Reverberations from times of cosmic awakening social moments

[JasonBlack]

(08-09-2022, 02:13 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: Depending on where the Millennial and Homeland generations divide, we are close to having an active Artist generation. Nothing has scarred the Millennial generation as the Civil War did to the Progressive Generation (they had a Civic childhood but became Adaptive/Artist when society became regimented and repressive. The Homeland Generation will not know a time in which there was no Department of Homeland Security, when crossing the Canadian or Mexican border was possible without at the least an "enhanced identity" card. Other generations older them will know of 9/11. but they will know about it only from news archives. The oldest have known little but Crisis. They will have seen as at most teenagers the perverse circus that is the Trump administration.

I expect them to do something that the Silent did, and did well, as that was the great cultural achievement of the Silent: the self-effacing comedy that few outside their generation have ever done. OK, there were portents in Gracie Allen and Lucille Ball (1910's), Don Adams , Larry Storch, and Don Knotts (early 1920's -- women got to do this first) Great comedy takes some of the stinging stuffiness out of life. Now that the great figures of Silent comedy have either died or no longer do comedy, we are going to need it.

To the extent that the neoliberals and especially Donald Trump continue to have a pernicious influence upon American thought, we will need them. We all know how it goes: you laugh, you cry, or you get angry. I'd rather laugh - wouldn't you? There is only so much grief and tragedy that one can face without becoming a wreck. There is only so much anger that one can harbor without destroying what one eventually regrets destroying or is compelled to experience sanctions (such as prison terms) for destroying.

Maybe we will see the 1T as a more civilized and far safer time. Maybe some of the strictures will steadily erode. Maybe the cultural lid of profit-driven politics and culture is cast off, and those Boomers who have followed the GI and Silent pattern of staying active physically and intellectually as late as possible while eschewing the vile trinity of drugs, alcoholism, and tobacco) and thus expanding an active lifespan and overall influence past age 65 may allow some of us to take a sort of revenge upon a money-driven culture and the politics of white male rage.

I hope you're right about this, because millennials fall flat when they try to be funny: too much political correctness and too little willingness to push the bounds of social appropriateness (for that matter, I share boomers criticism of them as musically bland and artistically uninspired. they deserve that criticism).