Agrosexual

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During their New Moon promo tour a couple of months back, the Twilight Trio was on Jimmy Kimmel Live, and at the end of the show Kimmel let a few people from the audience ask questions of the cast. A girl came up to the mic with a question for Taylor Lautner. “I really like your shirt,” she said. “I was wondering, can I have it?” The running joke about New Moon, of course, is the extent of the shirtlessness perpetrated by Lautner’s character and his werewolf brethren. (It’s gone so far, in fact, that Lautner, who beefed up special for the role, has vowed to never appear shirtless in a movie ever again.) As Lautner struggled in response to keep from losing his shirt and his dignity, Kimmel, possibly the oldest person in the entire studio at that moment, interjected, “You know, I think people would look down on men for demanding the shirt off a woman.” Yet that this interaction seemed totally acceptable and par for the course to the otherwise teenage audience struck me as an indication of a potentially far lager trend a few days later, when I saw “The Christian Side Hug” video.

If you’re wondering what on earth is that?? The “Christian Side Hug” is a rap performed by a group of white kids at a Christian youth gathering, about a way of hugging while standing side by side with someone as opposed to facing one another and putting your arm around their shoulders or waist, because, “front hugs be too sinful.” Despite ultimately turning out to have been intended as insider “satire” (though not before passing very convincingly as both 1. A typically “ass-backwards” — to employ a Palin-ism — move from the abstinence movement of promoting celibacy while sexualizing even mundane forms of human contact, as well as, 2. A reason to weep quietly for the final, ignominious death — like a sad toothless crack-addict in an abandoned alley — of hip hop), I happened to see the Christian Side Hug video on the same day as the fallout from Adam Lambert’s American Music Awards performance, and to me there was a certain similarity between the two.

In case you happened to have missed it, or hearing about it, Lambert put on a rather racy, sexually scandalizing live performance at the awards show.

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Perhaps confusing the AMA’s with the MTV Movie Awards, which have no problem rewarding male makeouts, or, more likely, shrewdly pushing the envelope hard on the night before his debut album release, in his first televised performance since the finale of American Idol, Lambert “shocked” the audience at Los Angeles’ Nokia Theatre and the millions watching live on ABC by closing the show with a risqué rendition of “For Your Entertainment,” the first single of his album of the same name. Highlights from the controversial performance included simulated oral sex from a male backup dancer, a make-out session with his male keyboardist, and a giant mirrored prop set up on the stage so the audience could see the looks on their own shocked faces.

According to Rolling Stone, the producers of the show weren’t informed about the guy-on-guy kiss in advance, and after the show, Lambert told the magazine the musician he kissed is a straight man. In the aftermath, ABC canceled Lambert’s Good Morning America appearance slated for the next day, which of course only helped generate even more attention and fanfare for the artist, who has clearly become an expert at navigating the myriad controversies he’s racked up. To me, what connects Lambert’s performance and the Christian Side Hug and the Kimmel incident, as well as endless other examples from our current pop culture, extends beyond any particular sexual orientation and includes even abstinence itself. It’s an underlying aggressiveness to sexuality in general: agro-sexuality.

To be clear, I’m not talking about aggression enacted through sex, but rather about a militancy in the display of one’s approach to sexuality. The past decade’s proliferation of online profiles, digital cameras, and all manner of social technologies has demanded we approach basically every other aspect of our modern identities as a performative display. It only makes sense that sexuality wouldn’t be exempt.

When I was a teenager in the late 90’s the general approach to sexuality could easily have been described as “come as you are.” Kurt Cobain had died the year before I started high school, Britney Spears’ first album wouldn’t come out until I was halfway through, and in between there was a lot of Green Day, Jewel, Fugees, and REM. Rap was still busy beefing between the coasts to have gotten fully pornified yet. Heroin Chic, an aesthetic glamorizing a drug that destroys sex drive, was all the rage. Even Madonna was, by this time, more interested in acting and electronica than vogueing or kink. And AIDS was huge. People were still dying of AIDS then. As opposed to now, when people are living with it. Kids were obviously still having sex, but since there was some semblance of sex education going on under the Clinton administration they were getting pregnant a lot less than in the “abstinence-only” Bush era. Basically, aside from the effort pushing the word “safe” in front of it, sex in the 90’s was not something to get particularly militant about.

