Lots of new readers have started following The Fixer since I last posted one of these. It seems sensible to preface this episode, which happens to be my 100th post, with explaining again why I say “ruined.”
Because I’m not wrecked. There is as much “wrong” with me as there is with you. We are none of us normal, because the norm isn’t a thing, it’s a statistic. We can talk as long as you like about the ghost of Aristotle in the shell of modern thought, but suffice to say there is no Normal Person we can all strive to emulate, and there never will be.
So why say ‘ruined’?
First, because it plays to my obsessional idiom, which has most of my written correspondence (from this blog to my text messages) employing the intellectual, somewhat stilted but still wholly lucid prose of an British college don circa 1948, for which I only slightly apologize.
Second, because in a sense it’s true. Any instinct in me to get along, accept good old school-marriage-breeding-working-death as my inevitable path, was further and further eroded by each of these encounters with The Other.
And boy, was there ever a lot of Other in the mid-1990s.
If you knew where to look. We used to call it counter-culture, because it offered a wholly alternate universe that felt wildly contrary both to what I’d grown up with and with what was being shown on TV. A realm in which the earth was held as sacred, my body was mine to both worship and gleefully deface, sexuality of all kinds was not just tolerated but encouraged, drug use was by informed consent and sensible practice while alcohol use was almost nil, and the music was both relentlessly joyful and wildly seditious in a time of increasing state surveillance and corporate control.
I’m not saying it was a golden age because I don’t believe in golden ages. Much of my experience was a function of my privilege (white, middle class, expensively educated, etc) because looking back I understand how hard other people were struggling for basic rights of safety and freedom that are only now in place. It’s deeply concerning, even embarrassing, to think how far we’ve backslid in the last few years into unfettered corporate control, restriction of reproductive and sexual rights, and infantilized violence perpetrated against people who are already oppressed. The more I think about it, the more it makes sense that yeah, Boomers and Gen X are all suffering from lead poisoning from their toxic childhood homes, because otherwise why are they acting like such fucking idiots?
Yeah, yeah, not all Boomers…don’t even start.
On the other hand, I’m firmly in the camp of the historical dialectic (see above re college don) and the notion that the pendulum each time swings further towards justice and freedom for all and away from authoritarianism. I fully expect that this present day ultra-conservative movement is not a new beginning but their last gasp, the Hail Mary, the desperate acts of desperate individuals who see their old way of life eroding and can’t deal with the fact that change exists, and that it spares no one.
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