Preening Monsters of Inconsequence

Today, Tom Ashbrook, host of the NPR call-in show, On Point, invited three recent university graduates to wax prophetic about their professional futures. The show's introduction had already set my expectations quite low, but the blather that followed forced me to switch off my radio in disgust. These three newly minted alums have heads so full of Madison-Avenue platitudes that I really despair for the future. They're not stupid, nor are they dull. Rather, they're cagey and single-minded, albeit provincial and unenlightened, attesting to saccharine dreams of affluence and seamless self-actualization—dreams which at this historical and cultural moment are risibly recherché. And they attest to them with such a tone of unalloyed optimism that a postmodern subject like me cannot help thinking that they're playing to the audience, that they "doth protest to much."

I mean, such "golly-Mister" ambitions do not accord with what market demographers otherwise tell us about the current lot of early twenty-somethings. They're the ones the Culture Industry so breathlessly panders to, the ones who inform media content. If we regard these realities as more indicative than any rah-rah rhetoric they can muster, then here's what they say about themselves in the lifestyle choices they make: they're the MySpacers, the FaceBookers, the lappers-up of bloody delicacies proffered by the latest cinematic torture-porn, the freak-dancers, the body-obsessed, the compulsive exercisers, the blasé wearers of overpriced slave-sewn garments, and, most abhorrently, the tunnel-visioned enablers of the status quo. Abu Ghraib or Grindhouse — it's all the same to them, just as long as the current geopolitical situation doesn't prevent them from plunging headlong into the economy to snatch up dollars that, if you pay close attention to how these twenty-somethings couch their remarks, they believe are theirs by divine right. American prosperity, a pettifogging abstraction which conceals real exploitation and malfeasance, is for them a roasted goose of such abundant flesh as to surfeit generation upon generation forever. They scoff at such secular Armageddons as peak oil and global warming. Sure, they've seen Al Gore's film—but that Hummer H2? Man, it's just to pimp a whip to pass up.

These folks represent, in other words, the undiminished legacy of the Eighties, the decade of their inception: "Show me the money, and Devil take the hindmost!"; "trickle-down" everything. They are all ripples and surfaces illumined by sparks of excessive self-regard, are the people for who life is one elaborate reality-TV show. Children of the simulacrum. More troublingly, they're a generation for which the contortions of public relations have become a veritable habitus: good is what nourishes the ego; evil is what you didn't get away with. The real is the rational. They'll certainly profess to hold the interests of others as they're own, when it's convenient to do so, but the clichés with which they express these interests, and the utterly diffuse and noncommittal means they suggest to secure them ("I owe other people a friendly smile." "The best thing I offer other people is the ability to listen." Political boilerplate at its most nauseating.) leaves you suspecting that they're real desire is to drink and fuck and speed in their cars and screw each other over.

Unlike people their age of decades past, they're not romantics; they opt instead for the treacly cynicism that is PC permissiveness. They're infantile, and, if crossed, will rage and will seek revenge remorselessly. They are, in short, preening monsters of inconsequence. This is, however, something Tom Ashbrook or anyone else National Public Relations will never tell you; o them, they are the dominant ideology made toned, flawless flesh, shaped in the most flattering light and without shadow or remainder. You can almost see them in the studio sleekly basking in the eminently deserved approbation which the dull pseudo-liberal hordes of NPR listeners so slavishly heap on them.