20th century) and the Great Depression/WWII Crisis. After them came the Millennial Cycle, which we're in now.

First came the Boomers (1943-1960). They were rising adults during the Boom Awakening, 1967-1980. Woodstock, Kent State, Vietnam, Age of Aquarius, Earth Day - radical cultural change going on here. Lots of self-interest here. There's a funny bit in this movie, I Could Never Be Your Woman, in which Mother Nature rants about how humans were grateful to be at the top of the food chain until the Baby Boomers, who "thought they could just breeze through life doing whatever the hell they wanted" - the men didn't go to war when they were supposed to, the women didn't have kids when they were supposed to, they became materialistic and didn't care about the environment at all. Hehe. So anyway, after them is the 13ers, 1961-1981, who grew up seeing the adults screw up the country (Vietnam, Iran, all that). They're The Breakfast Club and the Brat Pack in general - adults are against them and life doesn't hold much for them. Pessimistic and realistic by turns. Adults call them disappointing; 13ers themselves say they are what they have to be to get by.

Then, 1982 to about 2000 or so are the Millennials - us. We're predicted to be a Civic generation that comes of age during what is still an unknown crisis and is in elderhood during the next spiritual awakening. The book I have was written in '91. It predicts that 1991-2003 sees more regulation, "public intrusions into what others will consider matters of personal and business privacy," anti-drug and pro-environment lobbying, more pro-life movements, disdain for political party allegiances, increased materialism and attention to style and advertising, clean-cut and overprotected kids, and revitalized civic organizations for youth. 2004-2025 sees failure of Social Security and economic and social hardship. Depending on if the secular crisis turns out well or not, the Millennials could produce strong leaders and a greater sense of unity and solidarity than any other generation in recent history. If the crisis comes too early or unfolds poorly, then the Millennials will be a crippled generation, unable to do what the Idealist Boomers set for them. So say Howe and Strauss.

The whole theory really stretches the whole generation cycle deal to work. One cycle actually doesn't have an adaptive generation, which they explain away somehow, I forget exactly how. But if they're right, then our generation now is a civic, and we're going to reverse the trend of low civic engagement.

The other article I read for American Government is by Scott Keeter, who says that the youngest cohort of voters is currently showing signs of being more politically active and aware, much like their Boomer parents were in the '60s and '70s. Keeter calls us the "DotNets," though, and says we are active in community work and attempt to make our voices heard - we're not hesitant in expressing ourselves. If the voting trend continues in the direction it was headed from last election, there should be a higher turnout of 18-29 year-olds: in 2004, the percentage of voter turnout for that cohort increased 9 percentage points.

I know that that was a really roundabout way of making my point, but I wonder if Keeter's research shows that Howe and Strauss's theory is correct in this case. And if it is, what's our secular crisis going to be? Or, did it come early with 9/11 and the Iraq War and now the economic crisis and everything else that we're screwing up?

Something else that they said: the Boomers will be most influential and productive in their later years. They won't relinquish control early. Bush is a Boomer. But, Obama just misses being a Boomer by one year: he was born in 1961. And if McCain is elected...he'll be the first of the Silent Generation to be president. The G.I.'s produced 7 Presidents. The Silents, 0. The Boomers, just 1 so far. Obama would mean a 13er in office 12 years before the 13ers are projected to take over the White House.

Sarah Palin is a 13er too.

Somehow, I feel like no matter who's elected, things are not going to turn out well. Just a feeling.

I spent way too much time writing this instead of doing homework. Rawr.

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Now playing: Counting Crows f. Sheryl Crow - American Girls