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Much of Mannheim’s focus fell on the importance of “youth” in the analysis of generations. In stable communities (such as the European peasantry of the Middle Ages), youth is a simple biological distinction — the quality of being not yet old. But in times of social instability, youth becomes a source of difficulty, a problem. Mannheim was thinking of revolutionary eras, such as the early 19th century, when the movement from countryside to city was accelerating, and the status society of the restored monarchies was buffeted by a nascent bourgeoisie. It was a classic moment when the young people of a certain period became (in Mannheim’s terminology) an “actual generation”: “We shall therefore speak of a generation as an actuality only when a concrete bond is created between members of a generation by their being exposed to the social and intellectual symptoms of a process of dynamic de-stabilization.” Generations tend to get made by the people in them and by the times they live in when a span of time is felt by a biological cohort as one of crisis.
complements the granta essay
This self-fulfilling prophecy has turned out to be tremendously useful to ruling classes who find the remaining institutions of the welfare state frustrating. Because, after all, it’s not just executives who dislike the strictures of seniority and job security, they can explain—it’s also the millennials, who crave freedom and flexibility. An incomplete and accordingly corrosive image of society has developed out of this analysis, in which a class conflict gets portrayed as a war between the generations: everywhere the image of the autonomous, free-spirited millennial is being deployed against the geriatric, self-protective boomer. If teachers’ unions’ work protects seniority, this is said to hamper the desire of young teachers to flit in and out of jobs; meanwhile, it licenses charter school expansion. If older Greek or Italian workers protect job security, this is said to hamper the ability of the young to find work—and therefore justifies the expansion of contract and part-time work. Across Europe and the US today, the benefits fought for by older workers — especially in the public sector — have been represented as “unfair” to the youth, and the young are being mobilized against labor protections that they themselves have been taught not to hope for. What is taking place is a great expropriation of the futures of young and old, the roots of which are deeper and older than we are permitted to believe. Calling it a generation gap only swells the chasm opening up beneath our feet.
not like a novel analysis for me at this point but still a good summary
In 1989, when the Wall fell, the distant halves of Germany reunited, and we declared victory in a war against the Soviet Union that had been unofficially declared in 1946, I imagined our world would shortly change. I had always admired the sparkling, affluent suburbs as a child in the 1970s; politicians had told us we couldn’t have better lives in our cities, because it was so crucial to devote the national budget to massive military spending — to fund the wars in Vietnam and dozens of other places, to create space-age weapons and their equally fantastic delivery systems, including the ships and planes of the Navy and Air Force. When the US declared victory in this history-ending war to end war, I expected that at least some government spending would be redirected inward. To rebuild the underfunded public schools I had attended; to pay and reward good teachers and self-sacrificing doctors; to create neighborhood recreation centers; to fund after-school programs and athletics, neighborhood hospitals and parks; to provide treatment centers and clinics for the visibly ill people crowding the streets; to resurface our roads and build effective transportation systems; to provide a banking system that offered affordable loans, so that when I turned 16 the small businesses in my neighborhood could be run by people who lived in my neighborhood, who would hire me after school or in the summer; to make the technology available so that the radio station I liked could stay on the air after dark; and, yes, to pay the person we used to call “Officer Friendly” in the ’70s to walk his leisurely patrol around the neighborhood, acting like he cared about the people who lived there.
But none of this happened, you all. In fact, the opposite happened. After a brief and very minor drop in the 1990s, people for the next complete generation argued that military spending should be not just what it had been, but even greater, and that our lives in the cities should be even less like the lives of people in the suburbs. They argued that war was now endless, in fact — a part of the human condition. We should have a war on drugs, one that would push the incarcerated population past 2 million. We should no longer build schools in the cities but prisons, detention centers for “wilding” juveniles, and hire as many police as possible on the shoestring budgets of local governments. All the amenities that I had dreamed of, that I connected to the American way of life, were to be the unregulated province of private companies.
Second, I am certain that every one of us has the capacity to find very useful, very necessary employment. However, it might not be lucrative. Which is to say that while we might earn enough to eat, put a roof over our heads, and pay off our debt, the jobs that are at our fingertips require us to be servants of the public. We would be vulnerable, we would be humans, taking a public bus, being forced to share, having to reconcile our differences with strangers from all walks of life, perhaps purchasing only the things that we could afford right then, not on credit or future leverage but cash on the barrelhead just like the poor, no longer among the elites we know at this school, and perhaps not so wealthy. Perhaps not wealthy at all. We might be disappointed because we were not sharply upwardly mobile. We would have to face, for a period at least, that we had failed the American dream. We didn’t earn more than our parents, we didn’t have a larger home or a more exclusive social circle or wield more political or economic power. We weren’t living under the bright glare of glamorous reward. But it is at least possible that of the 21 million Americans enrolled in college, we have here among us some special abilities that have to be harnessed, developed, and then set free. It is quite possible that we have the capacity to engage in some special discussions, and to put into language what is in crucially short supply in America’s public places. One of our real challenges is whether or not we will freely make our voices, and our knowledge, and our skills and our learning about humanity available to the other citizens of this land. Those of you at this rally must help your fellow classmates, teachers, and administrators make choices that will benefit not the ranking, not the endowment, not the stock market, not the numbers, but the people, but humanity.
