Kid Schlock
With the combination of acuity,
brevity, and towering
unfunniness native to editorial
cartoonists, award-winning
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette doodler
Rob Rogers last week summed up
the epochal merger of Viacom and
CBS: An unsavory-looking punk
with a pierced nose and an
anachronistically spiked 'do
settles in to watch MTV's
Lauderdale Spring Break, only to
be confronted by the gray visage
of MTV correspondent Dan Rather
using terms like "jiggy." It was
a fitting comic for a news cycle
that had as a central theme the
culture contrast between
Viacom's youth-oriented
entertainment and CBS'
colostomy-bagging brand of
shuffleboard-style
entertainment. If there were
hints of barbarians-at-the-gates
paranoia in the sight of young
hoodlums looting the Tiffany
Network's family jewels, it was
more than made up for by the
spectacle of 76-year-old Sumner
Redstone, Viacom's Muppet-like
chairman, irrevocably replacing
Dick Clark in the role of
America's Oldest Teenager.
Redstone showed
characteristically shrewd timing
by leveraging his teeny-boppers
at a moment when their stock is
both hotly traded and
artificially depressed. At this
point, he is the only American
over 22 who isn't giving himself
a hernia trying to keep up with
the supposedly seismic shift in
our nation's age demographic. In
a characteristically understated
turn, the New York Times
Magazine, a few weeks ago,
announced the plight of
thespians facing the "biggest
teen boom in entertainment
history" — a phrase with
proximity to, say, "deadliest
pandemic in world history,"
reflecting the odd combination
of fascination and mortal terror
with which we tend to view our
under-20s. Clearly, the time to
buy had arrived when jittery
Miramax executives felt
compelled to make a
post-Columbine title change to
their "Killing Mrs. Tingle"
brand of box-office poison,
redubbing the film with the more
benign title Teaching Mrs.
Tingle (an empty gesture, it
turned out, as the Kevin
Williamson–directed
megabomb proved lethal only to
theater owners).
Of course, any good scare needs a
proximate cause, and the current
one has as its source the
mid-summer pall cast by
Woodstock '99's firestorm of
fear, an event whose ongoing
fallout merits a brief look
back, if only for the way it
perfectly captures the
ambivalence with which the older
generation inevitably embraces
the younger. In addition to
prompting junkie-cum-Sonny Bono
manqué Anthony Kiedis to
exclaim, "It's Apocalypse Now
out there," and launching
carpet-bomb attacks of
instantaneously clichéd
rock journalism ("As the flames
climbed high into the night / to
moonlight the sacrificial rite /
I saw Kid Rock laughing with
delight," wrote Rolling Stone's
Rob Sheffield), W99 set off the
latest round of youth-bashing by
folks decrepit enough to have taken
Wild in the Streets as a serious
generational cri de guerre
during its original theatrical
release in 1968.
"Don't trust anyone under 30" ran
the sub-headline of a column on
the matter in The Cincinnati
Enquirer. "The word 'Woodstock'
is out; you can't use that
word," a disgusted baby boomer
"wearing a psychedelic shirt"
told the Houston Chronicle.
"It's been blasphemed…. It
wasn't Woodstock," sniffed
Richie Havens, who performed at
the original Three Days of
Peace, Music, & Brown Acid gig
for the then-hefty sum of
US$6,000 (a payday the
self-styled "song singer" and
hitless wonder no doubt misses
at least as much as Wavy
Gravy's irrepressible
anti-Establishment antics).
"[The original] Woodstock …
marked childhood's end for a
tumultuous generation of
Americans and can be remembered
but not relived," smugged a
columnist for the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch, who cited no less
an authority than the Lizard
King himself in implicitly
stumping for the extermination
of today's younger generation:
"As Jim Morrison said, 'When the
music's over, turn off the
lights.' Somebody flip the
switch." Never mind the
self-evident dubiousness of
taking advice from Mr. Mojo
Risin' — a man so selfish he
choked to death on his own
vomit. Just keep your eyes on
the road while you grab yourself
a beer, buddy.
