culture: August 2005 Archives

A few years ago, I read Walter Jon Williams’s The Rift, a just barely speculative disaster novel about a cataclysmic 8.9 earthquake on the New Madrid fault that runs under the southcentral United States. It’s a chilling book, and the scary bits aren’t so much the power-of-the-planet stuff -- though that certainly is frightening -- but the economic devastation and political turmoil across the country and the globe that occurs in the wake of the quake.

I’ve been thinking about The Rift a lot over the last 24 hours as I look at pictures like this:

How many millions of people are suddenly homeless and unemployed? How much will the prices of gas and heating oil soar with all those refineries offline? How much of a hit can the already precarious American economy take?

I think I need to reread The Rift.

I think it’s going to be a very very scary winter.

Man, am I glad I got rid of my car last year.

Now, I remember this from my childhood:

I remember sitting in my dad’s Ford Fairlane waiting in a long line for gas, something I’m sure many Xers recall from their formative years. Though you might have thought that that politically motivated oil crisis, more than 20 years ago now, might have been the wakeup call America needed to begin a shift away from aggressive consumption of oil -- it was, in fact, fairly quickly forgotten. And for every indication that some folks are taking the current runup in gas prices as a wakeup call -- like the fact that hybrid cars are so hot -- there’s a counterindication that suggests that lots of people are still asleep: like the comeback of gas-guzzling muscle cars, which were killed off their first time out by the 1973 oil shock. (These new muscle cars get around 16 miles to the gallon in city driving; a Hummer, by comparison, isn’t that much worse, at around 13. A Prius? Somewhere in the range of 50 to 60.)

Perhaps the great thing Generation X will be called upon to do -- in the same way that the Lost Generation, our generational counterparts during the last great crisis, were the generals who won World War II -- is to lead a crash program in retooling our society away from its unsustainable thirst for oil. Maybe we’ll build continent-spanning bullet trains run by nuclear power. Maybe we’ll build walkable cities and towns. Maybe our Manhattan Project will learn the secrets of cheap, clean nuclear fusion. Maybe we’ll do all three, and more.

Fasten your seatbelts and put your thinking cap on. It’s gonna be a bumpy life...

Mark Morford again:

Millions are doing it, especially the young. They are shucking "religion" and taking up "spirituality." They are mixing Buddhist meditation with nontraditional Catholicism, eco-friendliness with Jesus, racial tolerance with Allah, ancient mysticism with Judaism, divine sex with Hinduism -- with an overarching sense that there is far more in heaven and earth than is dreamed of in most organized religion's meager philosophies. It sounds good because it is.

Of course, science is my religion, but that’s sorta sayin’ the same thing, isn’t it? Some divine sex should would be nice, though...

Xers don’t trust big institutions -- we knew that (and this site, which features an excellent rundown of the overarching characteristics of Xers, includes this as one of the defining ones). Sometimes it’s because those institutions want nothing to do with us.

I’m thinking of my pal Gabriel Shanks, a fellow online film critic -- he posts at Mixed Reviews -- a fellow founding member of Cinemarati and a regular poster at our new group blog -- and a fellow blogger, at Modern Fabulosity. He got married on August 14th, and because his beloved happens to be a man, he and his intended were excluded from participating in the usual civic and religious rituals that people in love typically participate in when they want to formalize their relationship.

But you know what? Gabriel’s wedding was the most moving I’ve ever been to. Gabriel’s a theater director (when he isn’t blogging and reviewing films) and his new husband is a singer, and they created their own ceremony, one bursting with poetry and song and ritual, and every single moment had personal meaning to both of them. I’ve attended some religious wedding ceremonies where every moment is dictated by tradition to the point where it all becomes nothing but rote regurgitation, and hence appears to have no overt meaning to the participants. But there were moments during Gabriel’s wedding that were so intensely emotion, so revealingly personal, that I almost felt I shouldn’t be watching.

The most remarkable aspect of the ceremony, though, was the exhilarating defiance in every word, every action, every kiss. This is what Xers do: when traditions don’t suit us, we create our own and make them really mean something important. It’s not always so fierce as it was at Gabriel’s wedding, but reinventing little bits of society here and there, where the old ways have either broken down or never suited us in the first place, is something Xers do deliberately, and do well.

You enjoy Klingon Fairy Tales, such as "Goldilocks Dies With Honor at the Hands of the Three Bears"...

You’re supporting Christophen Walken for President in 2008...

You actually look for confirmation that you’re a geek through things like Geek Test...

(FYI, I like Klingon fairy tales, I'm reserving judgment on Walken until his first debate with Christo-Republican candidate Mel Gibson, and I’m 42.20907% geeky, or a "Major Geek"...)

The army speaks geek these days:

We've also realized that the title "Private" is demeaning. It makes you sound shy and socially awkward and unable to function in society. That's not you, no matter what your guidance counsellor told you. Now, while we can't hand out "General" or "Supreme Allied Commander" right away, we can offer you a whole bunch of options. Through a special arrangement with LucasFilm, you can enter the armed forces as, for example, Sith Lord Wojoski or Jar Jar Sanderson. We even have an exciting design-your-own-rank program. One of our best new recruits is Neutral Evil Half-Elf Druid McCallister. And you know what? If McCallister believes his "Little Mermaid" poncho is a cloak of invisibility, we believe it makes him invisible, too. That's where we're at right now.

From The New York Times? The Onion? Nah, it’s from The New Yorker, a piece by Joel Stein with the deceptively bland title "The New Army Recruiting Pamphlet." Funny stuff -- check it out.

I dream, in my anarchist fantasies, of a day when firebombing a Wal-Mart will not be considered a crime but an act of humanity, one small step in ridding the world of that institution that embodies much of what is wrong with America today: corporations treating their employees like garbage, citizens in the thrall of mindless consumerism (like Robert Duvall and his fellow organic robots in THX-1138, purchasing crap just to throw it away, cuz it keeps the economy running), and the death of individualism not just in people but in the places where we live. Historic downtowns and town squares are decimated, and every place looks like every place else, an endless merry-go-round of the same big-box stores and fast-food joints. People say they shop at Wal-Mart because it’s cheap, but they have to shop where stuff is cheap because Wal-Mart killed off all the good jobs and replaced them with poorly paying ones. (Check out Wal-Mart Watch for some good scares.)

If we’re heading for a major crisis anyway, could we maybe take the opportunity to sweep this blight from the cultural landscape? You know, just as a bonus?

In an article in The Washington Post about the new magazine Make (which calls itself "the first magazine devoted to digital projects, hardware hacks, and D.I.Y. inspiration"), writer Peter Carlson takes the opportunity to bash its readership as "gloriously immature"... that is, after deriding them as "geeks, gearheads, hackers, do-it-yourselfers and other folks" (with that snide "other folks" presumably a catchall for everyone else besides geeks and gearheads Carlson finds tiresome and/or offensive).

These "folks" suffer from some other serious problems beside being interested in something besides football or the latest bread-and-circuses reality show:

Many of Make's projects are extremely difficult to execute and require a lot of skill and hours of work. The great American word "E-Z" is apparently not in Make's vocabulary...

Gee, these people have attention spans? Brains? What is this nation coming to?

And what sort of "gloriously immature" things are these "folks" up to? Well, the latest "MakeShift Challenge" ("applying creativity to solve an important global problem, and educating others as to how it can be done") invited readers to come up with a way to make contaminated water potable through the creative use of local materials that might be found in a remote rural village. Sheesh: how much nerdier can you get?

The radiation encountered on a journey to Mars and back could well kill space travellers, experts have warned. Astronauts would be bombarded by so much cosmic radiation that one in 10 of them could die from cancer.

The risks are smaller for older people because cancers have less time to develop. But women are always in more danger than men because they live longer and are more susceptible to breast and ovarian cancers.

[from New Scientist]

Where do I sign up? A 17 percent chance of cancer in exchange for walking on the surface of another world? I’m in.

This idea that we should never take chances, never open ourselves up to risk is holding us back from doing the things we should be doing. When did we, as a species, stop being enthralled by the idea of discovery, of seeing and doing things that no one has seen or done before? We Xers are supposed to be particularly open to the idea of taking chances -- we popularized "extreme" sports, for instance, and we tend to disdain things like the financial and social security to be found in a corporate job. But it seems to me that extreme sports are only a return to the risky adventures we as humans always engaged in -- hunting woolly mammoths can’t have been risk-free endeavors, and the ice man in the Alps wasn’t out for a Sunday stroll. And if there was ever any security to be found in being a company man, that time has long gone.

Meanwhile:

Only 90 men made the first voyage of discovery from Palos Spain. The ships were quite tiny by modern standards--no longer than a tennis court, and less than 30 feet wide. The Santa Maria had 40 men aboard, the Pinta, 26, and the Nina, 24.

[from The 4 Voyages of Columbus]

It took Columbus’s ships 10 weeks to cross the Atlantic. How long would it take us to get to Mars with some clever application of our current technology?

Ten weeks.

(Can’t find a link to support this: I know I read it in a science fact article in Analog magazine a few years back, and the comparison has haunted me ever since.)

What are we waiting for? For us adventurous Xers to get into the positions of power from which we can make the decision to go, perhaps.

If you buy into the generational theory of William Strauss and Neil Howe, then we’re headed, in the next few years, for a social and civil crisis on a par with the Great Depression or the Civil War, if we aren’t already in the beginning of said crisis.

(And just to be clear: Strauss and Howe don’t pretend they can predict events, just that their generational-cycle theory of history can sorta take a guess at how people will react, in a general sense, to events that happen to transpire. The idea is that one kind of generation, raised in one kind of way, won’t let some spark turn into a conflagration, while another kind of generation, raised in a different kind of way, will fan the flames. Strauss and Howe don’t pretend to be able to predict how individuals will behave, either -- it’s more about seeing that the general tenor of the times tends to move in a cyclical way that’s predictable in a general way. It’s all totally fascinating, and I highly recommend their books Generations and The Fourth Turning for more info.)

An article in yesterday’s New York Times on Charles Ross’s stage show One-Man Star Wars, which is debuting in New York tomorrow, features this gem:

Mr. Ross, 31, looks like the last person you'd expect to create a 58-minute homage to Luke, Leia and Obi-Won Kenobi. He's poised, with a deep voice and tall, blond good looks.

Because, as everyone knows, no one who enjoys Star Wars could possibly be physically attractive.

I’ve seen Ross’s show, on video, and I’ve rarely laughed so hard in my entire life. I’m hoping to catch a live performance soon, and to interview Ross for the blog, so stay tuned for updates.

He is adorable, by the way. And he’s a geek.