wax
07-02-2007, 08:57 AM
This particular observation involves what I call “The Day After Error”.
I have concerns with my parent’s generation but it is important to understand that I fear a new medieval saeculum is “likely” based on some of those mistakes.
In 1983 “the adults” (which included both the artists and the academe that they supplanted) decided in their great wisdom to insure that we children learned important lessons through the popular media.
What they didn’t understand fully of course was that the lessons we actually learned were going to be very different from the ones they wanted to teach us!
First… they insured that every one of us would see “The Exorcist” by sending each of us home with a note declaring that we must not watch it under any circumstances!
A thinking adult could predict what we would do with the notes and we not only all watched it edited for television, we made sure that someone rented it so we could see “the good stuff” as well.
Had they never mentioned the film at all few of us would have heard of it of course but as we viewed it lessons were learned that those adults could never had predicted.
I suspect that a percentage of us nomads experienced the exact problems that the adults feared we would by viewing it, but a few of us learned that one must become evil to destroy evil.
It remains to this day the only film that ever frightened me personally (but more on that later) because the enemy was not the little girl but something one could not fight in a way that a 14 year old male could understand.
Yet the girl was “saved” even if we didn’t understand exactly how she was saved.
The second lesson attempted was actually forced on us all with a zeal that to this day is hard to comprehend. Our teachers informed us that we must watch “The Day After” because it would be an important learning lesson.
It would be a moment for reflection and community togetherness that none of us would ever forget.
They might have been right in the latter part but they were very wrong concerning what lessons some of us would take away from it.
The day after “The Day After” we were herded into class to talk about this important movie and the important lessons it had to teach.
I noticed that we nomads had been split into two very different groups.
Many of us reacted as Angie Schuck did, “If there is ever a nuclear war I hope that I am killed on the very first blast,” she declared with a tear in her eye.
I suspect that this was the reaction the adults were hoping for because she was given a great deal of support for her response.
It of course started a discussion of how nuclear weapons should be banned and that the use of them by anyone insured that no one would survive… after all we are enlightened human beings and we must protect the world from our own self-destructiveness.
But she represented only one portion of my generation.
The teacher singled out Danny Ogle and asked him what he would do if the bombs were to fall tomorrow. Danny didn’t volunteer the information, he was asked so he responded.
“I would gather all of the guns and ammunition I could find; take over Cub’s Food’s, and I would kill anyone that got within shooting range!”
The teacher laughed momentarily and then moved on, “Seriously though… how would each of you help your neighbor and maintain contact with your government?”
The conversation moved on but Danny wasn’t kidding. And I found myself realizing that I would probably join him instead of lying down to die like Angie wanted to do.
The point is that by the age of fourteen, Danny and I had been trained to become feudal warlords long before he fully understood what they were (I of course had been exposed in other ways to the concept).
We had been trained for it with lessons that had been intended to teach us something very different, but they were lessons none-the-less.
Angie saw that movie and saw desperation which created fear, we saw that movie and saw hope… we saw moments that could lead to glory.
So what lessons did we learn that were unintentional?
First we learned that empathy and foolish emotions should be avoided if one doesn’t want to die (I am assuming that you recall the film of course) and we saw that we could survive a nuclear war if we were lucky enough, quick enough, and if we didn’t make “stupid” mistakes.
Lessons like: if you are in a basement waiting out radiological fallout, don’t follow some idiot girl outside (who you had just met by the way) or your hair will fall out just like hers!
If you notice strangers gathering around your safe house kill them… don’t talk, Don't ask questions, just assume that they are after your stuff and kill them before they can kill you (Danny noted that he found that example from the film especially stupid and I had to agree with him.)
The point is of course that while the adults expected us to view the breakdown of governmental support with fear and a reinforcement of how important community is we had already decided that if the government was doomed to fail anyway… then anyone who wanted to survive should kill the soldiers in the trucks and take the supplies for themselves.
For those of us who reacted this way, morality wasn’t really involved… or at least our perception of morality had become skewed by our perception of what morality actually was in an emergency.
Angie could give up if she wanted, but we had been taught not to do this… indoctrinated into the idea in fact.
I had been indocrtinated by my father to a greater extent than my peers, but society had planted the seed in them as well.
* * * *
In order to explain how that was done one would need to understand what I have come to call, “The Heston Paradox”.
Charlton Heston was my generations “Grey Prophet” for lack of a better term.
Our parents, in the seventies, loved to watch films in which the hero either died in the end, weeping about “loving one another” or some nonsense, or ran screaming in the streets attempting to tell everyone how things had gone so horribly wrong.
We nomads were far too young at the time to understand concepts like disillusionment, and the “art” that it could produce, but we understood that Charlton Heston was a would be hero with only one obvious flaw.
