Friday, May 18, 2012
This is the season of generational twaddle. At graduation
ceremonies across the country, politicians, authors, actors, and businessmen
take to the stage to tell young people they are fantastic simply because they
are young. This year, the ritual is more pathetic than usual because there’s a
presidential election in the offing. And because the current occupant of the
White House won in 2008 in no small part due to his success with the “youth
vote,” he is desperate for them to repeat their blunder.
At the all-women’s school Barnard College, President
Obama spoke to the audience as if they were an undifferentiated mob of
“Julias.” I’m referring to the banally creepy, imaginary everywoman the Obama
campaign has conjured on its website to show that Uncle Sam is now both sugar
daddy and husband to the women of America. “Now more than ever — now more than
ever,” the president repeated, “America needs what you, the class of 2012, has
to offer.” By which he meant their votes for him, of course. But he couched it
in all sorts of familiar platitudes.
But in terms of naked pandering, few can match Vice
President Joe Biden. Last week, he told a group of college students visiting
the White House: “You’re an incredible generation. And that’s not hyperbole
either. Your generation and the 9/11 generation before you are the most
incredible group of Americans we have ever, ever, ever produced.”
Here’s a tip: When you hear Biden say, “And that’s not
hyperbole,” you can be sure it’s hyperbole. Actually, here’s an even better
tip: If Biden’s lips are moving, assume it’s hyperbole.
The conventional response to this sort of thing is to
claim that Biden is giving short shrift to some previous generation. What about
the “Greatest Generation” of the World War II era? What about the
self-proclaimed baby-boomer secular saints of the ’60s?
But such arguments are part of the problem. Sure, we can talk about age cohorts and make generalizations about them. But in a very important sense, there really is no such thing as “great generations.”
I was born the same year as Brett Favre, one of the most
successful quarterbacks in football history. I take no more pride in his record
than I feel shame for being born the same year as Divine Brown, the porn star
and former prostitute who was arrested for her work with Hugh Grant. Cult
murderer psychopath Charles Manson, Utah senator Orrin Hatch, “Brady Bunch” mom
Florence Henderson, and that guy from NPR, Carl Kassel, were all born the same
year (1934). What does one person’s birth tell us about the life of another?
Absolutely nothing.
Seriously, if your self-esteem is remotely dependent on
the year you were born, or on the accomplishments of people who happen to be
the same age as you, then you don’t have a lot going for you. If you spend your
days on your parents’ couch, working through cases of Cheetos like they were so
many equine feedbags, if bong maintenance marks the outer boundary of your
personal responsibilities, then I’m sorry to say your inadequacies aren’t
mitigated one bit by the fact you were born the same year, never mind decade,
as Mark Zuckerberg.
And yet that’s the point behind so much generational
piffle. Youth politics are the cheapest form of identity politics. At least
black people are black their whole lives (Michael Jackson being the exception
that proves the rule). Barring surgery, women stay women. But young people
don’t stay young. Moreover, we treat them as if they’re geniuses precisely
because they don’t know much and have little life experience. Of course there
are incredibly bright and knowledgeable young people. But as a rule we’re all
born stupid and ignorant, and that condition improves only as we become less
young.
That politicians pander to anything that moves is hardly
a shocking revelation. Nor is it stunning to see the White House treat young
people as a homogenized blob they hope to flatter and bribe to the polls come
November. To paraphrase H. L. Mencken, if there were a huge bloc of cannibals
in this country, the Democrats would promise them tasty missionaries fattened
at the taxpayers’ expense.
What’s dismaying is how much this sort of thing seems to
work. Part of what’s exciting about being young is the discovery that you are
your own person, the captain of yourself. Cheering at the idea that you are a
drone, expected to simply “act your age,” is a sad declaration of your own
self-worth.
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