I liken growing up gen-x as being born after a cultural neutron bomb had been dropped aka, "the sixties". All the structures of "the fifties" were intact but everything had died. The whole thing was a sham and a lie but few people would admit it. Maybe that's also the reason for the popularity of zombies since then.
A zombie leadership class, still shuffling around attempting to do what it did before it died and mindlessly devouring anything that gets close? That's a good metaphor! :D
I wonder if this also might explain both of our attractions to philosophical Taoism. Responding to zombie nihilism with nihilism doesn’t go very far. I know that what draws me to the Tao Te Ching and Chuangzi, the Zen poets, etc is the simplicity and the spontaneous humor. And that all these types kept to the outskirts and away from the disaster of seeking power. Just a thought...
This is kind of how I have been feeling lately. I grew up right outside of a dying city in a "broken-collar" neighborhood. So that desire to build something different was baked into all of my friends. Unfortunately, the opioid epidemic ran right over many of them. It has been frustrating watching how things have been unfolding. I would say that we are obsessed with using outdated 20th century ideas to confront 21st century problems. Anyway I'm happy to stumbled across your writings. I look forward to reading more.
I've not heard 'broken-collar' used that way before, I'll remember that one. We haven't had a prescription opioid epidemic on the American scale here, but it just seems to be accepted that the drugs gangs will openly do whatever they want in some areas. People just treat it as normal now.
I started using it as a way to better describe depressed areas that were dependent on now gone blue collar work. As a term I feel it captures the essence of what I am saying. Open air drug markets are the norm here and I have picked up dozens of used syringes that dot my immediate neighborhood.
I left and hid away in the country, but I hate what its done to where I grew up. Not even just the people who use or deal, but everyone whose still there. For anyone who is anything less than rock solid, you just don't know if it will drag them in; and anyone can be in the wrong place at the wrong time when it comes to the guns and violence. I know of a few who have no part in it who got dragged in because of mistaken identities too.
I have thought about the country but honestly do love city life. Plus my financial situation makes it difficult to just up and move. I wish the drugs and violence weren't so integrated in the environment. I now avoid crowded events due to the prevalence of gun violence. On two occasions in the past month I left areas where minutes later someone got shot.
I'm not sorry I moved to be honest. The only thing about it I miss are some of the people.
I think it things are more extreme in the States than here, although I do wonder about the future. The younger people don't even remember the neighbourhood before it went this way. They don't know anything else.
I'm a bit older so my disillusionment with the Sixties came in 1971 when I went to the record store to buy a copy of John Lennon's "Imagine." At the time albums cost $2.80 but the quirks of inflation had raised the price, unknown to me, to $3.10. So I stood there in the store, looking at the smirking face of a millionaire, and sang to myself "Imagine this album didn't cost $3.10."
I have long felt that the Sixties to a certain group of people is like WWII - the last "Good War." In the Forties the Allies were going to save the world from European Fascism and Japanese Imperialism. In the Sixties, the hippies/yippies were going to save the world from racism, sexism, and a few other things. But eventually all the yippies became yuppies and traded their Birkenstocks for BMWs.
If people get nostalgic for the Sixties after watching "Woodstock" they need to sit down and watch "Gimmie Shelter." Visionaries like Martin Luther King have been replaced by race hustlers like Al Sharpton. By 1975 it was apparent to Bob Dylan that the Sixties were dead. Too bad no one seems to have listened.
Thanks for sharing, your story about 'Imagine' really seems to sum up where everything went.
The way Dylan is treated seems to reflect the wider cultural stasis: he's still widely thought of as the young protest singer in the broader culture, despite all those albums since.
I was a teenager in the 80s, in Luton, so your piece rings several bells. I was lucky enough to get out. My crowd were the anarcho punks. In my experience (and memory) we took from the 60s what we saw was worth keeping: the belief in peace and love as something to anchor to. Remember Crass?
I do remember Crass, although I was never really on the anarcho-punk scene. I think that by the time I was old enough to lie my way into gigs its energy had dissipated a bit. Hiphop and house were getting into full swing, though none of the boundaries between scenes were very solid anyway: that seemed to change for those who grew up in the 90's, though I don't know why.
I've never spent much time there, but I'd imagine Luton was very similar!
I may be a bit biased and perhaps the hippie thing had a longer shelf life in North America. I'm born near the end of the boomer generation and still retreat often to the 60s and 70s for those cultural touchstones where literally everything changed in a short period of time. That still amazes me. For example if you compare the period of, say, 1960-1979 and then 1980-1999, the first epoch is a more tumultuous sea change across any element measurable - politics, fashion, music, social mores, etc. (Yes, I'm grabbing punk as an outgrowth of what preceded it stylistically despite the internecine rivalry between the old legacy bands and say, The Clash, but bear with me). What annoys me to know end, however, is the smug hypocrisy of the elites who claim to have been from that era and somehow reflect its progressive and subversive values of the time. What a ruse. What we got was decades of hyper capitalist neoliberalism, war mongering and cancel culture. What's love got to do with that? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Here's my whimsical take on, among other things, how weirdly things have shifted: https://punditman.substack.com/p/time-kept-on-slippin-slippin-slippin
I liken growing up gen-x as being born after a cultural neutron bomb had been dropped aka, "the sixties". All the structures of "the fifties" were intact but everything had died. The whole thing was a sham and a lie but few people would admit it. Maybe that's also the reason for the popularity of zombies since then.
