| Sunday, November 30, 2008 |
13:38 - The new rebelliousness
http://www.somethingawful.com/d/news/thanksgiving-rules.php
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I've talked about this before, but I continue to find—and love it when I do—examples of writing on SomethingAwful.com that illustrate the long, slow coming-of-age of the generation of maladjusted nerds who constituted the first wave of mass Internet culture.
Predictably, back in the mid-to-late 90s, these people delighted in creating memes that confused and horrified the "normals"—I still recall with glee the Pusher and Shover Robots, which defined my world for a few months surrounding one Halloween in the post-All-Your-Base universe. Naturally, anyone who didn't "get" these gags were relegated to the Old Guard of society, barely worth bothering with except for their sheer weight of numbers which made it tiresome for us to shoulder our way through the drudgery of meatspace on those occasions when we had to do things like go buy food.
Predictably, the rebellion of such underground figures took the form of a cynicism toward the general populace, a contempt for social norms and customs, and a feeling of being above the petty constraints that turned our parents' generation into such apparently listless bores. (The fact that this exact same mentality has held sway with every generation of teens and twentysomethings in human history never seems to occur to anyone; it's always going to be different this time.)
But then—perhaps just as predictably—over the months and years since 2000, there's been a sea change. SA figures like Lowtax and Zack Parsons have done unthinkable things like buy suburban houses and get married and have children. Yet they've kept writing throughout the process; and now, where you might easily have expected on SomethingAwful in 1999 to see a sarcastic treatise on the pointless excesses of Thanksgiving—the hollow socializing with annoying family members, the free-floating guilt of colonial oppression, the sneering at fat people shopping at Costco—you now see this:
People who flat out refuse to celebrate Thanksgiving are losers. We're winners, Niko. They don't know that we roll like this every day bro, with stuffing and cranberry sauce. Anti-Thanksgiving nuts are basically saying, "I don't want to be a part of society." They've checked out. They usually have excuses ranging from "It's a holiday founded on violence and oppression!" to "What do we have to give thanks for? Let's give thanks every day!" Both are bullshit.
First of all, anybody who killed an Indian in the name of conquest during that period of American history is long dead. We should remember those times not to punish ourselves out of a day of gorging and indulgence (otherwise known as every day in this country), but to make sure that it never happens again. I wasn't responsible for Indians getting booted off their land and I'm sure as hell not going to feel guilty about it.
And second, shut up. We like to have dinner. We like to see our families or friends or both. Real people work for a living. They may work far away from their family or friends. Thanksgiving is a day put aside where our society mostly shuts down in order for everyone to connect with their given families or those they choose to call family. It's just another facet of our civilized world.
But don't worry, we get it. You're too cool for school. You've got it all figured out. You're smarter than all of us. You see through this whole Thanksgiving nonsense and see it for what it is! Oh how I wish people could realize the error of their waves. The nerve of people to get together and have dinner. Those monsters...
The nerds have grown up. Oh, sure, some perpetually bitter individuals will continue to hunker in their bunkers and cling to their own forms of guns and religion—scorn and self-admiration. But the bulk of the generation who had resourcefulness to spare in the waxing days of the Internet and spent it early on chafing against the established mores of human society have come to appreciate those very mores for what they are: constructs created by humans just like us for the purpose of making life easier. We're all trying to solve the same problems: paying the rent, enjoying the company of others, and contributing in some way to the communities that recognize us as members. It's a realization that has come to everyone upon reaching a certain age: that people who value such things as having a nice house, a wife, kids, good family relations, and a year full of cherished holidays to look forward to are not selling out any grand dream from their youths. They're fulfilling it.
It's amusing in the extreme, though, to notice the form these sentiments take. Appearing as they do on SomethingAwful, the perennial fount of Internet counterculture, these thoughts become radical manifestoes of rebellion against a status quo of irony and eye-rolling cynicism. It's the establishment there that revels in scoffing at the outside world... and it's the rebels who rally to its defense.
They'll all have to become a part of it someday. The only variable is how long it takes them to realize it.
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Brian Tiemann
