Posted on 07/16/2007 9:41:39 AM PDT by .cnI redruM
A certain segment of our nation’s publishing industry has long been parasitic and detrimental to our wellbeing. They drag our youth through the mud and leave them wallowing in shame and self-pity. If the Constant Reader enjoys an occasional periodical put out by Hugh Hefner’s daughter or the venerable and sagacious Larry Flynt, relax and read it for the artwork.
There are worse things a young person can do than pick up that issue of Playboy for all its articles and intellectual stimulation contained therein. One would involve smoking clove cigarettes, another, equally destructive habit would involve buying into the defeatist philosophy of generational whine put forth by Anya Kamenetz in Generation Debt: Why Now is a Terrible Time to be Young
Kamanetz posits her pathetic whine about debt and credit from the most hypocritical vantage point possible. She married a software engineer at Google after graduating from Yale and becoming one of the youngest columnists ever at The Village Voice. If she has money problems and credit card debt is keeping her up late at night, her outlay rate must be faster than the flow of water through the turbines of The Hoover Dam.
Kammenetz may have talked to all the experts about how young people can blow up their financial futures, and get stuck working a dead end job. However, she shows all the empathy for the downtrodden of Elizabeth Edwards criticizing her nextdoor neighbor’s landscaping efforts. Daniel Gross of Slate Magazine found himself oozing contempt for Anna’s tragic plight in the big, bad real world.
Look. It's tough coming out of Ivy League schools to New York and making your way in the world. The notion that you can be—and have to be—the author of your own destiny is both terrifying and exhilarating. And for those without marketable skills, who lack social and intellectual capital, the odds are indeed stacked against them. But someone like Kamenetz, who graduated from Yale in 2002, doesn't have much to kvetch about. In the press materials accompanying the book, she notes that just after she finished the first draft, her boyfriend "proposed to me on a tiny, idyllic island off the coast of Sweden." She continues: "As I write this, boxes of china and flatware, engagement gifts, sit in our living room waiting to go into storage because they just won't fit in our insanely narrow galley kitchen. We spent a whole afternoon exchanging the inevitable silver candlesticks and crystal vases, heavy artifacts of an iconic married life that still seems to have nothing to do with ours." The inevitable silver candlesticks? Too much flatware to fit in the kitchen? We should all have such problems.
As someone ten years older than the lovely and talented Anna, I’d lend her an extra dime if she was a little more original, and wasn’t already farting through silk. As long as people have been young and passably literate, the parasites have preyed on their sense of frustration. I date myself here as I wash down my Geritol and reminisce about what a cr***y author Douglas Coupland was and still is.
Coupland invented the whiney Mc-Job motif, while Anna Kamenetz was still applying to sybaritic, private universities and cheating in AP High School Classes. His ‘ground-breaking’ novel Generation X: Tales of an Accelerated Culture resonated for everyone who played hooky from work to participate in a national day of mourning after Soundgarden broke up.
I admit that I read the entire thing. I suffered through that one, and William Gibson’s Burning Chrome. I henceforth swore off reading the works of overpaid foreigners, whining about how bad the US sucked, while demanding payment for their literary genius in US Dollars.
I them embarked on a three-step plan that has dramatically altered my life. First, I first pulled my head out my butt, then I landed decent employment and third a married a woman who is way smarter than I am. It worked for me, you can try it too. It’s a straight-shot ticket out of the cry-baby thickets of Generation Debt.
Al-Quaeda should pay authors like Coupland and Kammenetz. These people give the unmotivated an excuse, the easily discouraged, a reason to quit, and the key role that our struggle to succeed plays, in shaping who we are as human beings, an unjust bad name. Except these two and other literary talents in their genre are worse than Lord Haw-Haw. They try and convince people to give up on more than just a war. They convince people to give up on themselves.
Well, then I’m at a loss. It’s up to the author to clear this up because keeping “if” and adding “it” makes no sense.
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