“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting.”
— e.e. cummings
which is all quite noble and good, but the thing of it is, e.e., is that it’s very difficult, not to mention psychologically debilitating, to exist entirely out of cultural context. not only do human beings (and enough sad, shaky little monkeys that we don’t need to conduct this experiment anymore, please) suffer severe emotional and no doubt neurological damage when left in isolation, but in practical reality, whether it’s cultural heritage, gender, skin color, family education level, economic class, or whatever, the sum influence on “who we are” of certain variables of culture-caste is a bit tricky to evade. and in the end, even those that do manage to escape this influence in its entirety still don’t earn their own individual place in society anyway, cuz we just lump them into one big group called “crazy.”
that’s not to say that the rest of us aren’t, in fact, embroiled in a kind of nonstop battle like what e.e. was refering to, but it’s not exactly about the struggle to be nobody but ourselves in a world that is trying to make us like everyone else. rather it is about the anxiety of having to figure out how to EXPRESS who we want to be seen as in a world where the options keep expanding.
which is why “THE OFFICIAL GUIDE TO OFFICIAL HANDBOOKS” by andy selsberg, is a great bit of humorous salve on the battle wounds of that anxiety. by pitting the various Official This-Or-That (Preppy, Yuppie, JAP, BAP, Bobo Hipster–it’s like the star wars cantina, but real) handbooks against one another, it exposes, for a moment, the inevitable ridiculousness of the entire “we’re all different… in the same way” con game.
We tend to think our standards for the beautiful and good are natural and eternal. They aren’t. And you know who needs this analysis?…. Marketers. If business is about knowing how your customer thinks, then [these are] business book[s]. [They] tell you exactly how to jack all those fat baby-boomer wallets—whether you’re selling ice cream, a university, a book, a religion, or a company. When I see suits on planes reading business best sellers, I think: Wrong! Get some books that explain how groups try to reconcile their dreams of who they want to be with the social and economic realities of their world through the stuff they buy. Then get down to business. That’s what J. Crew did.
….dude! that’s what i’m talking about! i mean…like, literally.
you should totally check out selsberg’s fucking awesome article (and you may never take the cultural significance of a disproportionate use of such superlatives as “fucking awesome” for granted ever again once you do, dear reader).
here’s a fun timeline of all the Official handbooks referenced in his article.
1980 – The Official Preppy Handbook
“Prep Sex: A Contradiction in Terms”
1982 – The Official J.A.P. Handbook
(that stands for Jewish American Princess, by the way)
“At the very core of the female Born JAP aesthetic are two guiding principles: 1) I am terrific; 2) Daddy will pay.”
1984 – The Yuppie Handbook
“Thou shalt have no other gods before thyself.”
1994 – The Official Slacker Handbook
“Part old-fashioned bohemianism and part fin de siècle exhaustion, placed against the backdrop of a crappy recession and intolerable suburban irony.”
1997 – The Field Guide to North American Males
“Wanna come over and watch The Simpsons?”
2000 – A Field Guide to the Yettie
Yettie = Young Entrepreneurial Technocrat
2001 – Bobos in Paradise
Bobo = BOurgeois BOhemian.
2001 – The BAP Handbook
(BAP = Black American Princess)
“Any name beginning with ‘La’ or ‘Sh’ and ending in -ima, -ika, -isha, and -ita is never considered by BAParents.”
2002 – The Hipster Handbook
This old vocabulary? I’ve had it since I was twelve.
and while you and i wonder what’s up with the delay on the Official G Handbook, the Official Cholo Handbook, and the Official ABC handbook, we can at least entertain ourselves with the hipster olympics in the meantime: