-People hate my generation precisely because we *don't* get around; because we sit and shit ourselves around postmodern articles in the Guardian which no-one else gives a fuck about because it reminds them of when they really had to pay the bills against the shilling of lefty cunts who still say that strikes were always about social justice and anyone who didn't agree was selfish, even now, thirty years later; because we salivate and ejaculate over non-existant images that we love enough to spill our seed over while we persuade everyone else that it means nothing that we dash home from a day's being fucked at work to wank out the day over some bullshit people screaming above their tattoos how much they love (being) butt-fuck(ed) or (ing). People hate my generation because our science, our literature, our music, is obsessed with an inward movement, into our own self, our origins, the beginnings of the next lot of poor fuckers, our bodies, we love our -great, fake, gymned up - bodies and we really don't love the bodies of people who aren't right: they should never of existed and we will damn well make sure they never happen again. People hate my generation because it is shit. Because we are still 14, now, in 2008, when the youngest of us is 25; because we love to be transgressive and rebellious even though it was our parents who really did it and it was really safe for us whose parents really didn't know what the fuck to do; because we were the first to come off the pill at 14; the first to throw hissy fits when someone told us we weren't Einstein or Bobby Charlton; the first to slash each other to pieces by the hundred; the first to take toddlers by the arm and kill them; the first to tell everyone else they were utterly irrelevant; the first to wave our wallets (which had no money in them after all) in front of a starving world; the first to beat the shit out of anyone who told us we were parked wrongly or had dropped a bit of litter or could have let someone sit in our seat; the first to tell anyone, anyone at all, who crossed us for any reason, to fuck off.
People hate us because we are cunts.
And we are 1971-1984: before and after are different generations: the one that comes after is worse, a lot worse,but then, we made it: the one that comes before is a bunch of shits, to be sure; but restrained by something: a sense of purpose or permanence: a belief in...something. It really isn't a joke, those of us born in the collapse of the consensus. We really do exist; and we are still here, shadowing out the rest of our lives behind keyboards, at the bottom of a glass, beating the shit out of our children or of anyone else we don't like. Shrilly denouncing everything from ourselves to anyone who has the audacity to disagree.
Our music: it stole riffs and tunes for E-ed up nights in other people's fields: now they steal our stealings for their own ironic dance music, now they prefer the stuff we stole from to the stuff we made. And how they laugh. They laugh because they know we are dead. We had nothing to give in the first place. "Oh, I just know that something good is gonna happen" - oho, we thought that was ironic enough in 1991, when postmodern life was fucked; and we thought the xpbm version by Utah Saints would last forever, now it has itself been ironized by another version laid on top: and so we are buried, we are buried because all we did was steal. We were stupid enough to believe that grave robbing made a civilisation.
Fuck me, when we danced to all that shit, did we really know how dead all that smiley-faced crap really was? What did it have that was real, what did it do that was original? They take the piss out of us, you know - they see NO DIFFERENCE between hippies and the twats at the end of the 80s: in fact, they've more respect for hippies. They are bright kids, and they elide 20 years in a heartbeat - it really doesn't matter to them.
Many of my pupils think I was a hippy. They have no idea, nor do they care. The powercuts, the breeze blocks from motorway bridges, Challenger, the beatings, the riots, the fear of a 4 minute death: they really do not care. Nor should they.
We really are shits.
Good old Sunny Jim. You lost, uncle Jimmy, you lost. And the world changed. And it wasn't, really, Mrs Thatcher's fault. She only surfed the wave.
Actually, you know what? Fuck it, I like Jim Callaghan and I'd vote for him tomorrow. But not in 1979.
And they wonder why my hair is falling out.
1 comment:
Oh, it wasn't all that bad, surely?
I think we are the generation we are because we bought the values our parents sold out on.
Remember, our parents roamed round fields off their faces too!
Then told us not to...
I'm being flippant of course, but in a sense I'm not. I think we are a midway generation. Our parents saw a new world then got roped back in.
OK, those born after 1984, they aren't a real generation. Now that might sound wierd- but heres this for a theory.
We are children of hippies. The hippies were chilldren of those who fought Hitler. they were the children of those who fought the Kaiser.
see what I'm getting at? it's as if the real thinking generations now come in time waves, those wars have set the pace. If you aren't descended from war vets, you don't see history the same way, it doesn't matter so much. We are the descendants of the fighters, your pupils aren't.
Ina nutshell, life doesn't matter so much to them, it doesn't have the urgency it does to us- we have a historical view they never can.
It is not in your pupils, but IN OUR CHILDREN that we must hope.
We still failed, we still sold out. Our children WON'T.
Because we fel more guilty about selling out than our parents did, so we won't let our children fail.
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