Back when we’d lived on the farm, my parents had listened to Sly and the Family Stone, Fleetwood Mac, the Beach Boys — music unheard in our house any longer, unless I put it on the turntable myself. They’d once hosted parties where all their friends got drunk and said funny things and played volleyball barefoot while wearing their hats at goofy angles. They were young, and it was the Seventies, but now the Seventies were over. Reagan had proclaimed morning in America, and the parties had stopped. Hangovers were no longer cool in this new dawn. My parents had even parted with their copy of The Joy of Sex, my favorite book of the hundred or so we owned, half of them Louis L’Amour novels. I mostly blamed Amway for the loss of everything fun and attractive in their lives. Now it was all work and church and boring sitcoms on the boob tube after dinner. I’d overheard one of my skeptical relatives call Amway a cleverly designed pyramid scheme built on a foundation of Christian sanctimony. Those words gave me the courage I needed to take a stand. With money I made bagging groceries at the Red Owl, I became a brand fanatic. I bought Crest toothpaste and Tide detergent and did my laundry separately from the rest of the family’s, to avoid using Amway products. This pointless insurrection left my father baffled. If I needed some token way of asserting my individuality, he said, then fine. Go for it. Waste your money on Tide.
He said, You know, I’m 67 years old and I’ve never stuck my pecker in a woman’s mouth. My wife wouldn’t let me. Not that I didn’t try. Jesus, I tried. You know something else? We haven’t had sex in eight years. I doubt we’ll ever have sex again. I envy you, buddy. You’ve got all the good stuff ahead of you.
[...]
I felt bad for the old man. It hadn’t occurred to me that anyone over the age of about 40 still felt sexual desire. Trying to picture him acting on it made me think of some freak carnival act.
lol
During our last month of confirmation meetings, at a time when I was supposed to be drawing near to the numinous embrace of the Holy Trinity, he tried every time to grope me, and every time I swatted his hand away. It became as much a ritual as our three cans of Old Milwaukee apiece. During our last meeting, just before I was to be confirmed with my classmates in a ceremony before the whole church, he tried with particular insistence to cop a feel while simultaneously straining for a kiss in the manner of the French. It was a terrible thing to see, the purple, swollen tongue of an alcoholic old man; it made me ashamed to be human. I knocked him away with a punch to the chest, a punch as hard as I could throw. He slumped in a corner of the couch, wounded. There were tears in his eyes, whether from pain or thwarted longing I wasn’t sure.
I mean it now. You guys be careful. I’d hate myself if something happened to you. You’re the best friend I’ve got left in the whole world.
He leaned in. I turned my cheek. He hugged me, nuzzling his stubbled jaw against the flesh beneath my ear, running one hand slowly south of my lower back. I closed my eyes and let him savor for a moment these affections, figuring they were a reasonable trade for the beer.
god
I stopped by his house one weekend unannounced, thinking he’d be happy to see me, thinking I’d score a bill. It was the middle of the afternoon, and the old man was drunk, reeking of brandy, slurring his words. His wife was away visiting her family in Iowa, so for the first and last time we sat in her domain, the living room. He said it was nice to have the place to himself. He could stay late at the bar if he wanted to, or drive up the road and visit one of his drinking buddies, a man his wife didn’t like him to see. Drinking had become not only his primary diversion but the ordering principle of his days. He spent less and less time at the bank, having ceded control to others. His back and hip were failing him. He moved awkwardly, gingerly, like a man breaking in a new prosthetic leg. For years he’d laid off cigarettes, but he lit one now. I grabbed the pack and took one too without asking.
You must be excited to graduate, he said. This is it. Your time has come.
Excited to get the hell out of here, I said.
He ignored me and played the pity card, as he had so many other times. He often said he was an old man with nothing left to look forward to, nothing but his friendship with me. Now he said he wished he were me. He wished he were in my shoes. Everything good was still ahead of me. He was just an old man creeping up on death, drinking the days away.
I confess I didn’t see the allure of my life. It felt like everything good was behind me, and I told him so. My basketball career was over. My girlfriend had dumped me, but not before we’d lost our virginity together. I was as heartbroken as only a recent novitiate in the joy of sex can be.
I doubt I could have told you at the time why I let him do it, but from twenty-five years on the answer is as clear as day. This was one part of my life where I had the upper hand. In school and at home I was subject to rules devised by others. I thought I was an adult — the overnight job, the car — but no one treated me as one. So be it. The adult world was an elaborate sham anyway, a web of unspoken disappointments, outrageous hypocrisies, crooked desires of unaccountable origin. I wanted to punch a hole in that web, but if that wasn’t possible I could at least feel righteous while punching an old man.
He wasted no time getting to it. He worked with a firm tenderness. His hands moved lower and lower. There was no doubt about where he was headed. He began to get pretty cozy with the contours of my gluteus maximus. I tried not to flinch as he pressed himself against me. I felt his breath on the back of my neck, his lips tickle my ear. He had me in a spot where he could have held me down if he wanted to, the sudden thought of which sent a charge through my limbs. I twisted my torso and boxed him upside the head rather viciously with my elbow. He slipped off the couch and let out a shrill cry as he landed on the floor. It took all my willpower not to kick him in the ribs while he lay there, whimpering.
Before I left I made sure to grab some beer for the road.
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