Of course, there was the gay rights movement, but by the time Ellen Degeneres was making the cover of Time for admitting, yep, she’s gay, it had already long been transmogrified from Activism to Pride. And perhaps it’s this shift from social justice to self-expression that is the root of Agrosexuality in general. After all, what are purity rings if not emblems of Abstinence Pride? And in some basic way, even the demand for the shirt off Lautner’s back was as much a performance of sexuality as was Lambert’s on the AMA’s.

In a 2006 New York Magazine article called “The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School” Alex Morris wrote:

Go to the schools, talk to the kids, and you’ll see that somewhere along the line this generation has started to conceive of sexuality differently. Ten years ago in the halls of Stuyvesant you might have found a few goth girls kissing goth girls, kids on the fringes defiantly bucking the system. Now you find a group of vaguely progressive but generally mainstream kids for whom same-sex intimacy is standard operating procedure. These teenagers don’t feel as though their sexuality has to define them, or that they have to define it, which has led some psychologists and child-development specialists to label them the “post-gay” generation. But kids like Alair and her friends are in the process of working up their own language to describe their behavior. Along with gay, straight, and bisexual, they’ll drop in new words, some of which they’ve coined themselves: polysexual, ambisexual, pansexual, pansensual, polyfide, bi-curious, bi-queer, fluid, metroflexible, heteroflexible, heterosexual with lesbian tendencies—or, as Alair puts it, “just sexual.”

Even the nouveau-celibacy of the abstinence movement is an option on this spectrum, its appeal (if not necessarily its effectiveness) one kind of response to all these overwhelming new choices. As alternative sexuality has become more mainstream, and sexuality moves from self definition to self expression, what has emerged is a new agrosexual attitude that really wasn’t there 10 years ago. There’s an expectancy of an in-your-face show of sexuality — whatever yours may be — as part OF sexuality itself. It’s by no means anything new, but it used to be employed by those who’d followed alternative sexual paths, flying their freak flags as a social statement, or for deliberate shock value, now, however, as the sexual mainstream is fragmenting along with the cultural one being agrosexual is par for everyone’s course.

In her LA Times article on Lady Gaga — likely as close to the embodiment of agrosexuality as a generation could hope for — Ann Powers writes:

Having gotten her start in the bohemian enclaves of downtown New York City, Gaga is deeply indebted to Warhol’s “Superstar”-oriented Factory scene and its aftermath, which produced drag performers like Candy Darling, artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and streetwise rock stars including Lou Reed and Patti Smith.

“The idea is, you are your image, you are who you see yourself to be,” she said. “It’s iconography.”

Warhol supported and exploited a coterie of outsiders who likely would never have emerged from their corners without his help. Gaga takes control but also shows herself losing it; she blurs the lines between self-realization and self-objectification, courting the dangers of full exposure for a generation of kids born with camcorders in their hands.

Though she talks nonstop about liberation, Gaga’s work abounds with images of violation and entrapment. In the 1980s, Madonna employed bondage imagery, and it felt sexual. Gaga does it, and it looks like it hurts.

She says she wants her fans to feel safe in expressing their imperfections. “I want women — and men — to feel empowered by a deeper and more psychotic part of themselves. The part they’re always trying desperately to hide. I want that to become something that they cherish.”

Trendwatching.com calls this “Maturialism,” one of its “10 Crucial Consumer Trends for 2010:”

Let’s face it: this year will be rawer, more opinionated, more risqué, more in your face than ever before. Your audiences (who are by now thoroughly exposed to, well, anything, for which you can thank first and foremost the anything-goes online universe) can handle much more quirkiness, more daring innovations, more risqué communications and conversations, more exotic flavors and so on than traditional marketers could have ever dreamed of….We’ve dubbed this MATURIALISM (mature materialism),

In fact, the image at the top of this post is an ad for UK ice cream brand The Ice Creamists, mentioned in the Trendwatching post as an example of Maturialism in action:

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Trendwatching suggests that if they want to keep up with culture, brands need to mirror the current societal norms that are “about anything but being meek.” In other words, this isn’t just for teenagers and pop stars; brands need to get in on the agrosexual action, too.

    



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Know Your Counter-Culture Youth Movements History

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At Passover Seder a friend of my mother’s brought me a DVD of the movie Stilyagi (“Стиляги.”)