There was only one reason why he died at the end of a film with a spear in him or that he fell to the sand screaming questions that no one was around to answer, and we soon realized that if only that flaw were removed the conclusion (which was always ironically abrupt) could be avoided.
If only he didn’t care, he could have rode off into the sunset.
We started to rewrite those “foolish” endings for ourselves, if only in our own minds.
Our heroes were very different; in fact we demanded changes that the popular media didn’t quite understand.
We didn’t want to hear what “Mad Max” had to say, in fact the less he spoke the better!
All we wanted to see him do is take his vengeance and move on.
And we went farther than that… much farther.
When Hollywood offered us a hero we often chose the villain instead.
We didn’t care about some guy from the future sent back to save a doomed mankind; we wanted the machine to be our hero.
“Someone who can’t feel pain, who can’t be bargained with, who will not stop until you are dead!”
We wanted him so badly that Hollywood was forced to rewrite almost everything they had in order to fill that need.
We didn’t watch Jason in “Friday the 13th” to see some camper survive… we didn’t care if any of them survived. We wanted intent, and the resolve to carry that intent through. We wanted Jason to kill, and keep killing.
Freddy was a madman of course, but he got his point across, and that is all we really wanted because the one mistake our heroes didn’t make was forgetting what the end goal was.
So… what will happen if my generation encounters “the flimsiness of the social contract” as Strauss & Howe predict we will?
I am afraid to say that we will force a complete collapse even if it could be avoided, and some of us will do it with a horrid sense of glee!
I am sad to report that some of my associates approached Y2K with more excitement than trepidation. And more than a few of them were disappointed when the predicted collapse did not occur!
I am not sure how I feel about that.
I have sat at least a few down and asked them if they truly want the horrors that such an event would bring and of course they consciously deny such a desire, but I fear that subconsciously the desire is much harder to quell.
And again, it is just a thought. Yet I don’t see any reason to predict a reinforcement of the social contracts that our forefathers defended. *
We (adults born between 1961 and 1981) expect to someday kill to keep what we have.
We also expect to kill to take what others have.
But it isn't completely our fault: our parents wanted us to see how horrible life could be if man did not learn to love one another... if we all didn't join hands and sing songs together.
The problem of course is that we knew that could never happen.
So the choice left us (subconsciously) was simple really:
Fall down and cry over a half submerged statue like Heston did at the end of Planet of the Apes... or take the girls with your guns and teach those monkeys a lesson or two concerning genocide!
I have concerns with my parent’s generation but it is important to understand that I fear a new medieval saeculum is “likely” based on some of those mistakes.
In 1983 “the adults” (which included both the artists and the academe that they supplanted) decided in their great wisdom to insure that we children learned important lessons through the popular media.
What they didn’t understand fully of course was that the lessons we actually learned were going to be very different from the ones they wanted to teach us!
First… they insured that every one of us would see “The Exorcist” by sending each of us home with a note declaring that we must not watch it under any circumstances!
A thinking adult could predict what we would do with the notes and we not only all watched it edited for television, we made sure that someone rented it so we could see “the good stuff” as well.
Had they never mentioned the film at all few of us would have heard of it of course but as we viewed it lessons were learned that those adults could never had predicted.
I suspect that a percentage of us nomads experienced the exact problems that the adults feared we would by viewing it, but a few of us learned that one must become evil to destroy evil.
It remains to this day the only film that ever frightened me personally (but more on that later) because the enemy was not the little girl but something one could not fight in a way that a 14 year old male could understand.
Yet the girl was “saved” even if we didn’t understand exactly how she was saved.
The second lesson attempted was actually forced on us all with a zeal that to this day is hard to comprehend. Our teachers informed us that we must watch “The Day After” because it would be an important learning lesson.
It would be a moment for reflection and community togetherness that none of us would ever forget.
They might have been right in the latter part but they were very wrong concerning what lessons some of us would take away from it.
The day after “The Day After” we were herded into class to talk about this important movie and the important lessons it had to teach.
I noticed that we nomads had been split into two very different groups.
Many of us reacted as Angie Schuck did, “If there is ever a nuclear war I hope that I am killed on the very first blast,” she declared with a tear in her eye.
I suspect that this was the reaction the adults were hoping for because she was given a great deal of support for her response.
It of course started a discussion of how nuclear weapons should be banned and that the use of them by anyone insured that no one would survive… after all we are enlightened human beings and we must protect the world from our own self-destructiveness.
But she represented only one portion of my generation.
The teacher singled out Danny Ogle and asked him what he would do if the bombs were to fall tomorrow. Danny didn’t volunteer the information, he was asked so he responded.
“I would gather all of the guns and ammunition I could find; take over Cub’s Food’s, and I would kill anyone that got within shooting range!”
