Generation Bubble
Archive for September, 2009
The Cloud of Unknowing: Glenn Beck and 9-11 Atavism
9-11 is only a Rorschach test, a mirror disguised as something else and held up before our believing eyes. We want life to be meaningful and when it is not or when it defies our chosen meanings, we call that disaster. Somewhere in the hazy cloud of debris raining down on Manhattan we thought we saw something: the devil’s face, American virtue, a clash of civilizations, or our own fragility. This is the reality of legerdemain: the suicide bomber is quicker than the eye. The act of flying an airplane into a building and the subsequent fall of that building are fundamentally meaningless. Viewed objectively through the eyes of god or the camera of a spy satellite flying far overhead, 9-11 is simply an event that occurred. The closely held truth of the magician is that magic takes place entirely in the minds of his audience.
Paradise Tossed: Three Theses on the Impossibility of Future Progress
It’s no secret that Generation Bubble’s political slant tilts to the left. Which is as it should be, I believe most days. But like any idealist, I suffer the occasional dark night of the soul. At such times I’m reminded of some words of Samuel Johnson’s. “None of the cruelties exercised by wealth and power upon indigence and dependence is more mischievous in its consequences, or more frequently practised with wanton negligence,” Johnson wrote, “than the encouragement of expectations which are never to be gratified, and the elation and depression of the heart by needless vicissitudes of hope and disappointment.” It is in the spirit of Dr. Johnson’s maxim that I present the following three theses.
Nonprofit Squeeze: Tax-Exempt Institutions Feel the Recession's Pinch
One would suppose these institutions held nothing but reliable, blue-chip stock on their portfolios, stock that, while certainly not generating spectacular returns, at least produced reliable ones. No, these nonprofits were after sexier stuff — all gamine gyrations of puts, calls, strikes and options. And I begin to speculate myself. I wonder if these nonprofits weren’t up to something altogether venal, exploiting their tax exempt status as a way of increasing their profit margin.
Brokedown Palace: Higher Education À La Carte
For the shock troops who have been drafted into doing the teaching at nonelite universities — the graduate students and adjunct professors — there may be troubled times ahead, as the demand for their labor is consolidated in various online-education sites. If community-college students are to become clients, and college can be supplanted with watching videos of old lectures and exchanging emails with a generic instructor out in the cloud of computer servers, then fewer adjuncts will be necessary (and those university departments that have traditionally taken in large number of grad students to teach undesirable undergrad courses will shrink — and perhaps as fewer are accepted into literature programs in graduate English departments, the topics of dissertations will become less ludicrous). Adjuncts could find themselves in the same situation as reporters, as local colleges go the way of local newspapers — to extinction.
Telescopic Philanthropy: The Pseudo-Solidarity of Recession Chic
Yes, the Great Recession can strip us of just about everything, but it cannot touch our many-layered, flip-chapeau, self-consciously ironic identifications. It’s comforting to know that while economic crises make the prosperous poor, it makes the poor poorer still. At least structures of class relations remain in place, having only adjusted downward to accommodate prevailing conditions. By choosing ironically to emulate the truly poor, we fetishize the choice as eagerly as any commodity. The choice alone keeps absolute equivalence at bay; as poor as we are, we’re never so poor as that if for no other reason that the truly poor cannot choose their poverty, while we tarnished, knowing angels of postmodernity always can.
The Looks Have It: Social Media and Pathological Narcissism
Given our current economic situation, having a nation of mirror gazers doesn’t bode well. It means that most of us are too damn fabulous to devote any time to stop the looting of the Treasury, to protest the closing of our public libraries (which almost happened to Harrisburg’s Free Library), or demand a stop to that wholesale destruction of the middle class that is currently going on. A glance at most Facebook pages will tell you that people still care more about running that sub-50 marathon or getting up the courage to suffer that first prick of the Botox-filled needle than considering what the United States will look like in ten years (needing substantial cosmetic surgery itself, undoubtedly).
Impractical Necessity: Selling Millennials on the Humanities
The latter particularly — knowledge work — would seem to throw a spanner in the distinction Nussbaum wishes to draw between pursuing knowledge for a job and pursuing it for more edifying, spiritual reasons. In an era like ours, in which work and play become increasing entangled (and not necessarily for commendable reasons), it’s hard to see how knowledge pursued for a career’s sake isn’t also knowledge pursued for one’s own good. Americans are famously beholden to the idea of self-actualization through work. That’s why they work harder, work longer and take less time off than their counterparts in other advanced nations. This mentality, though it might to some extent be rooted in Americans’ national character, hasn’t exactly been discouraged — and, indeed, had even been helped along — by corporations. So naturally thought about the whole of one’s life will at the same time be thought about one’s career; the two are in many cases indistinguishable, because, according to the master narratives of primetime one-hour dramas, advertising, and corporate in-services, reaching career benchmarks and reaping the fruits thereof, they tell us, are expressive of a life, in a very real yet vulgarized Nietzschean sense.
New Word Order: Contemporary Novels and Neoliberal Hegemony
Neoliberal political economy is nothing less that a coming-of-age story, complete with the requisite struggle against parental authority. To the state is born a little bundle of joy, the market, which the state does everything to nurture and protect. After a period of toddling and awkward youth, the market develops into a brilliant, multi-faceted creature. At this point, the state, incapable of appreciating the free-market’s many deep and subtle complexities, becomes more of a hindrance than a help, overweening in its abiding impulse to interfere in its child’s affairs — for the child’s own good, naturally. Against this parental impulse the market asserts its freedom, and eventually wins it. The novel practically writes itself.
Creative Class Consciousness: The Stimulus—Hipster Daisy Chain
Maybe the answer lies in a vibrant, robust ancillary economy devoted to aesthetic and cultural development. We can beautify, and beautify more, while keeping people busy in the bargain. This way they can give the lie to snooty ol’ Keynes’ presumption of their having no special talent. It will, of course, require great many more stimulus dollars than have heretofore been disbursed, but I, for one, would rather see fortunes go to starving artists and out-at-the-sleeves scholars than to fat cats.
Vile Bodies: Schadenfreude, Status Anxiety and Walmart Shoppers
Who are the people of Walmart, really? Are they truly deluded sorts who invite our sneers by jealously clinging to the trappings of their hair-metal glory days against the better advice of the fashion industry? Yes, many of them are gun-toting hicks and dentally challenged methheads, but they’re also the victims of a system of economic relations that forsakes broadly shared prosperity for the blasé depredations of crony finance. They’re overweight, undereducated untouchables, a contingent so abject and so abandoned to their low, catchpenny existences that they’ve even forfeited the right not to have their pictures snapped by snot-nosed postcollegiate pricks. Indeed, this accursed share of humanity is one of the few things still made in America.
Anton Steinpilz
Rob Horning
Ylajali Hansen
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