Back in November, I pointed out a piece at Slate in which Jack Shafer wondered when we’d start seeing evidence of Xers in charge of the mainstream media. His panel of experts concluded that the first sign would be references to The Simpsons in headlines.
And here we go, from today’s Chicago Tribune:
I, for one, welcome our new Xer overlords.
Ever play Paranoia in your geeky high-school RPG-playin’ days? Did you have any idea then that you were actually training your brain then to deal with the bullshit it was going to have to accommodate 20 years later?
It started when Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell threw a fit and decided to stop doing her job:
Washington Post ombudsman Deborah Howell has reportedly posted a comment on the Post's internal message board announcing that she has learned the following "lesson" from exchanges with Media Matters for America: "From now on, I don't reply." Howell's language did not make clear whether she meant that she would no longer reply to any criticism, or only to that registered by Media Matters.
[from MediaMatters for America]
Then, irate Post readers flooded the Post’s blog with critiques over another of Howell’s ombud columns. So the Post did what any civic-minded journalistic institution would do -- it stuck its fingers in its ears and said, “La la la, we can’t hear you!”:
One of these stories is honest-to-God real (culled from the Associated Press), and the other is honest-to-God fake (culled from The Onion). Can you guess which is which?
Activist Judge Cancels Christmas
WASHINGTON, DC -- In a sudden and unexpected blow to the Americans working to protect the holiday, liberal U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Stephen Reinhardt ruled the private celebration of Christmas unconstitutional Monday.
Judge: Baby on board is no excuse; Pregnant woman claimed she was driving for two
PHOENIX, Arizona -- Fetuses do not count as passengers when it comes to determining who may drive in the carpool lane, a judge has ruled.
And They wonder why we’re so cynical...
Jon Friedman at MarketWatch, in a three-part profile of Kurt Andersen, founder of Spy magazine, decries the prevalence of detached sarcasm and joins with Andersen, 51, whom he dubs “the reluctant Godfather of Snark,” in lamenting the sorry condition of the younger generation for which Spy was a major influence.
Andersen, rightfully, frets that many young journalists today take the easy way out when they try to be funny and hip. He cautions writers to avoid the trap of declaring, "I'm 26, and I look at everything, good or bad, snarkily."Or as Leslie Savan, author of "Slam Dunks and No-Brainers," put it, journalism has shifted "from dogged reporting to catty retorting."
It's a valid point. Plenty of Web writers, in particular, seem to think that entertainment passes for good journalism, that meanness alone has value. When rock and roll bands run out of ideas, they raise the volume on their music for effect. When bloggers run out of ideas or are too lazy or stupid to offer analysis, they simply resort to raising the snark level.
It's second-rate writing, but what the hey - it enables bloggers to delude themselves into feeling important or at least, self-important. And that's what matters to them.
I finally got to see Monty Python's Spamalot on Broadway last week -- hoorah! It feels like I've been tormented for aeons by the existence of this show and its exhorbitantly-
The show is a riot, the third funniest thing I've ever seen in the theater. (The first is Fool Moon; the second, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, Abridged, which is -- I can't believe it -- available on DVD.) It's much more than merely a revue of good bits from the Flying Circus and various Python flicks -- it's its own creature, familiar bits woven into new bits and spiced with a lot of parodizing of Broadway conventions and clichés. It is, as you should expect from anything with the Python name on it, wickedly irreverent.
It's so irreverent, in fact, that I was suddenly struck by its popularity: How did a culty little TV show end up being the hottest ticket in town? And then it occured to me that the previous hottest ticket in town, The Producers, also sprang from a cultish little film. What's going on?
What's going on, of course, is that Generation X, with its snarky attitude and tendency to embrace all things weird and funky and geeky, is not only working to bring these strangenesses to us, the audience -- Spamalot's Hank Azaria is an Xer, born 1964, and certainly a geek icon for his work on The Simpsons alone; The Producers' Matthew Broderick is an Xer, born 1962, and certainly a geek icon for his performance in Ferris Bueller's Day Off alone -- but the audience itself is now heavily Xer and geeky and doesn't see anything particular outré in Trojan bunnies and stream-of-consciousness insults ("Your mother was a hamster, and your father smelt of elderberries!"), or in making fun of Holocaust-seriousness or theatrical excessiveness.
Maybe, if we're very good, their gods of geekitude will bring us Star Trek: The Musical next year...
