Gratuitous Boomer Bashing

Ladies and Gentlemen, Mr. James Lileks screeding on a new play about the eviiiiiils of Hollywood McCarthyism:

It made me think (I was weeding today, doing lawnwork, and that lends itself to crank-think) of the perpetual adolescent strain in post-WW2 culture. Before the 50s, when there were actual problems like an interminable Depression and Nazis, adolescents were mostly unseen in the culture. You had kids, and you had grown-ups. Adolescents were young grownups, expected to adhere to the same general rules of behavior. It was an adult culture, and adolescents were the interns. The culture would tolerate some things like Bobby Soxers, but with wry eye-rolling amusement. After the war, though, the adolescent was not only the focus of the culture’s attention, he was taken seriously. He was an inarticulate oracle, a mumbling sage, a jeering jester with a switchblade. One of the dumbest lines in cinema is one of the most famous: asked what he’s rebelling against, Marlin Brando’s character in the “The Wild Ones� says “Whaddya got?�

Indeed. Furthermore, I'd say that the adolescent impulses about which Lileks rants are not only still present in the culture, they are in fact the dominant strain, a curious admixture of self-indulgence and self-loathing. It takes but a minute to recognize the way in which these forces have tainted virtually every aspect of modern society, from arts and entertainment to religion to education to family.

Now, it would be one thing if we lived in a vacuum, a place in which we could indulge such cancerous thinking in benign acceptance and just get on with our own lives. But we do not live in such times. Instead, it is increasingly obvious that we are facing an enemy that seeks not detente, but the abolition of our entire way of life, based not on pragmatic calculations of the balance of power, but on fanatical adherence to crypto-religious, Islamofacist militant views of the Way Things Ought To Be.

I leave it to Steve-O to provide the truly scholarly view of all of this, but my simple layman's opinion is that a society that does not believe in itself (as represented by the modern progeny of Brando's rebel-without-a-clue) will not survive the onslaught of one that does. And, frankly, really doesn't deserve to do so.