This is good stuff, brother...
A zombie leadership class, still shuffling around attempting to do what it did before it died and mindlessly devouring anything that gets close? That's a good metaphor! :D
I wonder if this also might explain both of our attractions to philosophical Taoism. Responding to zombie nihilism with nihilism doesn’t go very far. I know that what draws me to the Tao Te Ching and Chuangzi, the Zen poets, etc is the simplicity and the spontaneous humor. And that all these types kept to the outskirts and away from the disaster of seeking power. Just a thought...
I think so, the humour definitely softens the fatalism anyway!
My whole life has been about finding a way to respond to the deception.
Here I am firmly in middle age *still* at it. Ha!
This is kind of how I have been feeling lately. I grew up right outside of a dying city in a "broken-collar" neighborhood. So that desire to build something different was baked into all of my friends. Unfortunately, the opioid epidemic ran right over many of them. It has been frustrating watching how things have been unfolding. I would say that we are obsessed with using outdated 20th century ideas to confront 21st century problems. Anyway I'm happy to stumbled across your writings. I look forward to reading more.
I've not heard 'broken-collar' used that way before, I'll remember that one. We haven't had a prescription opioid epidemic on the American scale here, but it just seems to be accepted that the drugs gangs will openly do whatever they want in some areas. People just treat it as normal now.
I started using it as a way to better describe depressed areas that were dependent on now gone blue collar work. As a term I feel it captures the essence of what I am saying. Open air drug markets are the norm here and I have picked up dozens of used syringes that dot my immediate neighborhood.
I left and hid away in the country, but I hate what its done to where I grew up. Not even just the people who use or deal, but everyone whose still there. For anyone who is anything less than rock solid, you just don't know if it will drag them in; and anyone can be in the wrong place at the wrong time when it comes to the guns and violence. I know of a few who have no part in it who got dragged in because of mistaken identities too.
I have thought about the country but honestly do love city life. Plus my financial situation makes it difficult to just up and move. I wish the drugs and violence weren't so integrated in the environment. I now avoid crowded events due to the prevalence of gun violence. On two occasions in the past month I left areas where minutes later someone got shot.
I'm not sorry I moved to be honest. The only thing about it I miss are some of the people.
I think it things are more extreme in the States than here, although I do wonder about the future. The younger people don't even remember the neighbourhood before it went this way. They don't know anything else.
I'm a bit older so my disillusionment with the Sixties came in 1971 when I went to the record store to buy a copy of John Lennon's "Imagine." At the time albums cost $2.80 but the quirks of inflation had raised the price, unknown to me, to $3.10. So I stood there in the store, looking at the smirking face of a millionaire, and sang to myself "Imagine this album didn't cost $3.10."
I have long felt that the Sixties to a certain group of people is like WWII - the last "Good War." In the Forties the Allies were going to save the world from European Fascism and Japanese Imperialism. In the Sixties, the hippies/yippies were going to save the world from racism, sexism, and a few other things. But eventually all the yippies became yuppies and traded their Birkenstocks for BMWs.
If people get nostalgic for the Sixties after watching "Woodstock" they need to sit down and watch "Gimmie Shelter." Visionaries like Martin Luther King have been replaced by race hustlers like Al Sharpton. By 1975 it was apparent to Bob Dylan that the Sixties were dead. Too bad no one seems to have listened.
Thanks for sharing, your story about 'Imagine' really seems to sum up where everything went.
The way Dylan is treated seems to reflect the wider cultural stasis: he's still widely thought of as the young protest singer in the broader culture, despite all those albums since.
I was a teenager in the 80s, in Luton, so your piece rings several bells. I was lucky enough to get out. My crowd were the anarcho punks. In my experience (and memory) we took from the 60s what we saw was worth keeping: the belief in peace and love as something to anchor to. Remember Crass?
I do remember Crass, although I was never really on the anarcho-punk scene. I think that by the time I was old enough to lie my way into gigs its energy had dissipated a bit. Hiphop and house were getting into full swing, though none of the boundaries between scenes were very solid anyway: that seemed to change for those who grew up in the 90's, though I don't know why.
I've never spent much time there, but I'd imagine Luton was very similar!
I may be a bit biased and perhaps the hippie thing had a longer shelf life in North America. I'm born near the end of the boomer generation and still retreat often to the 60s and 70s for those cultural touchstones where literally everything changed in a short period of time. That still amazes me. For example if you compare the period of, say, 1960-1979 and then 1980-1999, the first epoch is a more tumultuous sea change across any element measurable - politics, fashion, music, social mores, etc. (Yes, I'm grabbing punk as an outgrowth of what preceded it stylistically despite the internecine rivalry between the old legacy bands and say, The Clash, but bear with me). What annoys me to know end, however, is the smug hypocrisy of the elites who claim to have been from that era and somehow reflect its progressive and subversive values of the time. What a ruse. What we got was decades of hyper capitalist neoliberalism, war mongering and cancel culture. What's love got to do with that? Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Here's my whimsical take on, among other things, how weirdly things have shifted: https://punditman.substack.com/p/time-kept-on-slippin-slippin-slippin