Continued from Diagnosing the Culture.
"Ima have to steal that song. Good way to let them hoes know the deal. They be buggin"
"o werd, i like that pic u left on the page, shitz crack"
"I MISS U SEXXXXXXXXXXY....I LIKE THE PIC TOO....HOLLA BACK WHEN U GET THIS"
"Whats good supastar...tell the fan club to fall back while i make my way to the front..HA..just seeing you how you're doing..stay fly, and get me babe"
[Notes from visitors to the "YoU hAvE nO cLuE WhAt Ur MiSSiNg!!!!!!" girl at MySpace.]
We're in the middle of an epidemic, and the kids are watching 20,000 hours of commercials for junk food.
The purveyors of the children's trash culture dominate. The responsible adults have bailed or been sidelined. The pimps continue to expand their reach.
"Unlike the computer, or a magazine or television, the phone is a piece of you," says an executive at Visa USA, explaining "a broad push by marketers to create a new generation of 'up close and personal' ads by delivering video, audio, banner displays and text clips" to cellphones.[1]
A critic notes that "this is part of the creep of advertising into every nook and cranny of our lives."[2]
In case the youngsters flick on the news, the pimps rule there too. As retired "Nightline" anchor Ted Koppel laments, most news programs "are designed to satisfy the perceived appetites of our audiences — most particularly, 18-to-34-year-old viewers, who are presumed to be partly brain-dead, though not so insensible as to be unmoved by the blandishments of sponsors."[3]
In former times there were calm spaces now and then. Today the shit torrent is non-stop.
"They are avid blog consumers," says a New York Times profile of a couple of the "millennials" (people born between 1980 and 2000) whose attention advertisers vie for. "They read celebrity gossip blogs like Defamer and PopSugar and shopping and travel blogs like Luxist and DailyCandy. And they learn of new sites through the tide of instant messages flowing into the pockets and onto the laptop screens of millions of young adults every minute of the day."[4] (The article includes some muted concerns from a researcher worried about lack of individuality, groupthink, and dependence on immediate feedback.)
It is as Charlotte Raven says, in her review of Is It Just Me or Is Everything Shit? "We're talking bad shit here." The book's authors, she adds, "are no longer susceptible to the culture's myths; they know that cool is a chimera."[5]
Today's young are enmeshed in a system. They think they're skeptics, but pursue a false cool that's been manufactured to exploit them.
Who might rescue the likes of Ms. "YoU hAvE nO cLuE WhAt Ur MiSSiNg!!!!!!"?
One possibility presents itself. Imagine a new influence — from a source having no commercial agenda at all. Imagine a personal connection — non-casual, intimate — with someone who comes from a different, less polluted world.
Someone, I mean, from an older generation.
Incidentally, YoU-hAvE-nO-cLuE's pix indicate she's a comely lass.
Whoops! We're face to face here with a social taboo, aren't we? Inter-generational romance. Suddenly everyone's hackles are up. Twenty thousand hours of commercials for junk food is barely remarked, but an older man with a young woman? That's "exploitation."
"It's almost as though the system encourages people to get sick and then people get paid to treat them," says former Beth Israel president Dr. Matthew Fink, commenting on how health insurers tend to reject cheap preventive measures for diabetics — like a $150 visit to a podiatrist — while readily covering extreme interventions — like foot amputations, which typically cost over $30,000.[6]
One can't lay out the blueprints for the conspiracy. But somehow, the system usually seems to take care of itself. The corporations are well fed; humans go hungry.
Insane numbers of young people are on prescription medications. Can this be understood in any way other than as the system taking care of itself?
In the sphere of communications, advertisers are fighting hard to get our attention. But some of us keep being distracted by other people. Is it an accident that we are being programmed, more and more, to mistrust and avoid that alternate information source?
There's a beautiful moment in Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 when Moore approaches a group of car mechanics, working together at a small-town garage, and interviews them about the government's terror warnings urging people to be vigilant.
"Never know what's gonna happen," one says.
All of them, it's clear, consider this statement sound.
"Never trust nobody you don't know," another offers.
The same fellow then tosses out an afterthought, which no one blinks at: "And even if you do know them, you really can't trust them then."
A similar siege mentality is operative here in Toronto. An exchange with a stranger who contacted me by email me last month is illustrative. She sent me this message:
I read a few of the articles you wrote on your website, and I
must say, I was impressed.Like an expert surgeon, you dissect and examine every aspect of
an issue, and then dissect what you've just dissected!Happy New Year!
Leah
That was nice; but perhaps meaningless. So I probed:
"Well, thanks. Which piece did you like?"
She listed several specific items on my site and added, "Very interesting stuff."
However, she opined, since I lived in Toronto (she too lived in the Toronto area), I should also write about Canada.
I felt differently; she persisted; so I wrote: "Well, give me your # and I'll try to explain ......."
