07-26-2021, 01:45 PM
(07-26-2021, 06:58 AM)Anthony Wrote: I have always maintained - and still do - that 1998/99 is the boundary - because '98ers would have at least some hazy memory of 9/11, which ended the Pax Americana that began when the Berlin Wall came down - while '99ers would not.
David Hogg (who I can't stand) and Greta Thunberg will be listed as "Sample Living Members" of what I have dubbed "The Activist Generation" when Generations: Volume 2 comes out.
9/11 did not change America's fundamental economic assumptions. The band playing the siren song of a speculative boom didn't miss a beat.
There have been days of mass death more severe than 9/11 in America -- during the COVID-19 plague. COVID-19 has forced fundamental changes in American economic life that are much more likely to continue. We have yet to see the long-term effects on American demographics (it first hit liberal-leaning blacks and Hispanics and came close to throwing the 2020 election to Donald Trump, but now that the people dying of it are increasingly right-wing white people that may have an even sharper and more lasting effect upon the electorate.
COVID-19 is much bigger than AIDS (except upon the gay population of the time and later mostly IV drug users) in demographic effects. It will reshape American culture. If wars that kill smaller numbers of Americans cause a boom in war literature (the Vietnam War has created its own volume of literature) and the similarly pointless Holocaust reshape American thought even if it happened elsewhere, just think of what COVID-19 can do.
Much of what is macabre in medieval culture and that never really went away as an influence upon the psyche of creative people is the result of the Black Death. The horror isn't the same, but it will be fresh in the minds of creative people in the next few decades.
... as the Silent generation of comedians (their culture's strongest and most lasting influence upon American culture except perhaps for the Civil Rights Movement that was heavily Silent) die off -- Jackie Mason died a couple days ago, America gets deadly serious about things that should be silly. For now there is nothing funny about COVID-19, but once it is clearly over, Americans will find much to mock. That includes politicians and cause-pushers of the time that pooh-poohed the danger of the plague. Sure, Charlie Chaplin could mock Hitler in The Great Dictator before the tyrant could start killing on the scale for which he would become infamous... but it took considerable time for Mel Brooks to mock Hitler after the mass death of his war and of the Holocaust in The Producers. Mel Brooks was a comic genius at the time, but he is now very old, and we don't see much of him anymore. We all know how that goes; his creative career is likely over. At roughly the same time the crew of Monty Python's Flying Circus was making plenty of cheap jokes about the fatuous behavior of Nazis and British members of the British Union of Fascists and National Socialists.
As a Boomer I can predict how the Homeland Generation will treat Donald Trump: figure a script much like Quo Vadis, only played for laughs. Sienkiewicz, the Polish author who wrote the novel that became the basis of the movie, had the persecution of early Christians as his focus of horror. Nero was a ludicrous character, but the late great actor Peter Ustinov wasn't playing Nero for laughs. The Silent are now too old to come up with this, but the kids born around 2005 might see things that way. Like the Silent they will have much respect for institutions -- but not when those institutions go sour. Sienkiewicz made much of the lasciviousness of Nero as an insult to Christian values that fervently-Catholic Poles obviously saw as affront, and of the sordid practice of damnatio ad bestiae. Lions and tigers and bears, oh my? They did the dining. One can't make much of a joke out of people being fed to bears and Big Cats.
Donald Trump is not as sordid as Nero, Caligula, or Commodus.... but those bad Emperors cannot be played for laughs. Trump can, at least once the peril of any would-be imitators is gone. Twenty years after the war people could finally laugh about Nazis, as the ones still around were mostly ludicrous losers:
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.