Hat tip to arno, who posted this originally on Lindy's thread.
Nostalgia Is A Mental Disease
Yeah. I used to read Doonesbury. Of course I used to wear a puka shell necklace and bell bottoms with sandals made out of tire tread too, but I got over it. Sometime about 1979 if I remember correctly.
As someone born at the tail end of the "Me" generation, there is nothing funnier to me than watching the baby boomer generation as it slides into its oblivion. A whole generation dedicated to "me" is reaching its end; finding nothing but its fat corpulent corrupt self satisfaction for all their works. No monuments, no temples, no universities, no ideas. Just obsolete record collections and posters of concerts and glory days gone by. The sad thing about the "me" generation; when your life is about nothing but self satisfaction it doesn’t leave a whole lot behind to be remembered for by the next generation.
Your generation sure has come a long way, Gary. And from the deepest part of my 'Generation Next' heart, I wish you'd all just keep moving right along. Your generation lived in the soft pocket that the generation before provided for your generation, and yet you hated them for it. The parents of your generation, the generation that survived the triplet horrors of the Great Depression, the struggle against fascism and finally the Soviets was your definition of evil, not the horrible things they fought against. They left behind a world that you could live in that was beyond anything they could have imagined. Freedom from fear, freedom from want, freedom of expression, and inside of a single generation you went and wrapped the whole thing around a telephone pole like a drunken teenager behind the wheel of a Maserati. It must’ve been hard for them to find the will fight starvation, Hitler and Stalin, but it must’ve been absolute hell for them to withstand the pain of their hearts being crushed by their own kids.
Thank you, baby boomers! Thanks for the sexual revolution, thanks for Chlamydia, herpes, oh and a very special thank you very much for the spread of AIDS. Thanks for a generation of kids raised in divorce. Thanks for rampant adolescent drug use. Thanks for crack cocaine and black tar heroin. Thanks for making a culture that makes the staggering hell of drug addiction something "cool". I guess it was just too much of stretch to make cancer cool so you went for the easy kill with the glamorization of the drug trade instead. Thanks to the generation of hedonists who produced a president who educated my kids on the phrase "oral sex", or the special nuance of phrase "no controlling legal authority". Thanks for turning baseball and football from the leadership and inspiration of Vince Lombardi to the stepping-stone to federal prison it has become. In 30 years we’ve gone from a culture that found the phrase "give em hell harry' vulgar to a president so vulgar as to defile the office of the White House by his personal acts. A generation who found the only vulgarity in their President was his being held accountable by the citizenry for those acts.
Thanks. Thanks, oh so very much.
But that’s ok Gary. My generation will be here after yours is soon gone to write the legacy of your lives. That is our revenge. We get to be the ones to tell your tale. And I do admit your generation did do one thing right, it created the internet.
Thanks man! You just gave the power of the press, once just reserved for people like yourself, to average wingnuts like me. "Power to the people" isn’t that how the song used to go? Well here it is baby!, only it seems that your generation really didn’t mean "power to the people" it really meant "power only to people who think just like us". Whoopsie Daisy! I guess that didn’t work out quite like you planned either. Is there anything your generation worked on that did work out? Well, yeah, The Internet. Now chock full of those people you and your cartoon now decry as 'unemployed losers'. Its funny the way you say it just like your parents called the people in your generation "in need of a haircut and a bath".
And my generation is now exploiting the internet. Did I say "Exploit"? Shall we call it what it is? Let's call it a revolution!( quick, get that Beatles record, where’s that "you say you want a revolution"- I so want to rip that to an MP3 and provide a link right here.) And since were throwing metaphors around, Those "barbarians at the gates" that you are hearing? Those "barbarians" are people like me, who can reach more people in an afternoon than you could do in the first 10 years of your underground 'fighting against the man' career. Only we aren’t underground, were that 'evil middle class' America you railed so much about when you still had hair on your head and not in your ears. Thanks to your generation, we don’t have to go through people you to talk to each other any more. We control the means of production comrade.
The 'silent majority' just got High Speed Wireless Broadband baby, and if you were part of my generation, you’d know what that meant.
But here’s a clue to the man who probably still owns a typewriter and a VCR:
You don’t set the agenda anymore.
You don’t determine what is cool and not cool.
We do.