Her reply said:
Hi Uriel,
Since I don't know you well enough, would you be comfortable giving me your
number instead?Take care,
Leah
I wrote back: "If giving out your # when the author of 'very interesting stuff' volunteers
to call seems too dangerous, maybe you're setting too high a premium on
safety in your life."
"That may be," she answered, "but as I'm sure you're aware, we do live in un-safe times, and I have other people to consider who's safety I also set a high premium on." However, she went on, "I am certainly happy to call you sometime if you would still like to talk."
"Nope," I emailed back. "The price is your #."
I never heard back.
So, returning to Ms. "YoU hAvE nO cLuE WhAt Ur MiSSiNg!!!!!!"
Her mind is filled with corporate prescriptions. What is most admirable in life is to be a winner — which always means something involving consumption: a thrilled absorption in transporting music; a statement of unique individuality via the display of brand-name watches, handbags, shoes; the efficient dispatching of one's personal banking at a laptop computer (why do the ads always show the computer user sitting cross-legged on the floor?? That would just cripple me). Plus, everything has to be extreme — soft drinks, sex, sports, travel destinations.
There's extremely little real human communication, however. What's stunning about YoU-hAvE-nO-cLuE's webpage at MySpace is what an extreme, gargantuan waste of time it all is. "Just stoping bye to show u some love well ihope ur newyear was the shit and all ur wish come tru iight then hit me bacc," reads a typical visitor's note. There's simply no particle of worth there.
YoU-hAvE-nO-cLuE is missing a basic insight about what it means to be human. It involves the brain; ideas; exchanging thoughts with others; weighing and comparing aesthetic viewpoints; and, at least once in a while, pursuing truth, insight and enlightenment.
I could contact YoU-hAvE-nO-cLuE; introduce her to new ideas; expand her horizons; show her how to better understand her world and live a more interesting life. Were she receptive, it's not unimaginable that we might develop a beautiful rapport of some kind. Ah, except that in her webpage's "Who I'd like to meet" section, she has:
I'LL TELL U WHO I WOULDN'T LIKE TO MEET...OLD PREVERTED WHITE DUDES!!!SO DONT EVEN TRY IT!!I'M NOT GNA RESPOND TO UR MSGS!!!AND DUDES WITHOUT PICS,DNT EVEN BOTHER!!!UGGGHHHH!!
Lest we forget, however, she does "love people in general."
Really, Ms. YoU-hAvE-nO-cLuE seems to have no conception whatever of the world beyond her mean and narrow horizons. She cannot imagine that I might have something valid, something interesting and worthwhile, to offer her.
In fact, one might well say ... she has no clue what she's missing.
But the attitude of this young woman is absolutely standard among her generation — like a manufacturer's mark identically stamped on each widget along an endless assembly line. It's ignorant prejudice, certainly, since numbers of "old preverted white dudes" have better values than most of her peers; better intentions where partners' welfare is concerned; better hygiene; better physical fitness; better performance; more wholesome sexual inclinations (as Naomi Wolf has written, YoU-hAvE-nO-cLuE's generation is "being taught what sex is, how it looks, what its etiquette and expectations are, by pornographic training — and this is having a huge effect on how they interact"[7]); as well as, obviously, better brains.
But as always, prejudice is impervious to reality. In a reversal of biology and word sense, it's called "perverted" when an older man evinces interest in a younger woman. The standard term is "creepy"; the standard denunciation the phrase, "He could be your dad" (laying bare the self-evident wrongness of it all). These formulations appear in a recent piece from the Sunday Times "Style Desk" that briefly considers such an affair, before properly concluding it'd be a bad idea.[8]
If even the liberal New York Times perpetuates this conventional bigotry, Ms. YoU-hAvE-nO-cLuE can hardly be expected to surpass it.
She's worse off; I'm worse off; but the corporations' transmissions suffer less interference. And as we acquiesce, the everything-is-shit quality of modern life (for humans) is maintained.
Notes
(Use your browser's BACK function to return to endnote reference above.)
[1]
"Marketers Interested in Small Screen," New York Times, January 16, 2006
[2]
"Marketers Interested in Small Screen," New York Times, January 16, 2006
[3]
Edited quotation from "And Now, a Word for Our Demographic, by Ted Koppel, New York Times, January 29, 2006.
[4]
"A Generation Serves Notice: It's a Moving Target," New York Times, January 22, 2006.
[5]
Edited portion of quotation in Diagnosing the Culture.
[6]
"In the Treatment of Diabetes, Success Often Does Not Pay," New York Times, January 11, 2006.
[7]
The Porn Myth, by Naomi Wolf, New York Magazine, October 20, 2003.
[8]
"So He Looked Like Dad. It Was Just Dinner, Right?" by Abby Sher, New York Times, January 22, 2006.
Article comments
1 - Zoe
This is perhaps the announcement that Uriel made to the whole world that he'd determined to leave us.