The movie is about a counter-culture youth movement that took place in mid-1950’s USSR. These kids would listen to jazz, dress in outlandish western fashion, with zoot suit jackets and skinny pants, style their hair into pompadours, call each other by American names like “Bob” and “Mel,” and in general behave in a flamboyant style that flew in the face of the Soviet norms. While it might be kind of bizarre for Americans to think of Boogie Woogie or the Happy Days wardrobe as “anti-establishment,” on the other side of the Iron Curtain, during the height of the Cold War, adopting Western culture was not only a shocking, subversive form of rebellion, it was totally illegal.

From Charles Paul Freund’s essay, “In Praise of Vulgarity:

The Stilyagi constitute one of the most remarkable movements in the rich history of oppositional subcultures. What they had turned themselves into were walking cultural protests against Stalinism in one of its most paranoid periods. All that Stalin had melted into air, the stilyagi made flesh.

In the years after World War II, Stalin attempted to extirpate every aspect of American culture from Soviet life. Jazz, which had been played publicly in the USSR as recently as the war years, was now officially regarded as decadent capitalist filth; to even speak of jazz during this period was a criminal act. The same was true of anything American: It was all capitalist decadence, and it was all dangerous and usually illegal. In reaction, the stilyagi did not merely embrace American culture in secret; they actually appropriated American characters, as they understood them, and took them into public. Indeed, they borrowed American cultural geography (“Broadway”) and laid it over Stalin’s [Gorki Prospekt].

Their protest was not a matter of distributing banned poetry texts; it was a public act, complete with role names, costumes, and even a peculiar behavior that was intended to call attention to itself.

It wasn’t only the authorities with whom the stilyagi had to contend; it was everyone. Being a stilyaga was truly isolating, and the public reaction was brutal. Their fellow Moscovites taunted them on the sidewalks and on the streetcars, loudly criticizing their appearance, hurling insults at them, sometimes attacking them. Obviously, the Communist press took notice of them, terming them subversive and linking them to criminal elements. Inevitably, the police also went after them.

In his book “Refusenik: Trapped in the Soviet Union” Mark Azbel writes, “With the tacit approval of the authorities, roaming gangs armed with scissors attacked the stilyagi on the streets,” slashing their moddish clothes and long hair.

The term Stilyagi itself comes from the word “Style.” It roughly translates to “style hunters,” which makes sense considering that creating their outfits, which were completely removed from the sartorial norm, required having to hunt all over the black market. Ironically, the American title for the film is “Hipsters,” whose 21st century incarnation Adbusters credited with finally achieving “The Dead End of Western Civilization.”

In the finale of Stilyagi, the movie breaks from the 1950’s, and offers a little love letter of sorts to all youth culture. Enjoy:

    



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These Are Your Alternatives:

A visual guide to your alternative identity fashion options

presented by:

The Alternative Apparel Catalogue

Burner:

(playa dust for your face sold separately)

.
Circus:

ahem.

2009_02_PI all together now

.

Hippie:

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.

Hipster:


also,

Skater, Raver, Goth:

(all separate categories;  you get the idea.)

and here’s a throwback–

Heroin Chic:

Any questions?

    



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Circus has come

Britney Spears has a new album out today, and guess what it’s called:

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That’s right!

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Britney Spears’ new album is called Circus, and this is incredibly interesting to me.

Once upon a time, I used to be the production manager for a circus called Lucent Dossier

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This troupe is actually part of a whole larger Circus performance subculture that has been growing on the West Coast for years. San Francisco’s The Yard Dogs Road Show, El Circo, and Vau De Vire Society, Santa Barbara’s Clan Destino, L.A.’s  Mutaytor, Cirque Berzerk, and Lucent Dossier, these are just a few of the major acts that are coming to mind, but there are untold scores of others. With its own distinctive music, style, and nightlife, the Circus scene’s cultural influence has been steadily spilling over into mainstream fare for a while.

In 2006, Panic! at the Disco cast Lucent Dossier in the music video for their first big hit, I Write Sins Not Tragedies. When Panic! went on the road later that same year they brought Lucent along, and called it the “Nothing Rhymes With Circus,” Tour–

–which, according to the Washington Post, offered “a far superior take on the warped circus theme Motley Crüe was going for in its latest tour.”

Oh, yes…that’s right. A year prior, Motley Crüe–who would become no strangers to the stylings of Lucent Dossier, themselves–reunited, and you know what their comeback tour was about?

