At the end of the show tonight (Cirque du Soleil's "Love") several of the performers were not only smiling, they were laughing. And I can see why. The show was full of ridiculous fun. Take the double-halfpipe rollerblade portion of the program, where four guys with white boots covering their skates and helmets cut to look like 60's British Invasion bowl cuts did incredible acrobatics in perfect synchronization. Significantly more interesting that anything the X games offers, and set, like the rest of the show, to The Beatles. Or the segment set to Revolution where a gang of acrobats lept from one trampoline to another, stopping on hanging nets, glass walls, or the giant telephone booth in the center. The whole show was like a giant acid trip (especially the part set to Strawberry Fields and replete with bubbles, whirling flag thingies, and dancers with Suessian props roaming the stage). And at the end, the cast was clearly in love with their work.
The first socio-political note I'll make regards the music. The whole thing is part fanciful acrobatics, and part semi-narrative of post-WWII history, set to the music of The Beatles. I was caught, as I watched, wondering what it must have been like to be there when They were. No other band or artist has had the unilateral impact of the Fab Four. I'm sure it can be argued that others have influenced more broadly or deeply, but none has provided the breadth AND depth of lasting devotion. Everyone knows The fucking Beatles. And their story informed, influenced and encompassed the trajectory of pop and counter culture in the perhaps the most influential period thereof. But I don't really need to tell you all about it. Mostly what I wanted to say is that while I remember that trajectory in my own life - Help and I Wanna Hold Your Hand in my mother's car, Strawberry Fields and A Little Help from My Friends in Harvard Square - it's important that we let the particular trajectory they represent pass on.
We owe a lot to my parents' generation. I won't go into all of it, but a lot. But we also owe a lot to the generation of kids who're coming up now, and my parents' generation can't give it to them. We are fighting a war now, like then, but it isn't Vietnam. And the old paradigms of the 60's don't fit anymore. Who marched against 'Nam and who fought in it are points that are virtually irrelevant to the challenges of the moment, and yet they inform and, worse, even cloud the judgment of the people who are most likely to make important decisions that affect the future. We all owe a debt especially to those who marched for Civil Rights, but the manifestation of racism now is no longer one that many of that age understand. Jesse Jackson and Andrew Young are as much products of their time as were Bob Dole and George HW Bush in the 90s, and they are fighting, with just as much futility, against an enemy that no longer exists. That isn't to say that racism, in the case of JJ and AY, is not a real and present problem, any more than it is to say that traditional values, for BD and GHWB, aren't being co-opted and changed into something different. What I mean to say is that when you're used to swinging a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Hammers are great, and they have their time in every generation, but we need people with a full tool belt right now.
I'm not the first to say that the world today is a lot different than the one my parents grew up in. The very real threat of nuclear holocaust is gone, and with it the certainty of knowing who was likely to hit us hardest, and how. Now we live in a world less like a boxing ring and more like a barroom brawl. We never know for sure who's going to swing at us, and we don't know if he's got a pool cue, a beer bottle, a knife, a pistol, or a high five. And where the Dodgers and the Volunteers, or the Marchers and the Cops, provided a contrast that was as binary as the black and white TV set it broadcast on, the current paradigm is much more confused. By no means do I mean to say that there weren't shades of gray then, what I mean to say is that the polar nature of these conflicts left an entire generation with a clear idea of who was right and who was wrong. And over the years since, we've seen exactly how that mindset plays out in the arena of public policy. Ronald Reagan and Tip O'Neill may have disagreed, but they got along. They may have cast one another's ideas as wrong, but neither, to my knowledge, cast the other as personally evil.
Enter the 90s. I can speak to those, since I was in the period of nascent sapience called adolescence. And I remember pretty well what it was like. It was Vietnam and Selma, only played out in the Capitol and the White House. Gingrich Vs Clinton. The Vast Right Wing Conspiracy Vs Privacy and Decency. Or cast another way, Family Values and Honor Vs. Perfidiousness and Debauchery. But that's the point. It was polar, and polarizing. And, after the disarmament of the right in the 70's, and the humiliation of the left in the 80's, it played out like a psychodrama of unresolved animosity from the poles that the 60's cultural revolution either created or expanded.
