Maybe my age is showing, but I just don't get this generational thing. Do Americans in their 20s and 30s have any friendlier attitudes towards government programs than those in their 40s and 50s? And when Queenan - who's a reactionary misanthrope, by the way - writes about his "generation" isn't he really writing about American culture? Why generationalize it? is it more ideologically acceptable?
Doug
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It's a particular style of cultural propaganda that alloys various socio-cultural developments with psychological and individualized motives and thus ignores the broadly more determinant and forceful developments of government/capital policies and their dialect with society and history.
If you view society through the lens of consumer americana, the mythic envelop of mass culture, then there appears to be a boomer-generation that acts enmass and has various attributes, and these are given a psycho-motive basis constructed entirely within the mythological world of consumer americana. It is a closed system within which we as reading consumers can reconstruct our experience and history, and understand it's parameters within that circle of concepts----absolutely none of which as the slightest hint of the gritty business of capital, government social policies, war, or just about any other materially determinant base.
I think of it this way. It is like trying to remember youth by looking at high school yearbooks. This kind of social trivia is incapable of capturing either the struggles or pleasures of those experiences. And if by chance they do, then it is quite likely there was no struggle and even less pleasure.
I have a much better way to measure or gauge a period and my own position within it and that is to re-read some of the books, or re-look at some of the art of a particular period that I remember. Somehow this indirect but still cultural method works. I discovered this method by re-reading War and Peace, which I had read when I was nineteen. Along with almost every major scene in this vast novel, I remembered what I had originally thought, and gained an insight into the mind of who I had been in a far more concrete and meaningfully way, than if I had looked at various photos of myself and friends. Even more revealing was re-reading Flaubert's Sentimental Education, which I had also read the same summer as War and Peace.
The point isn't that Tolstoy and Flaubert are good writers and this was a good culture, rather than the bad culture of tv consumerism. The point is these acculturate in different ways, and the contrast between them sets-up a psychic dislocation or aesthetic distance from which it is possible to escape the immediacy, overwhelming presence and enclosed quality of consumer americana, the mythic circle of forms. It is merely one way to step outside the circle.
Now for an example. Consider David Hearne's post:
``...I showed the same quote [Doug H's question] to my father and he said that he agreed 100% with it. As he noted, there are many members of his generation who never would have gone to college without government aid. There was a general sense in his time of a social contract between high school students and the country. You didn't have to be wealthy or super-intelligent in order to take advantage of the benefits of higher education. Of course, this is simplfying things a bit. (Were the same advantages given to blacks and whites equally?) However, the notion that such an unspoken contract existed would undoubtedly surprise many of my generation and the current crop of teenagers...''
Let's be clear here. There was no social contract. The only reason why David's father or I ever went to college was the Cold War. Kennedy-Johnson put in place the National Defense Student Loan program (notice the words national defense) along with National Science Foundation grants and programs to specifically move masses of people into higher education that would ultimately insure US technological supremacy for the immediate and foreseeable future. And it worked.
It was part of Kennedy and Johnson's anti-communist paranoia after the first summits with Kruschev, that followed Sputnik, and various Soviet saber rattling foreign policy moves like crushing the Hungarian insurrection, the Berlin blockaid, Castro's alliance with the USSR, etc, etc, and of course the early phases of Vietnam. Once Vietnam was up and running then the wonderfully coercitive force of the draft (the stick) worked in tandem with college (the carrot) to drive a mass of working and middle class kids through higher education---and some of them revolted, big time.
These government/capital policies accidentally created a whole intellectual/critical underclass that drove the civil rights, anti-war, and anti-corporate/consumer americana movements that the powers-that-be are still hating themselves for ever subsidizing. They will never make that mistake again.
It is now much more stabilizing to milk the middle and upper middle class of all their excess income, consuming higher education for various class driven vocational certificates (MBA's) for their children. That's the game these days. So, our dear little clones (mine included) can help exploit the earth through all those electronic-media/biotech/healthcare and old fashion factories as sweatshop/maquiladoras that our US/multi-national capital are so dependent upon.
So, these government/capital policies are the more forceful determinants of mass consumer americana, and not the psychological-cultural trivia of baby-boomer self-indulgence. Rather the psychological emphasis on cultural analysis is used as a mask, a sort of quasi-intellectualized propaganda to mediate the much more material and nasty means of state/capital control of socio-cultural change.
Geeze, I thought we had been through all this before.
Chuck Grimes