(Twisted) Memory Lane

Anne Lamott of TPM Cafe is trying to talk about Scott Mclellan (and, btw, shouldn't that name now be synonymous with "retreat' by now?).

Unfortunately, after she opened with this, I wasn't really thinking much about Rovegate:

Remember when you were a kid, and one of your best friends would say, "You HAVE to pick: if murderers were either going to kill your mother or your father, who would you pick?" And you'd feel terrible, because you HAD to pick. So you'd think, Well, dad is a lot more fun, but if murderers killed him, then our whole family would die or end up at the Rescue Mission; and mom is freaked out all the time, but if she got killed, who would take care of us? Like, does dad even know who the VET is?

It always took awhile to remember that you didn't actually have to pick, that it was just a friend who hated her dad and wished he would die, but was worried that if she came right out and said that, it would make her seem a little angry.

WTF!!!!! Did she grow up with Ryan Klebold? Really, if she said this out loud a cocktail party, how long a silence do you think would hold before someone commented. I mean, its bad enough that her friends were playing game-theory with parental departure, but then the underlying current of actual child-alienation verging on homicidal thought just overwhelms me. Forgot Rove, I want to reclaim those halcyon days of my youth. And I'm damn worried that Anne didn't share them.

You see, I don't like to say this much, but I too believe that it really was better back in the day. Now I don't believe in the hysteria that the world's going to hell in a hand-basket, but I have long thought we had it pretty good. We had video games, but the damn technology didn't improve every day so our stuff was still cool for weeks, even months. We had Sesame Street and no Elmo. We had Pee Wee Herman, we didn't have to think about his Pee Wee. We had the distant unlikely prospect of nuclear anihilation, not parents that buy duct tape. We knew Milli Vanilli before it was a joke (well, before it was that joke). Come to think of it, we had OUR parents, who frankly seem a hell of a lot more fun than the schedule-driven, 2 hour commuting, DVD/CD/Video GAme explicit-lyric labeling, missing-white-girl-obsessed dunderheads who've taken over the industry now. Indeed, one reason I keep my views about the good ol' days quiet is the prospect of the dunderheads exploiting it.

But Anne's making me worry that's not the case. Luckily, my friends didn't engage in these sort of mental experiments, maybe it was because I didn't hang with the D&D crowd, I don't know. But if this was going on back when I was a kid maybe we've been stuck in this same ol' long hard slog from time immemorial. Very disturbing to learn such things about my fellow Gen X>Yers. It's like when I got out of high school and first learned of the rampant and frivolous sexual experimentation that had been going on while I spent years trying to meticulously planning one failed conquest after the next like they were Mt. Everest and I had vertigo, asthma, and a prostethis. (Was I the Wile E. Coyote of youthful sex?)

I have to ask the question, Are My Generation Disturbed?

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