(cont.) Swingers, Boomers, iPad-Kids, et al.

pt. 2

When we left off last time, we were talking about boomers - specifically, their penchant for cartoons that sneer at young people (and their/our dependence on technology). This prompted me to wonder aloud whether there was any validity to my own concerns about “iPad kids,” etc., or if it was actually a sign of early-onset “Back-in-my-day”-itis. An important distinction to make, as nobody wants to be tarred with that brush (accused of being a boomer, that is). So we were very much hoping it’d be the former. Not because I’m ageist (not necessarily, at least), but because the latter would be a real can of worms; if it were the case that I had Type-1 Boomerism, it’d require an exhaustive re-examination of my fundamental assumptions, beliefs, opinions, values, etc. And nobody has time for all that. But we’ll circle back to this issue.

For now, let’s continue on in our “quest for truth” (i.e. look at some more cartoons):

I like this one because there’s a nice little nod to the “You know what this generation needs? A war! That’d straighten ‘em right out” crowd. If you want grandpa’s respect, go kill some civilians and get yourself a bit of complex PTSD, you worthless shitstain.

This sentiment is pretty widely held, believe it or not; the glorification of World War 2 (and of general military culture, really); a nostalgia for “back when men were men and women were women,” and all that. You see this all the time in the UK, too, with the “Blitz Spirit” role players (you get tons of guys - young ones - who still wear bowler hats and three piece suits) / the schmaltzy Keep Calm and Carry On™ thing (which is huge in the US, too, mostly with Disney adults - oh, and the people who still do online quizzes to see which Harry Potter house they’d be in. You know the crowd).

What I like about the War=Good school of thought is that essentially none of the people who espouse it were actually in any wars themselves: most of them are barely even 60, and a good deal of them are far younger than that. It’s not exactly “rocket surgery;” the generations who directly benefitted from the post-World War economic boom would like to reverse engineer another one. I’d probably do the same thing (once I was old enough to no longer be eligible for conscription, obviously). (If you need the spectre of a Noble Crusade to keep your economy going and to keep your national/societal identity intact, you’d think you’d want to reassess your priorities. Who knows.)

Thank god they [their parents] won though, huh? War = good doesn’t work to well as a motivational device otherwise. In the UK and [northern] US, it sort of can, I guess, with WW2 still less than a century gone. But it makes me wonder what crotchety old fellas whine about over in Germany. “Get your ass off the couch, you lazy fucker. When I was your age, I was helping helping smash windows for Kristallnacht.” Doesn’t have much of a ring to it.

(Not for nothing, Germany’s economy/its younger generations have done just fine without appealing to War/despite their… checkered relationship with war and militarism. How can that be???)

The other funny thing about the “We need a war!” shtick: we’ve had a bunch of wars since WW2. Plenty of young men did sign up/were forced into those - shouldn’t that have got us back on the horse? It’s almost as if the post WW2 boom was borne from a whole host of global factors - economic and political - and not least a good deal of fortune; simply sending young men off to die is not sufficient to “strengthen a society.”

For whatever reason, though, the big boys - namely, Vietnam and Iraq - don’t get referenced much by folks lamenting the “decay of western values;” how men have gotten lazy and soft, etc. As they say: Victory has a thousand fathers, but defeat is an orphan. (Not that these wars don’t get romanticized in their own ways - but more on that in another post.) Sure enough, the cartoon guys certainly seem to have a blind spot in this regard. We never see cartoon grandpas like the one above saying things like “When I was your age, I was fighting for control of a random hill in rural Vietnam that even our generals knew had no strategic importance. We won - at great cost - but abandoned it the day afterwards for the natives to reclaim. Then, back at headquarters, I helped mix napalm for the fly boys to drop onto civilians in remote villages. I still wake up in a cold sweat every night from the horror of it all……. [he drifts off, looking down into his lap, mournfully; eyes full of regret and shame and terror] …. What was I talking about, again? Oh, right. Uhh, get off the couch, you little slob.”

“Defeating the Nazis in Holland” is commendable, no doubt - but we certainly do like to cherry pick the romanticizable stuff from a time where there was lots of less useful shit going on. Selective memories, maybe. It’s never “get off the couch: when I was your age I was doing acid and going to Woodstock to try and get laid” or “When I was your age, I was protesting against the de-segregation of public schools.”

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We could spend all day picking these sorts of cartoons apart, but in doing so we’re allowing ourselves to get dragged into the mud, and that’s right where they want us. We’ve got to zoom out a little, otherwise we’ll miss the more important, broader point; the delicious irony of it all (which these comics all conveniently ignore): the fact that geezers are some of the most technology-addicted people we’ve got.

They may not have grown up with some of the higher-tech offerings we have now, so it’s not too surprising that they dislike/distrust the more advanced/immersive stuff; VR headsets and the like. I can see how all that could be a little overwhelming; fair enough. By that same token (the issue of accessibility, that is), I get that cell phones/certain other gadgets are likely a bit too small for them to see (what with the cataracts/glaucoma/macular degeneration), or too tricky to type on (thanks to the arthritis, et. al.).

Interestingly, though, “Tech = bad” goes out the window when it comes to the more rudimentary, simplistic stuff - the stuff they can figure out. That stuff takes a fucking hammering. They, like us, still use the most advanced gadgets they can - even if that just means TV (for their Fox News/MSNBC/Weather Channel/C-SPAN fix) - for huge chunks of their day. For christ’s sake, hundreds of millions of them still spend hours on Facebook to get their news and social interaction. Some even use it as a search engine:

Poor Joan.

