Demeritocracy

As I've crossed into my 50s and the questions about my age relative to popular culture become suddenly, starkly less ambiguous or hedged, I'm making an effort to not be one of those older people who are threatened by new things or changes to the old things. I try to keep the nostalgia out of my core personality. I find if you let it sit there too long--in that airless, lightless space--apparently it seeps and rots until the liquifying flesh and hardening sugars transform into a grainy crystallized sludge that somehow powers an indefatigable generator of paranoia and self-regard. Imagine being freaked out about the smallest social or cultural change all the time. It sounds fucking exhausting. For self-preservation, I limit my nostalgia to pointing out how some buildings used to be other buildings, while driving by them. "The corner where that Cane's chicken is used to be a Naugles" never got anyone disappeared, Pinochet-style, if you run it out to its logical extreme the same way "there seem to be way more foreigners around than before" seems to have.

I also don't complain about the kids and the way they talk or the music they're into or whatever. It's never occurred to me to say anything like "you call this 'music'? All sounds the same to me," and that's even acknowledging that it's WELL PAST FUCKING TIME to move on from the high-hat triplets running in every single trap beat in like 90% of popular songs. It's important to make a distinction between "this is what an old person would say" and "totally legitimate position to take by a culturally still definitely relevant person who is just saying." And besides, it's not always bad. I'm not saying let's go back to something else, I'm just saying let's move on from this thing. See, I'm the innovator advocating more change, if anything. I really am the Cool Dad.

I'm even fine with people changing the way they say things. Like especially millennial and younger women out here on the West Coast glottalizing their T's in the middle of words like "mountain" or "important." Sure, you can say it only seems like a change and people have been doing it for a while, but my anecdotal ears don't lie to me. It's different from how it was when I was a millennial's age! But that's OK with me! Evolution is what language does. At some point we stopped using "mack" to mean "generic person whose name I don't feel like using" in favor of "man" and nobody died. The hippies won that one thing in the 1960s and somehow society has not collapsed, man. So now we sound less like an old Bugs Bunny cartoon. Only a marginal loss, which, again, I am OK with!

Like I said, I even advocate for new things when it seems like we need them as we, as a society, outgrow certain ideas or expressions. Like right now, we need a new word for "scandal." In the old days, it meant something akin to "cause for public shame and personal and professional recrimination," but a couple of things have happened in the past few days that have really finally reset this for me. What's a happening now is that public officials can do a thing that would have normally have resulted in a tearful apology at a podium on their own amidst the sound of occasional camera shutters snapping, naming their families and their colleagues whose trust they've irrevocably broken, followed by a swift resignation and (if it was a really good one) a promise to immediately get either therapy or rehab. Then stern news people would grimfaced analyze the events as "momentous" or "unprecedented" or "really good for ratings."

And the bar for these things wasn't really even that high. You didn't even have to be that important! You could just be an inarticulate drunken sports doofus making a totally unsupportable ahistorical and racially tone-deaf point in the unfortunate presence of a microphone completely unprovoked and boom, career over. Now apparently you can be the whole-ass secretary of defense and commit the worst offense against basic operational security during an active combat operation in the history of communications and the result is... probably nothing, bolstered by the active public support of the president. You still get all the heat and the activity on cable news as you would with an actual scandal, but absolutely none of the payoff. I was going to say "so far," but I'm plumbing new depths of cynicism here, let me grow, even if it's downward.

It wasn't that long ago that there was some serious pearl-clutching and irrevocable damage to the reputation of a decorated career military professional (so you know, qualified to be SECDEF) just one administration ago because he had the audacity to go to the hospital and not tell enough people fast enough? No tearful resignation, but Lloyd Austin was still expected to eat it. Now we get the outlines, the silhouette of a real honest-to-jeebus "scandal," but the end bit, the shame and humility, gets honked down by louder and louder donkey-braying from the accused and his abettors.

I don't know what the word even could be to replace it. "Scandal" has done a lot of work for thousands of years, through Greek and Latin and Olde English, evolving just like language is supposed to. I'll have to think on it and we'll climb that mountain* when we get to it.

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*Pronounce it however you want! I'm not bothered! I'm not even checking! You're fine! I'm the one being normal about this!