When Ronald Reagan tried to lower a pillow over the face of the National Endowment for the Arts, I suspect he was mostly doing it because he was a cheap old ghoul who hated anything joyful and also who wanted to flex for his awful friends and deliver on the promise to cut taxes for the rich. I don’t think he was cunning enough to know that in doing so, he would also make entire generations of students unable to think critically. Nancy might have been that savvy, but not the man who is best described as a malevolent haircut from California.
But this is exactly what happens when you cut arts out of schools. Not only do we collectively lose the “delight of a child watching the Nutcracker Ballet, the smile of an old man on hearing a line from Shakespeare, the reverie of a woman lost in the shapes and colors of a Manet” (that’s a direct quote from a 1981 UPI article). We also lose the ability to see ourselves through art - including seeing patterns of humanity which have long been established and recorded.
For example: I believe that if more Americans had been forced to invited to participate in their school’s production of The Music Man, a cautionary tale about smooth-talking con men, they might have been able to flimflam artist when one leered across the debate stage in the fall of 2015.
The entire premise of The Music Man is that a guy comes to town, incites a pearl-clutching of Biblical proportions, and then also proposes the solution to it (for a fee, of course).
It can be hard to see things as they are, as they unfold before us. But when we see them on a stage and get them stuck in our head, these patterns become easier to identify.
Similarly, anytime someone tells me that Gen Z, as a generation, is “noisy, lazy, sloppy,” or whatever else they might say about the TikTok Youth, all I can hear is the song “Kids!” from Bye Bye, Birdie. You know, the one where the teens - FROM THE 1960S - are branded as “noisy, lazy, sloppy, crazy loafers.”
This movie came out in 1963. Which brings us to today’s C/O subject at hand: KIDS TODAY. WHY ARE THEY SO CRAZY AND WILL THEY EVER BE FUNCTIONAL ADULTS? Or, the Tricentennial-ish Hair-Pulling Over Teen Sanity that Humans Seem Doomed To Repeat Into Perpetuity.
Why are they like this?
Of course, it’s perfectly normal to think that the way you did things was the best way. I, for example, will be pried out of my skinny jeans by the cold hand of death and not a minute sooner because boyfriend jeans make me look like a toddler in a soiled diaper. However, as we age, we, as a species, seem incapable of recalling the wounds to the ego that the previous generation inflicted upon us.
Which is weird because being called the “Me, Me, Me Generation” by Time Magazine is seared into my brain, but maybe millennials really are as a petty as we’re said to be.
Sure, the Gen Z kids who rent the house next door make me feel like the Crypt Keeper with side-swept bangs, but I feel like I have a deep appreciation for a.) all the shit they’ve been through and b.) the fact that they understand technology that it is taking me a painfully long time to even kind of figure out. Their style choices aren’t for me (because I already wore knock-off JNCOs, thanks) and their music is a mystery to me, but like…that’s fine. That doesn’t make them an alien species.
OR DOES IT? Because for like, 100 years (and probably longer, but I’m just dealing with the last century), there seems to be a cliff effect where one generation reaches their 30s. Collectively they all tumble over the side like so many tub toys going into the warm, soapy water. And once they reach the bubbles, looking up the remaining figures on the porcelain edge, they cry out “WOW YOU GUYS UP THERE ARE ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NUTS.”
Seriously, it happens with every generation. Like when girls in the 1920s were exploring their own war-sandwich liberation period and the people who had lived through the Victorian era were AGOG.
Here’s a clipping from a Birmingham paper in December of 1924.
The editorial, which is actually just an ad for an edition of a magazine, is a teaser for a tell-all by “judge” who I’m pretty is a character that the editors just made up like Dear Abby. The ad, designed to educate (read: absolutely terrify) parents, outlined the many VERY REAL, NOT AT ALL RIDICULOUS fears that all parents should have when their teens left the house. Cigarettes! Not going to church! Sexual immorality!
This moral panic is designed to, like the titular Music Man before them, move units and make money by exploiting very natural parental fears about kids gone wild. But it reads a lot like any number of Facebook posts from ~ Influencers ~ who claim to know how to ensure your child stays a peaceful, virginal MotherBoy until he is married chastely at age 40.
Like this literally just describes the extremely normal process of maturation.
But there’s something about creating a completely foreign identity for growing teens that humans just seem to hook into. Because even though some people can spot the pattern - there’s a cartoon below that ran in 1922 that essentially said “it’s pretty much the same as when we were kids but a little different, chill the fuck out” - the many who can’t or won’t find themselves sucked into this kind of folie a deux wherein the “deux” are “parents and the media who are telling them to be very afraid because their children are all absolutely nuts.”
Juvenile delinquents
In the 1950s, those same parents - the ones who had been raised on radios and rumrunning - lost their collective minds right on schedule, except this time there was an additional element of deep racism.
Whereas the the 1920s panic was mostly about sexism - ~ boy moms~ were afraid of loose girls in silk stockings who were out there shaking it like Eve holding the forbidden fruit - the 1950s Kids Today-Itis took the form of fear-mongering around “juvenile delinquency” which is like, just mildly-coded racism.
Youths who grew up on comic books and pulp detective novels gained more autonomy as a result of WWII because independent teens. The films and music they listened to reflected this - think Elvin and James Dean - and their overall attitudes toward authority were pretty well soiled by the war.
In the eyes of marketers, they become perfect consumers. Here’s a snippet from a brand survey about how much teens had in disposable income (since many had jobs but lived at home) and why it had businesses excited about the things they could get disenchanted kids to buy.
Rather than just making clothing for children and clothing for adults, more companies started making Juniors lines, specifically for teens - and, in doing so, helped more young people define their look as distinctly different from the style of the parents and then helped parents have more things to be mad about.
There was also a lot more integration in public spaces as BIPOC communities moved into cities to take new jobs. And with white kids getting introduced to Black music - the aforementioned King of Rock was part of that, as were figures like Alan Freed, a disc jockey who played Black artists on his popular radio program - a lot of parents who were considered liberal in the 1920s were suddenly not quite so open-minded.
The abject terror around “race-mixing” wasn’t even subtle. Parents - and, maybe more importantly, local and federal elected officials - saw this as a dangerous time. If these kids went too crazy, they might commit crimes. They might get in trouble. They might start wanting equal rights for marginalized groups.
Here’s what this tepid puddle of pee had to say:
Ah yes, the decadence of [checks notes] growing up under the shadow of war.
So the Kids Today of the 1950s were called crazy for the way they felt about themselves. They were called crazy for the way they loved music. They were called crazy for driving too fast and for going to the movies all the time. They were called crazy for their weird hair and their odd slang and their interest in desegregated common spaces, like music venues and drive-ins.
And by painting them as crazy, their parents were able to not only undermine them and effectively disenfranchise them, they also gaslight them into thinking that their teenage interests were all flights of fancy.
When they grew up, whatever kids were into - different rock, more progressive policy issues, not going to war - were more easy to write off as “kids today.”
And this is the whole thing!
Main Generation Syndrome
In writing this, I’ve been thinking about how protective we all are about our own generations. Which is weird because, as a millennial, I feel that I was so maligned starting at such a young age by forces so much more powerful than I was that my default setting is to worry about the generation after me, not condemn them.
I mean, I don’t understand them and they make me feel ancient, but that’s not their fault. That’s a me problem. Well, me and also the concept of aging generally.
Still, there are times when I have to talk myself down from thinking that all of these bucket-hat-wearing youths are absolutely losing their minds. I worry that when we try to regulate TikTok - WHICH WE SHOULD, IT IS A PRIVACY HELLSCAPE - we’re really just trying to regulate the next generation of people we don’t like because they’re not us.
And we have Main Generation Syndrome, which is like Main Character Syndrome but with generations. We see the timeline of existence as starting with us - like everything before us was stately and old and everything after us is just a cheap imitation of our own best years. But what a completely bonkers way to view the processional of humanity.
That, to me, feels like the real mental issue. Deciding that our ways are the best ways in the fact of so much evidence to the contrary. And you don’t even have to go digging through newspaper articles to see it. Just think about how Trouble with a Capital T starts with kids in pinch-back suits playing pool instead of patching the screen door. Because like, we’ve been wagging our fingers and armchair diagnosing kids for a long time when it’s pretty clear that adulthood forgetfulness is the sickness.
xoxo HBO
P.S. did you know I have a podcast about cleaning? I do!