Lowered Expectations

by Akim Reinhardt

Most People are Good | SLC6A1 ConnectPeople are basically good.

God, what a tiresome trope.

It is a desperate and naive sentiment, often advanced by those who can’t bear the truth. I say this as a historian who has studied genocide, ethnic cleansing, slavery, vast, violent, exploitative colonial systems, and more mundane expressions of racism, sexism, homophobia, and classism. But if you’ve neither the time nor the inclination to brush up on 10,000 years of human history as a background for this discussion, then allow me to point you towards the present.

More than 70,000,000 people just voted for Donald Trump. Again.

After four years of observing, on a near daily basis, his presidential grotesquerie. The racism, the sexism, the vindictiveness, the endless vitriol, the knee-jerk authoritarianism and ceaseless attacks on and erosion of American constitutional mechanisms and democratic norms.

The number plagues us like a cancerous tumor unfazed by chemotherapy or radiation, and too large for a scalpel to carve away without disfiguring the corpus: 70,000,000. Read more »

Yes, I’m Defending the Millennials, Goddammit

Crystal-ballby Akim Reinhardt

Generational analysis, when done poorly, is half-a-notch above astrology: All the people born at this time are like this!

Of course there's plenty of good generational research and analysis by demographers and other social scientists. However, most people don't delve into that stuff. Most people simply absorb generational analysis from popular culture. That's unfortunate, because you can often get more penetrating insights from a Chinese restaurant paper place mat.

Worse yet, a lot of pop culture generational analysis is passively racist and classist. You know who we're really talking about when we say “Baby Boomers,” right? It's hardly every American born between 1946-1964. Black people? Latinos? Most immigrants? The deeply impoverished? Pushaw. For the most part, we're just talking about the white MCAU (middle class and up), and whoever can pass through their circles. And we're not even talking about them smartly. By and large, we just rehash dumb stereotypes. This generation sacrificed. That generation navel gazed. Bla bla bla.

For example, when I Googled “Baby Boomers are,” the auto complete came up:
selfish
the biggest
entitled

When I Googled “Millennials are,” the auto complete came up:
lazy
the worst
screwed

Indeed, pop culture generational analysis is often so shallow, haphazard, and/or commercialized, that it typically only blathers about every other generation. There's an accordion discourse, which fixates on alternating generations (Greatest, Boomers, Millennials) while largely ignoring the generations between them (Silent, X, Z). As a result, Baby Boomers dominated popular discourse for a long time.

However, Baby Boomers have recently been knocked off their demographic perch. There are now more Millennials than boomers in the U.S. population, and these relative youngens are increasingly the subject of America's generational fascination. As such, they catch a lot of flak, much of it head smackingly stupid. I recently came across a stunning example of this vapid chatter while drinking a blueberry beer in a Lake Placid tavern.

Yes, that Lake Placid, two-time Winter Olympic town and scene of the 1980 Miracle on Ice. And yes, blueberry beer. It was actually quite good, thank you very much, Judgy McJudgerson.

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