My generation, and the one ahead of me, the X-ers, watched it all play out from the comfort of our teens or early 20s. And to tell you the truth, looking back, it made us hate both sides. We grew up in a world most influenced by the commercial. Disgusting as our consumer culture is, it also had a certain uniting impact. Perhaps you and I disagree on how best to balance the budget, but we can all agree that Transformers was way cooler than the Power Rangers. The point, I guess, is that between the mass assimilation of popular culture, the expansion of individual opportunity, and the incredible growth and integration of information technology, the world we see is a much less binary place. And the world that teenagers today see is almost unrecognizably intertwined even to me. In people of my age, you won't find many with a clear answer on Iraq, at least not now that we're there. We see that there is still simmering racial tension and inequality, but there is no clear and great evil of segregation to overcome, nor any clear starting point to addressing todays problems. We can't save our steel mills by slapping a tariff on imports, not anymore. The problems of today require a much more complex set of tools than just a hammer, and yet, over and over, that's all I see in the hands of politicians of a certain age.
It's time to turn the page. Clinton and Gingrich did it in 1992. They pushed out the old guard of Bush and Thurmond and O'Neill, and packed the pre-War world away with them. The depression, Iwo Jima and Normandy, Korea, all these went out with them. As they should. But in came Montgomery, and Vietnam, and Watergate. And although some great things were accomplished in that time, the mindset of the 60s is also largely responsible for the chaos of the 90s, and for the last 7 years. Now it's time to let it go. Pundits look at Barack and say, mostly, that he has support of young, progressive, well educated people, and explain it away with some platitude about bourgeois popular culture. Or they see youth support, and spit out something about "rock-star status." What they're missing is the real reason we're turning to him. It's because he hears us. It's because we don't really want to listen to our parents bickering anymore, we want to make our future in the reflection of how we see the world as it is, not how we see the world as it was.
I'm sure that from the six of you who read this, I'll get 4 complaints about the accuracy of some part of it. I'll hear that I've got it all wrong, and that it wasn't so clear-cut, that there were always shades of gray. I'm not denying it. What I'm saying is that from the time JFK was shot, from the time Dr. King started marching, through the Civil Rights Act, and the Womens' Lib Movement, and the Summer of Love and Vietnam and Watergate, my parents and their generation were steeped in an Us Against Them mentality that I don't want to watch play itself out anymore. The Cold War's over, dead and buried almost 20 years. Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll are here to stay, but so are abstinence-only education, DARE and Jerry Falwell. At least they're here for the moment. And we have to somehow reconcile all of it if we're gonna get anywhere. I chose to do what I've been doing because I saw an opportunity to be represented by someone who sees the world (mostly) through the lens that I do. And that's why, like the performers at Love tonight, I left every day of it smiling.
The Beatles told the story of the 60s. The War was over, things looked good, and they were four nice, clean cut kids with a smile. The world got a little harsher, and they got an edge. The world got scary, and they got weird. They split up. One went commercial, one disappeared, one went off to make fun of himself, and one got killed. Between them, they played out most of what happened to their whole generation. And, in the show tonight, you could still see their influence. Kids younger than me and people old enough to be my grandparents were lip-synching, or straight singing along. We'll never forget what they created, or how they spoke for an entire generation, in some way. But we also have new music to listen to, now. It may be influenced by The Beatles, and we may recognize something of them in it. But we shouldn't try to make it Abbey Road, or compare it to Revolver. It's better if you listen to it on it's own.
And if you want to read a thought I liked from the Washington Post that kinda got this whole thought-train rolling...
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/01/bill_clinton_credited_reagan_i.html
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