The Best Years of Our Lives
Oct. 29th, 2000 08:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sanpaku_backupIt's depressing to me when contemplating the '00s (isn't it funny how last year everyone was speculating on "what will we call the new decade?" and now it turns out we don't need to call it anything) that in many ways for "my generation" the end has arrived. It happens that our salad days, the days our kids will ask us what they were like, have ended.
It's an odd feeling, getting older. There was this brief moment in my life-- between about 1992 and 1994 or so-- that I felt strangely sympatico with the world. The music on the radio was at least listenable, suddenly, not taken up with Richard Marx imitators. And there was this presidential campaign where for the first time in my life someone won that I wanted to win. Growing up I felt this was IMPOSSIBLE, and so did many confident Republicans I grew up with. (And they loved every goddam minute of it. If nothing else in my life, I have tried to be a gracious winner about stuff.)
Then one day people started wearing these pants, bell-bottoms, and you just knew that things had started to pass you by. "Back in the day..." (add crotchety old person noises), "we watched movies in school from the '70s, and people who wore bell bottoms were laughed at. And then these young whippersnappers..." I did manage to tell my high school students this, even, when I was a teacher, on the last day of school, and it felt important to say for some weird reason. Well it was funny, but the music on the radio got worse and worse, and you knew that the brief feeling of sympatico was over.
I was thinking about this on a national political kind of level. Some of the high school students I taught are kind of radical socialist types, and on a couple of occasions I talked that talk with them. They were very idealistic, so I told them about Michael Moore and Ben Elton and socialism and so forth. Still-- while it's probably mistaken to overgeneralize from my experience and theirs' to the country as a whole-- I think there's something to the idea that people who are around 30 now are ruined for idealism and always were. When you grew up under Reagan the only way to survive was tremendous irony. The left wing aspects of that didn't survive into the '90s, but the irony sure took off like crazy.
In a low-key, pop culture speculative kind of way, I think it's a lot like the 1920s, the decade of H.L. Mencken and Dorothy Parker and Scott Fitzgerald. The instant sarcasm of the past 10 years hasn't produced a lot of meaningful political change-- it's undermined it. But it has made everyone a lot more of a wiseass. Well, what happened in the 1930s, when serious political turmoil came, those '20s people were completely useless. A time that demanded earnestness had no interest in them any more.
I was talking to one of my former students and trying to ask her about the whole Nader vs. Gore kind of thing. I voted for Nader last time out. I had the luxury to do that. But where I grew up-- a rich Republican enclave of frat boys and cheerleaders-- it was just impossible to my mind that you could say there was no difference between being a Democrat and a Republican. Maybe I just didn't know of any alternatives, but in a broad way there were 2 kinds of people.
So I just can't fathom people who see no difference between the parties. I remember too well growing up under a president who wanted to count ketchup as a vegetable, who said that trees caused pollution, who joked about nuclear war. And got overwhelming LOVE for all that!
I want there to be a stronger Left in this country, but on a practical level, we are never going to have a more liberal president than Clinton. That is America, bucko.
Which brings me back to my point. When the Monica thing broke, I realized in a flash: "that's it. It's over. It's all downhill from here." You realized that your life and belief in politics had ended, because the '90s were over. Never in your lifetime would there be anything you recognized as embodying what you thought was good for the country. (Those 1920s wiseasses had no use for the New Deal. Their cynicism was too engrained.) They began sliding into what we'll have soon again, a replay of my childhood: Republican president, witless but beloved, cities crumbling again, recession, bad stuff overseas. It's tempting to say Clinton's behavior caused it-- would Gore have lost the election any other way?-- but all parties must end sooner or later, I guess. Even if Gore was to manage to win, he'd still lose in 4 years.
I can't really quantify or justify my sense that the years between 1995 and 1999 were somehow less nerve-wracking for people like me. I just feel that it is over and we have a lot of bad, dark years ahead. Even if they too have to end someday, at the end of them we'll be too old to enjoy anything anymore.
I found out my boss at work is 5 years younger than me. Where did that life go.
It's an odd feeling, getting older. There was this brief moment in my life-- between about 1992 and 1994 or so-- that I felt strangely sympatico with the world. The music on the radio was at least listenable, suddenly, not taken up with Richard Marx imitators. And there was this presidential campaign where for the first time in my life someone won that I wanted to win. Growing up I felt this was IMPOSSIBLE, and so did many confident Republicans I grew up with. (And they loved every goddam minute of it. If nothing else in my life, I have tried to be a gracious winner about stuff.)
Then one day people started wearing these pants, bell-bottoms, and you just knew that things had started to pass you by. "Back in the day..." (add crotchety old person noises), "we watched movies in school from the '70s, and people who wore bell bottoms were laughed at. And then these young whippersnappers..." I did manage to tell my high school students this, even, when I was a teacher, on the last day of school, and it felt important to say for some weird reason. Well it was funny, but the music on the radio got worse and worse, and you knew that the brief feeling of sympatico was over.
I was thinking about this on a national political kind of level. Some of the high school students I taught are kind of radical socialist types, and on a couple of occasions I talked that talk with them. They were very idealistic, so I told them about Michael Moore and Ben Elton and socialism and so forth. Still-- while it's probably mistaken to overgeneralize from my experience and theirs' to the country as a whole-- I think there's something to the idea that people who are around 30 now are ruined for idealism and always were. When you grew up under Reagan the only way to survive was tremendous irony. The left wing aspects of that didn't survive into the '90s, but the irony sure took off like crazy.
In a low-key, pop culture speculative kind of way, I think it's a lot like the 1920s, the decade of H.L. Mencken and Dorothy Parker and Scott Fitzgerald. The instant sarcasm of the past 10 years hasn't produced a lot of meaningful political change-- it's undermined it. But it has made everyone a lot more of a wiseass. Well, what happened in the 1930s, when serious political turmoil came, those '20s people were completely useless. A time that demanded earnestness had no interest in them any more.
I was talking to one of my former students and trying to ask her about the whole Nader vs. Gore kind of thing. I voted for Nader last time out. I had the luxury to do that. But where I grew up-- a rich Republican enclave of frat boys and cheerleaders-- it was just impossible to my mind that you could say there was no difference between being a Democrat and a Republican. Maybe I just didn't know of any alternatives, but in a broad way there were 2 kinds of people.
So I just can't fathom people who see no difference between the parties. I remember too well growing up under a president who wanted to count ketchup as a vegetable, who said that trees caused pollution, who joked about nuclear war. And got overwhelming LOVE for all that!
I want there to be a stronger Left in this country, but on a practical level, we are never going to have a more liberal president than Clinton. That is America, bucko.
Which brings me back to my point. When the Monica thing broke, I realized in a flash: "that's it. It's over. It's all downhill from here." You realized that your life and belief in politics had ended, because the '90s were over. Never in your lifetime would there be anything you recognized as embodying what you thought was good for the country. (Those 1920s wiseasses had no use for the New Deal. Their cynicism was too engrained.) They began sliding into what we'll have soon again, a replay of my childhood: Republican president, witless but beloved, cities crumbling again, recession, bad stuff overseas. It's tempting to say Clinton's behavior caused it-- would Gore have lost the election any other way?-- but all parties must end sooner or later, I guess. Even if Gore was to manage to win, he'd still lose in 4 years.
I can't really quantify or justify my sense that the years between 1995 and 1999 were somehow less nerve-wracking for people like me. I just feel that it is over and we have a lot of bad, dark years ahead. Even if they too have to end someday, at the end of them we'll be too old to enjoy anything anymore.
I found out my boss at work is 5 years younger than me. Where did that life go.