Here’s a hint:

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The Circus subculture infiltration, I should mention, has by no means been limited to music. With such proximity to the entertainment industry, it’s been showing up all over the place. Captivating gamers at E3, holding it down at Red Bull’s nightlife spectacle, Ascension, even America’s Next Top Model weighed in with an “homage” of sorts to the style earlier this year–

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–but none of this is really comparable in scale to an endorsement from the Princess of Pop herself.

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Despite the inescapable reality that it’s blatantly far from any kind of original album or tour concept, Britney Spears still chose to go with Circus anyway. Clearly there is something about Circus that continues to resonate with performers, but there is also something about our current culture, that the Circus theme persists in being so damn appealing. It should have long ago gotten played out, and yet here it is again, and again. It would be easy to contend that Circus is just an overly-tenacious current trend (and I know a few Circus professionals who do), but I see it is as the manifestation of a cultural response to a slew of far greater–and much less fickle–social trends.

In Freaks and Fire: The Underground Reinvention of the Circus, J. Dee Hill delves into the history and sociology of the Circus subculture:

Traditional forms of the tribe, like the village, have almost completely disappeared. Fewer and fewer people live in small communities where their daily interactions bring them in contact with the people they are deeply connected to, either spiritually or economically. Workers in modern corporations are replaceable and no longer bound to each other by the experience of a shared interdependence. The modern individual is preoccupied simultaneously by isolating, immediate concerns of personal survival and the larger, often intangible concerns of war, terror and economic change as transmitted by a now-seamless global media network. The intermediate space of community is not easily reached.

Not by accident, many of the newer, emergent forms of culture include a specifically tribal aspect. A return to tattooing, sacrification, fire performance and drumming, as well as a renewed interest in ritual, has occurred side-by-side with the formation of intentional (if temporary) communities such as the Rainbow Family gatherings and Burning Man festival, all of which focus on celebrating and integrating the peculiarities of their varied members.

It was at these kinds of festivals, in clubs and at underground raves, that alternative circus acts began appearing in the early 90’s. The performers were young, crazy “freaks” without any formal training who used circus costumes, skills or themes as performative means for expressing their own exaggerated personalities. Many went on to gain formal training or to study the history of the genre, but essentially their relationship to conventional circuses resembled that of outsider art to mainstream art circles. They didn’t really relate to the modern-day circus. They took their cues from something much, much older: the caravan-pulling gypsies.

The gypsies, shunned by society at large, but fiercely loyal to their own clan, were the most tribal group in all of Europe. It was these wanderers who first produced circus-like entertainment in the medieval townships, along with strolling players and minstrel shows. It wasn’t until the 1770’s that Englishman Philip Astley fused military equestrian drills with acrobatics and other entertainments to form the modern circus.

The phenomenon of alternative circus performance can be seen as the theatrical dimension to one generation’s wholesale rediscovery of the concept of tribe.

In other words, kids originally began forming Circus performance troupes as an extension of creating urban tribes:

According to French sociologist Michel Maffesoli, urban tribes are microgroups of people who share common interests in metropolitan areas. The members of these relatively small groups tend to have similar worldviews, dress styles and behavioral patterns. Maffesoli claims that punks are a typical example of an “urban tribe.”

20 Years later, instead of forming punk bands, party kids were forming circuses. And in an age where no one thinks twice of breakdancing or skateboarding, does circus art seem all that unexpected?

In the past decade we’ve also seen the arrival of social media, and “Performative means for expressing exaggerated personalities” as Hill put it, isn’t just for the Circus anymore. It’s what makes the social web go round, too. In Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled–and More Miserable Than Ever Before, Jean Twenge and her coauthors analyzed 15,324 responses to the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, completed by college students between 1987 and 2006. The survey is considered the most popular and valid measure of narcissism, and features statements such as “I think I am a special person,” “I can live my life anyway I want to,” “If I ruled the world, it would be  better place,” etc. According to the results:

The trend was extremely clear: younger generations were significantly more narcissistic. The average college student in 2006 scored higher on narcissism than 65% of students just nineteen years before in 1987. In other words, the number of college students high in narcissism rose to two-thirds in the space of less than twenty years.

While Myspace, Youtube, blogs, and all the rest, aren’t responsible for the origins of this narcissism trend, they absolutely help enable its progress. “Narcissism is the darker side of the focus on the self,” writes Twenge, and our constant interaction with social media is an indulgence in self-focus. All of us have been affected by the process of maintaining our online presence.  Even if we’re not all live-streaming our entire existence, we upload photos of our lunches or puppies for our network to see, we write blogs about experiences that we planned to blog about even as we were having them, we leave comments for friends just so other people will see them, we fill in our favorite movies and books and music in the appropriate boxes on various profiles, aware of what our choices say about us. In a sense, all of this is a performance. We are already constantly performing our selves, and Circus represents the ultimate performance platform.