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In fairness, this doesn’t give them enough credit. I’m making them sound somewhat zoned out/ disengaged. Not so. They’re happy to reach into their pockets when and where they can. Tech fluency and willingness to spend money on it are not as mutually exclusive as you’d think. Quite the opposite, in fact: that demographic has some of our biggest spenders - “whales” is what they’d be referred to as. How many stories do you hear about people being horrified to find out grandma Ruth or auntie Dolores bankrupted herself by plowing tens of thousands of dollars into Farmville, Clash of Clans, Bejeweled, Candy Crush, or some other variant of online gambling; any of these apps that are essentially slot machines in disguise. Not that these folks care if they’re disguised or not; actual gambling in general is huge, too: fancy-looking machines, comfy seats, flashing lights. They never stood a chance. Real slot machines, in particular, seem to have a particular hold over them. (I love that video so much - and there’s tons just like it. It makes me feel better with regards to our froggy brain damage - it’s not just the young people who are getting fucked after all. Misery loves company.) I’m counting this as “technology,” since these places use exactly the same research and mechanisms to gain and hold our attention.

So, yeah. This isn’t a moral divide, however badly they and those cartoonists might want it to be. If you think these people wouldn’t be just as conspicuously addicted as young people if they could manage to be, you’re out of your mind. If nothing else, this’d be thanks to the elephant in the room: they’re some of the most viciously horny people we’ve got. You think they wouldn’t have used dating apps in the 60s and 70s, had they been available? I can’t tell you how many dozens of old dudes I’ve sat beside/near on trains or at restaurants or even at the beach, just scrolling through TikTok for hours, watching bikini try-on videos, twerking tutorials, and the like. (Their wives/sugar babies are often next to them, and either can’t see the screens, don’t care, or are absorbed in scrolling of their own.)

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And this is what we’re up against. These people - the slot machine players - are the very same people who are chuckling at “phones=bad” comics (and who are running the country 👍 ).

This is all low hanging fruit, I know, but on a more serious note, it’s these sorts of shenanigans that give young people (who, in the US, are spending on average 9 hours a day on their phones/devices) the perfect excuse to dismiss any criticism: these old folks are the same ones that support a lot of outdated/regressive norms and attitudes, we can therefore simply disregard their disdain for technology as nothing but yet another example of their poor judgement and outdated worldview.

And this ties back, of course, to the societal issue we have with things having become so binary/polarized. Which means I’m in quite a pickle. We don’t really have a protocol to handle a situation as “complex” as: “A group with whom I disagree on one topic might be right about something else.” Let alone if you add in an extra layer: Whether it’s possible for someone whose motives/values are opposed to mine to stumble upon an objective truth (or at least something close to one).

I’m not above this. The prospect of agreeing - on any subject - with a cohort of people that enjoys and shares minion memes unironically is… less than ideal. The cartoon-enjoyers give the rest of us “iPad-kid-might-be-a-bad-idea” folks a bad name. There’s nothing worse than being un-cool/behind-the-times. Even if you aren’t actually those things, just being perceived as them is bad enough.

It’s like, I don’t know, growing up in a heavily sheltered Buddhist commune in India and getting a swastika (an ancient symbol of peace and cosmic balance and that sort of thing) tattoo across your back only to find out, upon your assimilation into the Western world, that your precious logo had been co-opted - and arguably ruined - by a couple of bad (albeit sharply dressed) apples.

Shit - what now? Do you have to get it lasered off? Or do you stand firm, and cross your fingers that people will take a second to hear you out?

Luckily, this phenomenon isn’t unprecedented; there’s all sorts of examples in nature of different species happening to share a trait or two, yet remaining fundamentally distinct - and thus retaining their sovereignty; their dignity. So maybe there was hope for me yet - the [metaphorical] swastika could stay!

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For those unfamiliar, when two things have traits that are similar in appearance/function, but don’t share a common ancestor, it’s called convergent evolution. One example of this is how bats and birds both have wings. People used to - justifiably - intuit that the species were related, but it turns out that the wings/flight thing developed in both species completely independently; it’s only by chance that the animals ended up looking/functioning similarly. Another example is how whales and bats both use echolocation. Or how humans and octopi both have “camera” eyes, where light goes in through a lens and hits a bunch of nerves (unfortunately, that’s about the extent of my ophthalmological understanding. Other than, uhhh, rods and cones?).

The opposite of this, if you were wondering, is divergent evolution, where two species who are actually related develop vastly distinct traits as they adapt to their respective environments (perhaps they were separated by a tectonic shift or a forced migration or something like that); we do this artificially with dogs, for instance.

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More usefully, in my case, the convergent evolution thing isn’t just a DNA thing. It also happens quite a bit when it comes to certain beliefs and ideologies, e.g.: Should race be a determining factor in the hiring process? The people who answer “yes” might be arriving at that answer from some pretty different angles. Here’s a little video satirizing this. (Using “woke” as a noun is, I know, a boomer thing to do, but if we can look past that.)

We see examples of divergent evolution in the way we think, too. One example is the US’s political system: the two-party system creates a false binary, making it seem like the parties are diametrically opposed. In reality, while the parties do have a few noticeable differences, those are mostly emphasized for show; at root, they serve many of the same interests, and exist as “mortal enemies” mainly just to legitimize each other. It’s like how the Harlem Globetrotters needed a loyal “sidekick” team to beat up on every night. Or like Batman and the Joker, etc.; they don’t actually want to kill each other, regardless of what they might say.

More on all this shortly.

(We’ll get to the swingers eventually, I promise.)

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P.S. I thought I’d add in a picture of me and my grandpa (may he rest in peace) at my 7th birthday party back when I was a kid. I wasn’t paying attention, obviously, but I think he was talking about how folks back in his day always made sure to share and subscribe, so that they didn’t get sent straight to hell.

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Here’s the next post: