R.I.P. FEDERALIST 2006 2006-2006

This is it for me, so I'm closing big. Some of you may remember this from the grad reading series earlier this year - the ages are a little off, but no big deal. Thanks so much to everyone who came and read and commented.

Federalist 2006 is loosed from this digital coil...

To Anyone Over Sixteen Without An Ulcer.

I. Stock of the Situation

I work in a grocery store. I am 26 years old, and a man on all counts biological, intellectual, and sexual. Professionally, however, I am a Stock Boy. I have a college degree – in English – that qualifies me to make excellent conversation while shelving groceries. I am currently working on my Masters degree – in writing – which should qualify me to create erudite dialogue while shelving groceries.

I would say that I am typical, excepting that I know things like the German word for ‘strawberry’ and that Tycho Brahe died from a burst bladder after drinking too much wine at a royal dinner where it was against protocol to take bathroom breaks. I am over-educated and under-utilized. I am deeply in debt, but very good at Jeopardy. I have three email accounts and an iPod. I read the newspaper on the Internet. I listen to Jay-Z and Willie Nelson. It’s a good bet that I am cooler than everyone older than me. A day in my life is, as near as one could say it, a day in the life of the average young American.

At work the other day, I noticed that the cost of spices has gone up. We do price changes every Wednesday, and ordinarily they don’t make any impression on me, but this sent through my mind faint tolls of distant alarm bells. Some of the prices rose thirty cents, some as much as seventy-five. Vanilla was up a dollar. Cardamom had taken on two.

Consider the early spice trade: a battle on a delivery route, some local ruler’s bad attitude, inclement weather; any of these things could drive up the prices of pepper or cinnamon, affecting, in one blow, the daily life of a continent. Today we are insulated from these kinds of wild vacillations. It takes a long and a complicated sequence of events to even notice the far-off rumble of the machinations of states. There are headlines, and a din of pundits, but for the most part, we seldom notice politics in our wallets. The story here on the ground, in our schools, in our homes, in our grocery stores, remains stable. Only now the cost of spices has gone up. Those events have been set in motion, and the fallen dominoes – dwindling oil supplies, the collapsing dollar, inflated domestic poverty, the growing expense of transportation, etc – have conspired to raise the prices of our seasonings.

II. My Zeitgeist Ate My Weltanschauung

The eyes of the nation, and consequently the world, are now turned towards America’s youth. For a long time now, young people have been the engine for progress in this country. Every time the establishment falters we look to the anti-establishment, the naïve, idealistic, vigorous young. It is that time again. Debt and unemployment, a failing war, enemies all around, fewer friends than ever. As a good friend of mine put it, “This is some Roman Empire shit going down right here.”

Which raises the question: What is on the minds of America’s Youth? It must be asked, not in a baited attempt to get us to defend ourselves, but because there is no encouraging, cohesive concept of my generation. No one knows what is on our minds. We have not articulated a profound collective sentiment. Hell, we grew up hearing that ‘collective’ was a bad word. All the knowledge that exists of my generation is comprised of polling data and market analysis, a few one-dimensional, clichéd representations, graphing and pie-charting our favorite flavors and colors. Though, we have been tagged and released many times, as Generation X, the Internet Generation, the Whatever generation, and most recently the iPod Generation, the labels applied serve merely to comfort those that fail to understand us. They are dismissive and trite, consistently portraying us as a fickle citizenry, sensational nihilists swept up in some fleeting newness. We are left defined by our fads.

It is easy, then, to say that there is nothing on the mind of America’s youth, and plenty of evidence – as with any generation – that we are going to blow the whole damn thing. It makes great copy to reduce us to our apathy, our obsessions with video games and hip-hop beats, to note how quickly we can be lured by loud explosions or the promise of college girls with their shirts above their heads, and it is all too easy from this to reach the ultimate conclusion: We are all screwed.

III. Remembrance of Things Past

It often seems to me that my generation and my nation have grown up together, by which I mean that both of us have only recently acquired what might be called a real history.

The time has come where the significant, the living past, bears enough resemblance to our current world that we can learn a few things. It is easier to see now in 2006, from looking back, what things have been gained and what have been lost. Of course, the United States has a long history, but what I am referring to is not a simple backlog of years, but a sense of familiarity, a recognition of this place, and the place we are heading, of having been in the same spot before.