Not surprisingly, we also crave attention. After all, what’s the point of being the spectacle if no one is watching? “Given the choice between fame and contentment,” writes Twenge, “29% of 1990s young people chose fame, compared to only 17% f Boomers.” No doubt, the 2000’s generation would score even higher.

Writing about narcissism and fame, Danah Boyd, a researcher of digital youth practices, asks, Why is it that people want to be famous?:

When i ask teens about their desire to be famous, it all boils down to one thing: freedom. If you’re famous, you don’t have to work. If you’re famous, you can buy anything you want. If you’re famous, your parents can’t tell you what to do. If you’re famous, you can have interesting friends and go to interesting parties. If you’re famous, you’re free!… [However] Anyone who has worked with celebrities knows that fame comes with a price and that price is unimaginable to those who don’t have to pay it.

The idea of “freedom” is a huge aspect of the appeal embodied by the Circus since way before its modern “reinvention.” Circus has long represented freedom from normal society’s rules. The ultimate outlaw lifestyle. And like celebrity, it too has extolled its own price. No surprise then that celebrities from Motley Crüe to Britney spears should find this theme so relatable.

While I don’t doubt there will be much talk of shark-jumping going on within the Circus underground (after all, just how underground-y can it be if Britney’s fans get into it?), to me, both the alternative and the mainstream reincarnations of Circus are on the same continuum. More than just a subculture or a concert tour fad, Circus has come to articulate something about the nature of our relationship with various social trends shaping the modern experience.

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change.us

“Our stories are singular, but our destiny is shared, and a new dawn of American leadership is at hand.”
President-Elect Barack Obama

516 Years since Columbus discovered America.
232 Years since the first democratic government was established in the United States of America.
143 Years since slavery was abolished.
138 Years since black people got the right to vote.
54 Years since it was agreed that “separate but equal” was bullshit.
26 Years since the coinage of the Bradley Effect.
3 Days since Barack Obama was elected the next president of the United States of America.

Those Obama posters proclaimed “Change,” but I don’t think it ever really occurred to anyone, not even to his most avid supporters, just how sudden, and overwhelmingly personal this change would feel. In the past three days the most profound change I have witnessed has been in people’s perceptions. Perceptions of their personal identities, of their cultural identities, of their national identities, and their perceptions about the very process of affecting social change, and personal opportunity.

These changes that happened, literally, overnight, are undeniably going to be important in shaping the future of this country, and the world. So as every trend forecaster and futurist gets down to the task of figuring out how the result of this election is going to impact our culture, I offer these three-day old observations.

What Obama’s victory means for:

1. Black People – As Sherri Shepherd summed it up on the View, “People of color, we’ve always had these limitations on us. I remember, somebody in my family said one time, when I said I want to be a comic, and an actor, they said, ‘No, you will get a job at the post office. They don’t let people like us do that.’ And so, to look at my son and say, ‘You don’t have to have limitations’… It is an extraordinary day for me.” Unlike too many examples of black achievement in the past, Obama’s win does not signify an exception, but rather a symbol of opportunity for all people of color. The idea that there is only so far you can go if you are black, or that you can only succeed up to a certain point, has been shattered, and I think it’s possible that something in the very sense of black identity itself has been affected here. This is such a huge deal that it’s pretty impossible to really grasp the full magnitude of what this will mean for the future of the Black community specifically, and race relations in the in the U.S. in general yet.

2. GEN Y – Much like black people, I know, from personal experience, that the general under-30 population is feeling something right now that they’ve never experienced before either. The picture below was taken in the Mission district in San Francisco on election night:

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Sean Bonner, who took the photo, later wrote, “19th and Valencia. One of the last places in the country I would expect a crowd of people waving American flags. But sure enough it happened. I talked to people today who said for the first time in their lives they hung flags in and out of their houses and finally understood what patriotism is all about. That’s kind of a big deal if you think about it.” It’s a huge deal. Think about this: The first election that my generation was old enough to vote for was stolen. All the other elections we’ve ever known involved George Bush. Neocons aside, the general population born after 1981 has never known what it’s like to not feel resentment and embarrassment about our country. We’ve never felt like our country reflected US, until now. As with the Black community, I think the impact of Obama’s win on the future of the youth of this country, and the future of our affect ON this country that we can now feel is ours to care for, is still unimaginable.