Here’s just a bit of our manifesto:
We don’t think communists are cool. We know they are blood thirsty butchers every bit as evil as the Nazi monsters your fathers generation fought against 60 years ago. We went to school with people who had been evacuated from Vietnam, who escaped the new 'peoples socialist paradise' on rickety rafts only to be attacked by pirates, sold into slavery or killed in the south china seas. They weren’t escaping your version of a 'peoples paradise’; they were escaping reeducation camps and genocide. You told us that would never happen if we left Vietnam. You told us it would be peace. It was peace, but it was the 'peace of the grave'. The communists killed people en masse and then enslaved what was left of the people living in the south, but you said that would never happen. Your generation lied, people died. 7 million people died. And now lots of the Vietnamese lucky enough to get away live in southern California, and they vote Republican.
We don’t think America is a bad place. We think its a pretty damn nice place. We cant help but notice the people that risk their lives to come here are all smiling when the arrive, almost as if they were happy to be here. Imagine that! Perhaps they haven’t been reading your cartoon or listening to Air America. Maybe if we put Al Franken on the Air in Tijuana, that might stop the illegal immigration problem( oh if only we could warn them Gary, if only...) We don’t need to translate Air America to Spanish, the language of the upper class yellow coward is universal around the world. The only people we see in this country who stagger around unhappily are ones with the Kerry/Edwards bumper stickers on their cars. Maybe the new car smell in Volvos isn’t quite as country fresh as it is in our hummers...
We don’t think the military are baby killers. We honor our troops, We honor the past, We honor the dead. We respect the living. My generation didn’t need a draft, it volunteered! 'Greatest Generation'? Well, we think that gene skipped a generation. Your generation wants to lay prostrate at the feet of those who killed innocent people in Manhattan, wants to equate Mohammed Attas soldiers in Guantanmo to the likes of Martin Luther King in a Birmingham jail. This generation has given its life to go kill those who killed us and to help spread the liberty of democracy, yes - I said it, liberty , Democracy AND YES, FREEDOM to those who are enslaved. Your generation sneers at the very idea of such a thing. Your generation thinks the only thing the world needs to be liberated from is us. You think that because some of us don’t want to have our tax money go to 'piss christ' that we don’t have freedom, while women who were shot in the back of the head for kite flying in Afghanistan wonder just what the hell your generation is talking about.
We dont think the New York Times knows its ass from a hole in the ground. Does the name Jason Blair right a bell, oh how bout Maureen "I’m on vacation, more about rummy and poppy later" Dowd, or Paul' Cant find your socks? Its Bush’s Fault!" Krugman? Journalists... oh yeah, right on! We don’t think Woodward and Bernstein would be able to make an interesting blog even if they hired Sekimori to design it and Roger L. Simon to write for them. They sure as hell wouldn’t allow comments and trackbacks to fact check their ass. If Bob Woodward would've posted the Bill Casey book as a post on a blog, and insta-lanche would have crushed it in about 15 minutes. You don’t think so? Ask Isikoff about that 'Koran Flushing' story, you know the one that killed 60 people around the world and turned out not to be true. Isikoff lied, people died. That’s what your generation called journalism. My generation calls it "hack-tivism", because that’s what it is. Yeah sure, Isikoff, Dowd and Kristoff are getting paid for it. For now...
You're a leftist and used to be funny. P.J. O'Rourke was a leftist and now he's not, but he grew up, which is a normal thing for most men everyone except you, Michael Jackson and peter pan. Now he is in his 50s and yet he's still funny but he’s not a leftist anymore. I suggest you give him a call sometime. There is nothing wrong with trying to act like your 25, except when you’re in your 60's. There’s nothing worse than an old fart singing about teenage angst except for an aged elitist east coast ivy league cartoonist who just realized that he’s done nothing for the betterment world but shop on Sundays at pottery barn.
I have to hand it to you, you did change the world in one accidental, dont get your actual hands dirty way. You gave us the internet so that we could do the work you could never get around to doing. With the internet, my generation will help free the oppressed. With the Cell Phone we will bring down dictatorship after dictatorship. With the palm sized video camera, we will put a stop the suppression of freedom and human rights. The day of centralized control is over Mr. Trudeau, and if you were in my generation, you'd know that. The day of the subversive cartoonist has also passed, but I suspect you probably did know that.
"power to the people"? Absolutely friggin right. And At T1 Speeds no less!!
Oh, and we'll still be here after you and yours are gone. We'll remember you, but I don’t think your gonna like what we tell our kids about what your generation did to the world.
And hey, thanks again for the internet.
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