Varifrank: Nostalgia Is A Mental Disease

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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.

Posted @ July 03, 2005 01:05 PM | Current Affairs

VF,

As I was reading your column, I found it unusually vitriolic. What got VF so excited? Who said what to whom to get VF on such a rant? Then I read the full Doonsbury cartoon, and all I can say is
Good on Ya!

Ray-Ray

Posted by: Ray-Ray at July 3, 2005 07:16 PM

Being sicker'n a dog will do that to ya. Ive got some sort of problem with my lungs. I cant walk, cant breathe, cant hardly talk. so what else is there? thats right baby,leftist scalp hunting.

Posted by: varifrank at July 3, 2005 07:23 PM

Mrph. Didn't boomers, once upon a time, pride themselves for their nonmaterialistic sensibilities, and sneer at people who valued things in terms of money? People who were capable of saying things like, "If what you do is valuable, why aren't you getting paid for it?"

How times do change.

Get well soon, Varifrank.

Posted by: jaed at July 3, 2005 08:50 PM

VF...

Yeah I was pretty torqued at Doonesbury too, and, I'm near the leading edge (age-wise) of the boomers (double nickle this year). But it's not the age alone. I mean Bush *is* one of us. And, I was mortified by Clinton as the first boomer president. We could have done soooo much better.

But it isn't age alone that does it. Yes, we did grow up in an insular bubble provided by our parents. But, it wasn't all that insular. We had the monthly crawl-under-your-desk-and-kiss-you-ass-goodbye exercises (Civil Defense drills). The article in the L.A. Times and with a graphic about what would happen if an A-bomb detonated at the L.A. Coliseum. (My neighborhood would have been radioacive glass.) Going to the County Fair and seeing all the home improvement displays full of fallout and bomb shelters, and how the Army would clean things up after a nuclear strike. Listening to the fallout reports every night on the news. Wondering if we were going to be blown to Kingdom Come in October '62.

It wasn't prehaps quite as insular as you might think. Looking back, it was a disfuctional world, in which even tho I had a loving mom and grandfather, I couldn't be sure I would wake up the next day.

But life is better now. We're taking the fight to those who would harm us, and I honestly feel much safer now than when I was 12, in large part due to the man at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave in D.C.

So, I'm just asking, don't lump all of us in there with Doonesbury... some of us did grow up, raise kids, hold down real jobs, fight & die in Viet Nam (not me), and make real, meaningful contributions to those around us. And some didn't, like Bill & Hillary.

But, they ain't me, and I don't want to be lumped in with 'em.

That's all.

Posted by: leelu at July 3, 2005 09:57 PM

I know I know. I have to be careful, but picking on an entire generation rather than one excremental cartoonist saves me from any potential lawsuits for slander.

I often remind myself that his generation is also the one that had the astronauts, and they are my heroes.

Theres just something about that generation that gets under my skin and when I think about people like trudeau always, and I mean ALWAYS siding with the socialist dicatorships against free people, it just makes my blood boil. "This thing of ours", blogging, is a miracle in the history of mankind. Its something people have always talked about, and yet there he goes sneering over his nose that the lowly blogger like that BC cartoon with the caption, "oh look sir the peasants are revolting", "hmmm yes they are...."

gack!

I was born in '61. So technically Leelu, I too am one of them, but I have never, ever had any association with that whole sixties youth rebel mentality. I dont remember anything of the 60's except 'the space race', of course Iwas 9 when it was all over, both the decade and the race. By the time I came of age in the 1970s, I had seen the left exposed for the fraud that it was in the persons of Jimmy carter and Jerry "lower your expectations" Brown. I voted for Andersen in 1980 because I couldnt quite get over the actor thing with reagan and there was no way in hell I would have voted for Carter. The change I saw in the country from 1980 to 1984 was enough to convince me that their side was wrong about this country and Reagan, god bless him, was actually right. The payoff came in 1989 when first the communist chinese revealed to all that they were just another bloodthirsty dictatorship and the soviets threw in the towel. And yeah, I was surpsied when it happened, but unlike Trudeau and his ilk, I was happy.

The truth of it is, It is we who live in the 'peoples paradise', and its idiots like trudeau and their anti-american bigotry that cant let them see that simple fact.

We live in grand times my friends. It is great to be alive.

Now, back to coughing like a two pack a day smoker...

Posted by: varifrank at July 3, 2005 11:17 PM

@VF: Whew! I bet you're glad that's our of your system! Funny thing is, it is not just an American phenomena. Here in Germany we have the same dead-end Lefties in charge who were part of the 1968 APO (extra-Parliamental opposition) groups who back then misbehaved badly, studied poorly, and had open sympathy for the RAF and their ilk. BTW, they still behave badly, and still haven't learned anything... since the present situation in Germany proves they don't know fecal matter from Shinola. Get well soon.
@Leelu: Please talk to your friends. There needs to be more of you.

Posted by: TheScout at July 4, 2005 07:43 AM

Okay, Frank.

I have to point out that you parents are also probably 'Baby-Boomers'. This sounds a little like what you are complaining about. Most of us boomers are not what you so ably bitch about, so give it a rest.

We have worked HARD for what we have accomplished, so quit complaining and get to work!

And, not all of this generation are the liberals you intimate us to be.

I have some prime generalizations about your generation, but, you know what? I am not gong to stoop that low.

The Hobo

Posted by: Robohobo at July 6, 2005 04:43 PM

'Tis true.

And so were all of my astronaut heroes. It is a puzzlement, is it not?

Posted by: varifrank at July 6, 2005 05:06 PM

Really outstanding writing

Posted by: Jake at July 12, 2005 08:14 AM

I bothered to go look at what Trudeau did that had you so incensed (not excessively easy, since the link requires you to sign up for any of them that old -- so I created a new yahoo EMA for them to spam to their hearts content).

I do agree, Trudeau has become just such an utter and absolute ASS it's amazing. His Condi rice caricatures were simply inexcusable. It's simply amazing how absolutely condescending and racist this useless prick has become, without any semblance of a clue.

I used to respect him, even though I usually disageed, but I just totally bypass his strips any more, to the point of literally forcing myself not to read them at all.

As far as the media's "tail end of its fascination with blogs", I predict that it will trail off until the very -next- time blogs once more ram the truth down their gagging, spluttering throats with a pate-de-foie-gras feeder.

Posted by: OBloodyHell at August 20, 2005 11:24 PM