Kyle Smith brought up this point today in his New York Post column – that the Sarah Palin book tour is providing a wonderful distraction of the foibles of the Obama administration, which recently fumbled its trip to China, fell flat on its face over Recovery.org and the phantom congressional districts, not to mention rising unemployment and the troubles in Afghanistan. A certain e-mail hacking may not bode well for cap and trade. I nodded in agreement, until I realized all I had written about this week was Palin’s book tour. I run screaming out of the building, but the detractors pull me back in. A media where hard news reporters are dressing down teenage girls outside of book stores does call for a bit of action.
This time pulling me back is Jonah Goldberg and this hilarious excerpt from his latest article at National Review.
Slate magazine is just one of the countless media outlets convulsing with St. Vitus’ Dance over that demonic succubus Sarah Palin. In its reader forum, The Fray, one supposed Palinophobe took dead aim at the former Alaska governor’s writing chops, excerpting the following sentence from her book:
“The apartment was small, with slanting floors and irregular heat and a buzzer downstairs that didn’t work, so that visitors had to call ahead from a pay phone at the corner gas station, where a black Doberman the size of a wolf paced through the night in vigilant patrol, its jaws clamped around an empty beer bottle.”
Other readers pounced like wolf-sized Dobermans on an intruder. One guffawed, “That sentence by Sarah Palin could be entered into the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest. It could have a chance at winning a (sic) honorable mention, at any rate.”
But soon, the original contributor confessed: “I probably should have mentioned that the sentence quoted above was not written by Sarah Palin. It’s taken from the first paragraph of ‘Dreams From My Father,’ written by Barack Obama.”
Is anyone actually being rebellious here? I kind of doubt it. Having lived through Punk, New Wave, and Grunge, I can honestly say that any countercultural trend in the US will be immediately co-opted by the social powers that be, and turned in to both a completely controlled form of expression with rigid guidelines, and also a fairly consistent profit stream for those in power. I’m using music as an example, but it fits with damn near everything else, artistic movements, philosopies of the last 60 years or so, and of course, politics. Even the most well-intentioned of “Rogues” and “Rebels” are almost-instantly compromised, and in many cases that’s what they wanted anyway, either for a delucional belief that it’ll “Get their message out there” or simply to make money.
You hear all this stuff about rebellion and questioning authority, and ‘going rogue’ on both sides of the political equation, but in the end it’s all McRebellion, a matter of fashion and not of conviction. It’s like a Presbyterian minister who’s thought to be “Dangerous” because he parts his hair on the left side rather than on the right, and only shaves every other day: It means *nothing*.
I agree entirely, ‘bot. In fact it’s my theory that the whole “teenage” and “rebellious youth” theme was invented by marketers, in order to cut a particular demographic out of the herd and use the tension created by the separation to sell more stuff. Before WWII, there were no teenagers, in the sense we think of them now. They were children on their way to being adults, gradually taking on responsibility. They longed (most of them) to be grownups. A boy got his long pants at confirmation (or Bar Mitzvah) and he was darned proud of them, and anxious to enter the adult world.
Exactly, Lars. Now we have “The Youth Culture” and its’ accompanying level of maturity.
Lars,
I’ve said the same thing many times about teen-agers and WWII. However, prior to WWII I don’t think they were children on their way to becoming adults, I think they were adults. Most American kids prior to WWII were working full time jobs by their mid-teens. Many were married by 17, even 14, 15.
Good point. I’ve long held that the simplest way to solve the problems of juvenile delinquency and youth gangs is to repeal the child labor laws.
Just kidding, just kidding. Sort of. Mostly.
We live in a society that encourages an arrested development. Some of us make our way through it alright, but many do not. I’ll bet the 18 year olds who sign-up for the armed forces are much better adjusted, as a group, than the ones who go to four year Universities.
Amen. We don’t have a teen, we have a young man, and we were careful to tell him that on his 13th birthday. I don’t like the teen culture, I don’t believe teens have to rebel. I do believe they have to find their own way, but that it can be done in a respectful way, as it was done centuries before James Dean.
Some of that is justified, of course. Society is more complex, it takes a lot longer to learn to type than it does to learn to write by hand, longer still to learn how to use a computer, email, etc. As a result, our ‘latency period’ has to be extended to allow us to take all this stuff in. This is inherent in civilization. I assume ancient Romans were complaining about how long childhood was unnaturally stretched out, “Why back in my day, I could already fell a boar with an arrow by the time I was eight!”
That said, extending our latency period to the mid-30s seems excessive, particularly since much if it is just in service of entertainment and consumer culture, and the strange disconnect most people have between what they see on TV and what they think real life is like. It’s not really strictly an American problem, either. It’s kind of a unviersal western thing, and even Russia has had a serious problem with it since rejoining the west. Japan’s fought with it ever since they were adopted by the west at the end of WWII.