Colonial America is to us, positively antediluvian; the 1800s a time of horse-drawn buggies and ridiculous wigs; even the early 20th century speaks to us more as mythology than model. But as the War in Iraq further echoes that in Vietnam, other similarities begin to become apparent. The 90s boom and bust begins to look a lot like the boom and bust of the 1920s. The Patriot Act is our House Un-American Activities Committee. Gay Rights our Civil Rights. George W. Bush our George H.W. Bush. We are growing into it. America has met the horizon envisioned many years ago, when after World War II we positioned ourselves as fledgling leaders of a new world order. Half a century established the nation in that role and, no matter what resentment or criticism may arise in other countries, in the face of global issues – terrorism, poverty, free trade, Communism – America, my America, my generation, is fully expected to lead. Our troublesome characteristics, our idiosyncrasies and peccadilloes are not youthful folly anymore; their consequences are no longer growing pains.

We are learning which mistakes we are doomed to repeat, uncovering, as a country, our pathologies. Our trouble is in learning that we need to learn. My generation did not lose its sense of history. Until now, we never had one. The days and years of our parents are archaic, lost in slowness and quaint ignorance. Our own pasts return to us as times of clunky objects and bad haircuts. Tender, gentle images of today hold no stature with us; the present is a drowsy dream from which we are trying to wake up. Everything we own is obsolete as soon as we turn around. Why would we wish to inhabit or understand the unstreamlined, unsophisticated eras that preceded us?

IV. Become As Little Children

I turned 26 years old last November. When I was 15, playing little league baseball, I remember the games always began with the national anthem. Usually it was played through a crappy public address speaker, often from a mic held directly to the speakers of a miniature boom box. It was never beautiful or rousing or terribly inspiring, but I always felt something. I was as naïve about government and politics then as I was about love and sex. I felt it as a gift, to have nothing more pressing than to spend the afternoon playing baseball, in a safe place, in a nation that afforded me such luxury.

I still cling to this idealism. Even with what I have learned, with all the jingoism and racism and corruption that I witness, I hang on to an America that I love deeply. This is, I believe, what is on the minds of the youth. We talk about avoiding the “real world” that assiduously lays claim to our childhood, but with a lament that knows that it is too late. We have already been grotesquely thrust outward, prematurely exposed by way of the internet, by way of cell phones, to impatience, to sex, drugs, and innocuously blue, uncalloused and bright Tuesday mornings.

One of the follies and charms of youth is the ability to live life in the abstract: to bear along with meaning minus consequences. The American youth have all experienced at least one day in which the illusion dissipated. We are all, in some manner, members of the Class of September 11th 2001. It was unavoidable that we would have graduated to something, some further understanding revealed in that morning and its aftermath. We cannot elude the changes, whether they come in shifts of personal, political, cultural, or economic consciousness, or only in the prices of our cardamom.

But I am not worried. It is this fusion of innocence and travail that gives my generation strength, and we will thrive because we are neither whimsical nor cynical. When the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded, we will not be tethered to the artifices of our mothers and fathers, and we will not refuse our time for dreaming of a fuller, prouder destiny. As mixed up as things get, as mixed up as they are now, and as they will be, I say that we see them as they are, and we face them as we will.

We may look inauspicious with our unprofessional piercings, our bad habits and our ordinary shoes, but are we not the generation of Star Wars? Of The Bad News Bears? Of The Goonies? Are we not the very rag-tag bunch of weirdoes, underdogs, and rejects from whom the world has come to expect salvation?

Oily-haired nerds, bored office denizens, thugs, protesters, soldiers, video-gamers, riot grrls, punk rockers, ravers, vegans, neo-hippies, frustrated stock men! We are the next generation, and not because Pepsi said so. I know so many brilliant, concerned, passionate people you would never even believe me; I know that one day, near or distant, the world will turn its gaze back to our time, to our plot of history, and see our battles, with tyranny, with waste, poverty, and apathy, and as time opens towards yet another new horizon, say of our enemies, “And they would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for those meddling kids.”