3. America’s perception in the rest of the world – A friend of mine who’s leaving for a tour in Europe next week said to me, “It’s going to be SO different traveling abroad now.” At first I wasn’t completely convinced. My dad has a joke. He says, “Anywhere in the world, Russians and Americans walk into a bar the same way. Loud and obnoxious. Americans do it because they think they own the bar. Russians do it cuz they think they can beat up anyone in the bar.” And it’s not like the way Americans walk into a bar changed with Obama’s acceptance speech. But something definitely did change. “I travel a lot,” Sean Bonner also wrote, “And I’m constantly faced with people from other countries saying ‘Well, you are cool enough but obviously you are the exception, the rest of your country must be idiots to have voted for that Bush guy.’ When I try to tell people that not everyone voted for him, and even people who did vote for him aren’t 100% down with his actions over the last several years, they usually scoff and point out if the country didn’t like him he’d get kicked out, so clearly people are behind him. That’s not something I heard from one person in one country, it’s a feeling I got repeatedly all over the world. The US electing Obama over McCain is a clear message to everyone else on this planet that the US isn’t happy with the leadership we’ve had and we want something to change. This is good for all of us.”

4. Politics – Politics–and I do mean the political process itself, not simply “being political”–is not just for your conservative, older uncle-in-law anymore. Politics is YOURS. Something really remarkable about the Obama campaign is that it offered an outlet for channelling that political youth energy that since the 60’s has been expended on efforts “outside the system,” INTO the system. (Counterculture is dead, after all). I think having felt cheated and ignored by the political process for so long made the prospect of trying to affect institutional change seem impossible. The low-hanging fruit of “personal growth” has all but replaced institutional change as the means for solving society’s problems. But at the end of the day, institutional change, is, in fact, the change we need. So will this new experience of feeling that the political process CAN be ours to affect motivate more of the activists of my generation to give it a rest with the protests-slash-street festivals, and instead put on a suit and tie and do the work it takes to create institutional change? Man, I would really fucking like to hope so.

5. Government – Have you seen this www.change.gov?? Government has NEVER looked like this before. Not just American government. Not ANY government. Fucking amazing! Yesterday, in a cafe, I was watching as CNN announced that Barack Obama had appointed his chief of staff, and I was riveted! Everyone else in the cafe was watching it too. It was the kind of scene that makes you think something terrible is happening on TV, but it wasn’t terrible at all, it was just the new president forming the new government…and it was fascinating! Maybe it’s just cuz it was day 2, maybe this interest in our government that we all seem to suddenly be possessed by will wane, but I’ve gotta say, before, I NEVER used to be interested. Not on ANY day. I think the initiative to run the government in a more transparent, responsive, open way will help to sustain our feeling of personal connection to and investment in the government, and help prevent all of us from slipping back into the general detachment we’d had from it up till now. Consider how a focus on a shared, mutual government vs. on self-segregated communities might affect the dismayingly polarized American landscape we’ve come to know.

6. The American Dream – In Generation Me, Jean Twenge suggests that my generation is too full narcissism and entitlement, that we’ve got massively unrealistic expectations, and we need to be made to face reality, and realize that our dreams are just that. Even for many who did not vote for Obama, there is an undeniable sense of something profoundly impossible having been achieved in his victory. It’s the kind of profoundly impossible achievement that is, and has always been, the hallmark of America, and Obama himself said as much in his victory speech. For those whose dream has been to become Britney Spears, perhaps you might want to take a cue from Twenge’s book. But for those of us whose dream has been about succeeding at doing what we believe in, at doing things our own way, about succeeding at doing the thing that brings us joy and fulfillment, Barack Obama’s victory is a testament to its possibility. The “American Idols” we have had to look up to for too long have either been utterly disposable, recast every season to feed the celebrity tabloid industrial complex, or otherwise icons of unattainable privilege and luxury (think: Paris Hilton). Barack Obama has worked his whole life for everything he has accomplished, and what he’s earned now is the responsibility to do yet more work. I really cannot remember the last time someone like this was an icon of the American Dream, and I can’t wait for a generation of kids who will grow up wanting to become like Barack Obama.

    



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