Gamorrah Played the Long Game

I'm not a Creationism guy by any stretch, but you have to think that, if it were the case that an all-powerful and omniscient God decided to spontaneously carve out a couple of mortal flesh-monsters designed to sin, suffer and die in an effort to get him a taste of some sweet mortal worship AND (this bit is important, I'm told) because He loves us, at some point even Adam and Eve looked at each other, shook their heads and were all like "These kids today, they're going to be the end of civilization, Jesus..." Of course in their case they were almost right since one of their boys hauled off and killed the other one which, to my rudimentary calculations, constituted one quarter of the world's human population at the time. In those early days of Genesis, every crime is a genocide. And that's why black people can't be Mormon priests.*

Even if we believe in evolution, it's not hard to imagine a nice Homo ergaster couple fretting about their Homo erectus children disrespecting the old traditions of dying from abscessed tooth infections and hiding from lions in favor of their idle and shallow fascination with the latest technological gizmos like boats and tamed fire. They'd worry those kids would someday be the death of all of them, and like Adam and Eve I guess they were kind of right eventually.

I was trying to make a point about how the dismissive disdain for innovation by the old guard and the embrace of novelty for its own sake among the younger generation has always been and always will be, but it looks like I chose two poor examples. Based on experience, I'd say it's safe to assume we're all actually pretty fucked when these kids take over. Turns out we're not worrying enough. I should have guessed that though. Anyone who thinks it's OK to communicate using emojis is going to be a fucking problem.

The original conceived-of topic thread I've disturbed myself into losing had to do with (I'm realizing now as I type this)** being comfortable with innovation because people have been saying "ooh, these kids today..." for thousands of years and we're all mostly fine, a point I've made before. But maybe it's that the innovations I was going to look at--related to the coarsening of popular discourse--aren't Millennial innovations but are actually GenX innovations that are simply manifesting themselves now. The confusion I'm feeling I think is in the generational overlap where Millennials are getting a lot of popular culture heat because of their emergence as tax-paying consumers worthy of drawing the attention of the people who would really like more of us to drink Mountain Dew, but it's actually the moment, behind the scenes, of GenX financial, social and political ascendence.

I was going to talk about how I was unexpectedly struck by the casual and conversational way we've let down our collective guard over the brief years of my adolescence and adulthood when I was reading an interesting but harmless piece on Nate Silver's fivethirtyeight.com about the lack of statistical data on women's sports*** and the throwaway manner in which the author included "Just because the data is shittier and more difficult to find doesn’t mean that it’s not out there..." Shittier, she said. First of all: from a girl! Secondly, offered as a totally justifiable and relevant modifier, without the intent to shock or inflame. It's just the best word for the job. It made me reflect on how all the news outlets I read (meaning everything not printed on paper) would have exactly as many qualms (zero-ish) about employing language like this if the situation called for it. It doesn't even stand out anymore.

And I remember as a kid the news stories--national news stories--about what we were going to do as a people because TV commercials for bras showed women wearing bras. Now as I type this, I could theoretically have another web browser tab open showing a video of a man trying to fuck a cheetah. Everything our grandparents thought about us, with our backward baseball caps and girls wearing pants, was totally true. Only on a scale far more vast and far-reaching than they ever could have predicted. All because of the internet. We did ruin everything they'd worked so hard to build up. Way to go, us.

Of course, don't me wrong, they internet is still a terrible place. But, like global warming, that'll be my children's problem to reckon with. The good thing about being such a disappointment as a generation is we won't live long enough to really have to absorb the radiation of the fallout.

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*OK, being fair, they can now, but they had to wait for the all-loving, all-seeing God to get around to telling them it was cool. In 1978.

**Behind a recliner, in a corner in my bedroom, all lights off, suddenly very concerned about the intentions of my children.

***Judge away, fuckers, you know it now too