Shoestring Century

What have you learned today from someone older than you?

Skip this paragraph if you want to get to the meat, but let the record show that I talked to my dad on the phone for twenty minutes today and learned the following:  what an L.O.I. is, how a pod of orcas acts when it’s hunting, that his annual physical went fine, that 7-Eleven stores used to owned by the Southland Corporation, that an almost unheard-of group of three bald eagles landed near my parents’ yard yesterday, what kind of real estate deal generally requires a broker, that the 6th annual West Seattle Huling Bowl was accidentally announced this year as the 16th annual West Seattle Huling Bowl, some details of what my sister and brother-in-law’s new apartment in California looks like, and that Washington State used to have a law that required the owners of a proposed liquor-selling venue to obtain approval from the leaders of any religious establishment within 150 yards, before the law was thrown out by the Washington Supreme Court for violating the first amendment.

I could have learned more in twenty minutes from Wikipedia, but how much of that free-floating trivia would I be able to recall a week from now?   Casual conversation are centered on known places and cared-for people.  That’s why their facts stick.  They provide back stories to the roads we actually travel and the buildings we actually inhabit.  Ahead of even the blogosphere, they form the first draft of history.

A 2004 study by researchers at Leicester and Coventry Universities found that, for the first time, sports and pop celebrities had become a greater influence on British young people than their own friends and family.  One of the men behind the study said that “star-struck youngsters are treating their famous role models as ‘pseudo friends’”.  Even though a noticeable chunk of my generation has made the choice to stop watching TV and seek out more fulfilling media (a poetry slam, a book passed amongst friends, a classical music performance, an art walk), the fact remains that we grew up surrounded by these media “psuedo friends.”  And where are they now?  I’m not asking “where is Bob Sagat now?”  I’m asking “where is Danny Tanner now?”   Can I remember a shred of what this TV father taught me, now that the screen’s died?

Culture is a process. Culture is a process by which values, information, and aesthetics are communicated between individuals, particularly between individuals of different generations.  There is no such thing as youth culture.  Of course, young people have always been the discoverers, the inventors, the avant-garde. But today’s old were young once.  Never before in history have the young been isolated, glorified, set aside, and target marketed just for being young.  Each pseudo-revolutionary generation, conditioned to distrust “anyone over thirty,” is left in a savage, barren state to reinvent the wheel.  Humanity stagnates.  This is not how progress happens.  When you think progress, don’t think revolution – think apprenticeship.   Progress is not the result of revolution; revolution is the result of progress.

Today I have a void where Danny Tanner once stood, wisecracking, because he and I were never in fact that close – we were never engaged in the process of culture.   He was beamed into my home in 30-minute waves, which held my attentions in a fuzzy blue glow… and then he blinked out.  Every sitcom offers its own phantom household, a parallel world of growth and excitement.  Meanwhile, in the one real life, we sit static – no one’s apprentice, the conqueror of nothing.  To destroy a culture, simply destroy the process of culture.  Distract the youth until the old are dead.