There are *true* rebels, of course, but they’re few and far between, and generally smacked down hard and fast. I once wrote a play about the Founding Fathers being resurrected in the modern day, and realizing in about 12 hours that the US Government needed to go, and so they start a revolution against the system they, themselves, set up, and they get killed (again) by the system they, themselves set up.
Society is not more complex. That is a canard. I was probably a 100+wpm typist by the age of 8; probably before I even learned to write cursive. I can do calligraphy, that took longer to learn than typing.
What do you think has a greater learning curve; learning to care for and ride a horse, or driving a modern, automatic transmission car?
The vast majority of the delay in our 20 year olds entering the work force is self-induced. Most European countries treat Accounting, Computer Programming, Business Administration, Elementary Education… as trades. After High School you take courses in the subject and are apprenticed to an organiztion that does the work you want to do. At first you are mainly in class with a few hours a week on the job, then, as each year progresses the class time reduces as the on the job time increases. Sitting in classrooms in sweat pants taking 15 hours a semester of Accounting and mickey mouse pre-requisites for 8 semesters and never setting foot in an actual accounting firm and making journal entries is a crazy way to make Accountants, but that’s what we do in the U.S.
I blame James Dean, the original model for the whining, callow, ignorant, pouting child-man.
Not a bad choice at all. I’ll nominate Jack Kerouac as well.
Ok that’s funny. I didn’t read all the comments before commenting above, so I guess I heartily agree with you.
Nah. American culture has *always* liked the bad boy, the rebel, the man of no real book learnin’ but a strong passion. That’s the cowoy myth in a nutshell, isn’t it? The guy who doesn’t give a damn for the law, but always does the right thing by his own personal code? The beaten-down stranger who’s seen too much and just chucks it all to start a new life, and doesn’t give a damn for the manners and customs of the people around him? Isn’t the Civil War frequently put forward as the final triumph of “Ordinary Folks” over the last vestiges of old world class and custom?
It worked to our advantage when we had a frontier and world wars to win, we needed to be scrappy, but without a clear goal that same ‘cowboy’ concept turns in to damn smelly hippiedom.
My response to that (and I could be mistaken) is that I don’t think Americans always celebrated the rebel simply for his rebelliousness. The rebel represented the individual grounded in moral truth, in opposition to an elite grounded in privilege and traditions which no longer served the moral purposes they had been established to promote. It wasn’t until after WWII (I think) that we began to think that rebelling was in good in itself, that “every man [should do] what was right in his own eyes.” It followed a loss of faith in objective right and wrong.
We all sound like old men. Just putting it out there.
I think what we have is a branding issue. Back in the 60s we allowed worthless bums, drug addicts, and hippies to be rebranded as “counter culture revolutionaries” and today we have a culture that paints slackers and other worthless layabouts as quirky, fun people rather than ticks on the fun bag of society. It’s not necessarily rooting for the bad boy as much as it is trying to convince ourselves there is no such thing as a bad boy, everyone is just misunderstood or unfortunate now. We’ve become intellectually dishonest with ourselves and that has become an incubator for idiotic moral relativism which we in our endless quest to rebrand everything now call being “a progressive”.
I miss the cat.
Yeah, I think I might bring it back. The cat was awesome.
hey, I am an old man…but I didn’t like James Dean when I was his age. For some reason I just couldn’t wrap my head around seeing a whining pouting poofter as a role model.
And those ticks on society, well, I suspect they’re only tolerated on the coasts in the enclaves where they either live on trusts, media, or they live off the government.
And I suspect that even in those enclaves, the ticks are not especially welcome.
@ Lars: I didn’t say the Myth of the Rebel was entirely self-serving, or destructive did I? At least one half of it is personal growth, and always has been. Unfortunately, like I said, without a moral compass to use as guidance or even to oppose (Which is also a kind of guidance), the whole “Rebel” thing just turns to solopsism, which is what it’s largely become in our time. “I’m a rebel because I like the Replacements, and any drunken fratboy who likes the Replacements must be a rebel, too.”
@ Rufus: Speaking as a guy who grew up in the 80s, with a dad who grew up in the 50s, he was utterly bewildered as to how complex and stressful my life was as a teen. It was only a generation later, but it was like I was growing up in a completely different country than him. Just because things look easy from the outside doesn’t mean they are. I mean, when you were a kid in high school, did you have to contend with kids pulling guns on you between class? I did. Riots in your school? Been there, done that. Drugs? Rape on school grounds? Abortion? Devil Worship? Suicide? These were all fairly commonplace things in the high school I went to, and my school was regarded as something of a countryclub at the time, compared to the older schools all around us. Lemme tell ya, if you’re 14 and someone pulls a gun on you, it’s pretty damn stressful. And it doesn’t really get better the second time you do it. But you learn to keep your head down, and you just keep going to school in the warzone regardless of how awful it is because there isn’t an alternative. And if it was that bad 25 years ago, I can only imagine it’s vastly, vastly worse today. The stories I hear from my teacher friends certainly make it work that way.