The teacher laughed momentarily and then moved on, “Seriously though… how would each of you help your neighbor and maintain contact with your government?”
The conversation moved on but Danny wasn’t kidding. And I found myself realizing that I would probably join him instead of lying down to die like Angie wanted to do.
The point is that by the age of fourteen, Danny and I had been trained to become feudal warlords long before he fully understood what they were (I of course had been exposed in other ways to the concept).
We had been trained for it with lessons that had been intended to teach us something very different, but they were lessons none-the-less.
Angie saw that movie and saw desperation which created fear, we saw that movie and saw hope… we saw moments that could lead to glory.
So what lessons did we learn that were unintentional?
First we learned that empathy and foolish emotions should be avoided if one doesn’t want to die (I am assuming that you recall the film of course) and we saw that we could survive a nuclear war if we were lucky enough, quick enough, and if we didn’t make “stupid” mistakes.
Lessons like: if you are in a basement waiting out radiological fallout, don’t follow some idiot girl outside (who you had just met by the way) or your hair will fall out just like hers!
If you notice strangers gathering around your safe house kill them… don’t talk, Don't ask questions, just assume that they are after your stuff and kill them before they can kill you (Danny noted that he found that example from the film especially stupid and I had to agree with him.)
The point is of course that while the adults expected us to view the breakdown of governmental support with fear and a reinforcement of how important community is we had already decided that if the government was doomed to fail anyway… then anyone who wanted to survive should kill the soldiers in the trucks and take the supplies for themselves.
For those of us who reacted this way, morality wasn’t really involved… or at least our perception of morality had become skewed by our perception of what morality actually was in an emergency.
Angie could give up if she wanted, but we had been taught not to do this… indoctrinated into the idea in fact.
I had been indocrtinated by my father to a greater extent than my peers, but society had planted the seed in them as well.
* * * *
In order to explain how that was done one would need to understand what I have come to call, “The Heston Paradox”.
Charlton Heston was my generations “Grey Prophet” for lack of a better term.
Our parents, in the seventies, loved to watch films in which the hero either died in the end, weeping about “loving one another” or some nonsense, or ran screaming in the streets attempting to tell everyone how things had gone so horribly wrong.
We nomads were far too young at the time to understand concepts like disillusionment, and the “art” that it could produce, but we understood that Charlton Heston was a would be hero with only one obvious flaw.
There was only one reason why he died at the end of a film with a spear in him or that he fell to the sand screaming questions that no one was around to answer, and we soon realized that if only that flaw were removed the conclusion (which was always ironically abrupt) could be avoided.
If only he didn’t care, he could have rode off into the sunset.
We started to rewrite those “foolish” endings for ourselves, if only in our own minds.
Our heroes were very different; in fact we demanded changes that the popular media didn’t quite understand.
We didn’t want to hear what “Mad Max” had to say, in fact the less he spoke the better!
All we wanted to see him do is take his vengeance and move on.
And we went farther than that… much farther.
When Hollywood offered us a hero we often chose the villain instead.
We didn’t care about some guy from the future sent back to save a doomed mankind; we wanted the machine to be our hero.
“Someone who can’t feel pain, who can’t be bargained with, who will not stop until you are dead!”
We wanted him so badly that Hollywood was forced to rewrite almost everything they had in order to fill that need.
We didn’t watch Jason in “Friday the 13th” to see some camper survive… we didn’t care if any of them survived. We wanted intent, and the resolve to carry that intent through. We wanted Jason to kill, and keep killing.
Freddy was a madman of course, but he got his point across, and that is all we really wanted because the one mistake our heroes didn’t make was forgetting what the end goal was.
So… what will happen if my generation encounters “the flimsiness of the social contract” as Strauss & Howe predict we will?
I am afraid to say that we will force a complete collapse even if it could be avoided, and some of us will do it with a horrid sense of glee!
I am sad to report that some of my associates approached Y2K with more excitement than trepidation. And more than a few of them were disappointed when the predicted collapse did not occur!
I am not sure how I feel about that.
I have sat at least a few down and asked them if they truly want the horrors that such an event would bring and of course they consciously deny such a desire, but I fear that subconsciously the desire is much harder to quell.
And again, it is just a thought. Yet I don’t see any reason to predict a reinforcement of the social contracts that our forefathers defended. *
We (adults born between 1961 and 1981) expect to someday kill to keep what we have.
We also expect to kill to take what others have.
But it isn't completely our fault: our parents wanted us to see how horrible life could be if man did not learn to love one another... if we all didn't join hands and sing songs together.
The problem of course is that we knew that could never happen.
So the choice left us (subconsciously) was simple really:
Fall down and cry over a half submerged statue like Heston did at the end of Planet of the Apes... or take the girls with your guns and teach those monkeys a lesson or two concerning genocide!