Generational Trolling in Our Time

Certain sectors of the Internet -- those whose ox is being gored this time, mostly -- are complaining about this here Time magazine cover story, which claims that Young People Today are lazy, unmotivated, and entirely unlike the upright older generations who, gol-durn it!, pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and Built This Here United States.

This is indeed a stupid argument, but it's not a new stupid argument. Time in particular trots it out every few years -- see the following two examples from 2005 and 1990, grabbed quickly and haphazardly -- but all of the lazy wing of American journalism (which is most of it) likes this "we're better than you people, even though you're young and healthy and pretty and thin and have your whole lives in front of you" story, because they are old and crabbed and grumpy and have their entire failed lives burning behind them.

I'm part of Generation X, which was massively vilified in the media throughout the late '80s and early '90s -- remember "slackers?"; that was us -- even though we were very much like other teens and twenty-somethings before us. Folks older than me can chime in about how the mass media similarly demonized hippies, "juvenile delinquents" in the '50s, and all the way back to the flappers of the '20s.

The point is that this is what the media does. They identify a stupid trend, don't bother to check to see if it bears any relationship to reality -- or if they've filed the exact same story every five years for the last seven decades -- and run with it, hoping for attention and ad revenue. You don't have to let the idiots troll you. Just tell them to piss off, and go on about your life.

And remember: in twenty years, you and your age cohort will be the ones complaining about the new generation of Lena Dunhams and Douglas Couplands and Abbie Hoffmans. So you'll get your chance in the smug asshole chair, don't worry.

(Also, an actual journalist named Elspeth Reeve -- one of the few who checks facts and has a historical sense and more than one functional brain cell -- has debunked this for Atlantic Wire already.)

The Things You Find When You're Not Looking For Them

This morning I stumbled across the website for The Outdoor Co-Ed Topless Pulp Appreciation Society, which is exactly what it sounds like: a group of New Yorkers (mostly young and female, from the pictures) who have been getting together for at least the past two summers to read Hard Case Crime and similarly noirish stuff, usually in Central Park, with their tops off. (There also seems to be a connected series of read-ins on the roof deck of some building, where full nudity is allowed.)

Yes, there are pictures, and many of those pictures will not be safe for work. That seems to be the point of it: it's more "look at us having fun reading and tanning with no shirts on" than "and here's what we thought of these books." I've chosen one tame image to put here, to illustrate the concept. (If anyone from OCTPAS comes by and wants me to remove it, my e-mail is in the right sidebar.) I'm also happy to see the focus is clearly entirely on the fact that they think this is a fun thing to do, and not on wanting people to look at them. (There's plenty of the other on the Internet already, of course.)

I was hoping for book criticism, but tits are pretty darn nice, too. I never want to be someone who complains about tits; that would be sad. But it would be swell if those readers wrote a tad more about what they read, particularly the ones that multiple topless readers enjoyed -- because that could make a completely wonderful back-of-book blurb.

Still, this is an activity that should be encouraged. Well, both of them: reading and public toplessness. Not necessarily together, I suppose, but there is a lovely chocolate-and-peanut-butter piquancy to the combination. The world turns out to be a little more interesting and exciting than I thought it was when I got up this morning.