"Score one for the Baby Boomers,"
editorialized Newsday. "Their
Woodstock may have had mud and
stuff, but nobody charged $4 for
a bottle of water." (That price
tag, incidentally, may be less
damning than it sounds:
Noninflation-adjusted prices at
the original Yasgur's farm
festival ranged from about two
bits for a glass of water, to a
buck for a slice of bread, to a
whopping $2.50 for a hot dog.
Adjusted for inflation — and
for having to sit through
performances by acts like '50s
apologists Sha Na Na and
Confederacy buffs The Band —
that comes to roughly $4,500 per
ounce.)
Indeed, the mayhem at Woodstock
'99, including numerous sexual
assaults, was disturbing enough
that even a number of those
still on the inside of the
Logan's Run bubble city have
turned into generational
quislings. To wit, a piece in
the San Francisco Chronicle
written by 20-year-old Nathan
Kensinger, who, according to his
bio-line, "is honing his writing
skills at Hampshire College"
— and honing his skills at
heaping scorn upon his own age
group (a talent that can only
become more valuable in an
economy that will increasingly
bow and scrape before the
increasingly cranky and
nostalgic dictates of the
increasingly well-heeled baby
boomers). "These rapes were part
of a larger whole [of] the wild
weekend that Generation X
created," wrote Kensinger,
issuing one of the broadest
cultural indictments since Mick
Jagger musically blamed you, me,
and everybody except Lee Harvey
Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan for the
Kennedy assasinations in
"Sympathy for the Devil."
"Instead of laying blame on a
'small group of thugs' or the
'egotistical bands' for the
riots, assaults, and other
savagery that characterized this
festival, we should accept that
what transpired was the product
of Gen X's lack of moral
standards."
However fun such proclamations
are to make, they are doubly
mistaken. For starters, there's
the problem that youth —
vaguely defined as those under
30 — are, alas, a decent
bunch by most indicators
routinely trotted out to
document moral depravity.
Indeed, the same universal lack
of moral standards that gave
rise to the vandalism,
hooliganism, and felonious
assaults at Woodstock '99 may
have also somehow contributed to
the other ominous youth trends
that have been widely reported
on for a number of years now:
Kids these days volunteer more,
drink less, do fewer drugs, go
to school longer, and do better
on measures such as the National
Assessment of Educational
Progress than their counterparts
did during the Carter
administration. More troubling
still, youth violence is down,
just like all other forms of
violence (with the notable
exception of the US-sanctioned
bombing of foreign populations).
As the co-author of a biennial
survey of 16,000 high school
students conducted by the
Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention recently told The
Washington Post, "None of the
behaviors we studied showed any
sign of going up." Indeed, most
of the categories, including
carrying weapons and fighting,
showed significant declines.
Youth still has more to fear
from Age than vice versa, as the
baby boomers — most or all
of whom lack the long-term vigor
of a Sumner Redstone — head
into their benefits-grubbing,
stock-market-depleting
retirements, defining the human
lifespan up even as they define
youthful deviancy (and for that
matter their own) down.
Then there is the more obvious
and important sticking point
when it comes to broad-brush
generalizations: However
stunning and momentarily
pleasing they may be, they are
by definition overblown and
unnuanced, the sociological
equivalent of a Christo
installation (in fact, both
share the potential to kill). As
the literary critic Marcus Klein
generously acknowledged in his
introduction to American
Novelists Since World War II,
"Everything depends, of course,
on the kind of one's sample, and
any general characterization
might be sustained."
Such brutal honesty tends to take
the winds out of one's sails, or
in the case of Christo's 1991
installation of umbrellas in
California, it fills them with
gusts of air, causing them to
impale passersby. Either way,
it leaves us with less to say
about the kids today. Except for
the ironclad prediction that as
bad as they are today, the next
bunch will be that much worse.
Nick Gillespie is editor-in-chief of reason. This story originally appeared in Suck, and can be viewed in that format here.
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