But maybe those kids wouldn’t have the time for guns, drugs, sex, and general debauchery if they actually had to contribute to society and weren’t very much encouraged to live so damn irresponsibly.
I heard a study talked about on the radio (so my facts are shaky, but hey, that’s never stopped me before) that the top factors in the behavior of teens were:
boredom
money (too much or too little, although the study claimed too much was actually worse)
responsibility
amount of free time (again, too much or too little are both bad things. Too much and they are bored, too little and they have no time for consideration of actions)
It happens to coincide with my personal belief that we have it completely backwards as a society. We believe that giving a “child” the responsibility of helping keep a home and family going is mean, that having them contribute to society is taking away their childhood, and that they have a right to sleep in and play video games now because they will have to work the rest of their lives. However, we do make them responsible for having the knowledge of sex and violence on an unprecedented level. I believe it’s an incredible injustice to make them responsible for adult knowledge (although some of what they know I don’t, and don’t need to) and yet treat them as children. Very confusing at least.
So I guess I agree with both of you and that it’s a dangerous combination to have life be easier physically and so much complicated emotionally.
Republibot 3.0,
I guess you and I and are dads are about the same age and I’ll bet money my High School was worse than yours. No offense, but we didn’t invent anything new in our generation. Teen-aged girls have been getting pregnant for quite some time. I’m pretty sure the rate of teen-age pregnancies has gone down over the centuries. If you didn’t have a couple kids by the age of 16 in the 1300’s you weren’t worth the hovel you lived in.
Stress is not knowing how you are going to eat tomorrow. Stress is not knowing what the infection you have is, or how to cure it. I don’t care how stressful your school seemed, I guarantee you the life expectancy and morbidity rate of every kid who attended it is way higher than kids who lived in the same geographic area 100 years earlier. How many women died in childbirth in your community? It was extremely common up until the 20th century.
Have you ever talked to someone who went to a school 180 degrees different than yours? A kid whose dad had a great job, the family had a huge house, took awesome vacations… Most of those folks will bitch and moan about how stressful their lives were, and are; they worry about getting invited to parties, wearing the right clothes, the car they got when they were 16 wasn’t as cool as the car their buddy got. Our simian brains are hard-wired to find stress and those of us who don’t figure that out get caught up in it. Easily 90+% of the people who have ever walked this planet would trade places with you to have the conditions and opportunities you had in the ’80’s. There was peniccilin so you didn’t die when you got a cut that got infected, or when you got the measles. There was heat and air-conditioning. You had shelter. You had food. You had a magic box that bought the best entertainment from around the world right into your carpeted, heated, air-conditioned living room. You had a magic box that kept food cold and you had a magic box to heat the food. You didn’t spend 90% of your waking hours trying to find something to kill and eat. Think about a king living in the 1400’s. He lived in cold and damp conditions, when he had a headache, toothache or stomachache he got no relief. He might even have some “physicians” give him a blood-letting that left him worse off. His food didn’t have M.S.G. on it. With his fastest coach and horse team he could maybe travel about 10 miles in an hour, and that was a bumpy ride! His kidneys and butt would have been plenty sore when he got wherever he was going. It took him days and weeks to learn of news transpiring less than a few hundred miles away. He knew almost nothing about the world beyond a few hundred mile radius.
We all have stressful things happen to us. If we choose we can all focus on that, feel sorry for ourselves and wallow in the stress. Yet, in modern America it is literally true that most of the stress we have in our lives is completely self-inflicted. We bring it on ourselves. We live in a society where people pay to rent storage containers to store the possessions they own that no longer fit in their homes. It’s been one of the fastest growing businesses of the past two decades.
Read some history, my Man! You had it made in the ’80’s and you’ve got it made now. The problem with your life in the ’80’s vs. your dad’s is things got a lot more convenient and easy. People talk about all the problems we have with credit. The reason more of us have credit card debt than in your folks’ generation is there were no credit cards when your parents were young. You literally could not get a home mortgage with less than 25% down until the late 1980’s, so how could anyone in the ’50’s get “upside down” on their mortgage. There were no home equity lines of credit. If there were would the same percentage of people bite off more than they can chew? Sure.
Most all of us living in modern America make the stress we bear. Your folks didn’t have as many TV sets as you do. They didn’t own a microwave, a DVR or video recorder, cam-corders, electric guitars, and on and on… Confuscius said, “He who owns little is little owned.” That’s good advice most of us could learn from. Stress, real stress, is not having options. We have more options and choices than any humans who have ever lived. If we don’t choose wisely we can end up living very stressful lives, but it’s still much better to live in a world with too many options, than too few.
Just a bit on teen pregnancies…. they haven’t gone up or down much — they’ve moved from pregnancies of legally married 15 year olds to extended adolescence and putting off marriage and child bearing into the 20s and 30s for the most part. I’d wager a significant majority of teen pregnancies today would be kids in wedlock 120 years ago. I agree that times have always been tough, but never underestimate the power of strong social disapproval in a smaller community to suppress behavior that today goes unjudged and may even be celebrated.