Raging with the Machine

"I wanna publish zines
and rage against machines
I wanna pierce my tongue
it doesn't hurt, it feels fine
the trivial sublime
I'd like to turn off time
and kill my mind...."
-Harvey Danger, "Flagpole Sitta"

I remember the 90's. While they say that if you remember the 60's you weren't really there, remembering the 90's is easy, because I had a lot of people tell me how great the sixties were, how much their generation has done to save the world, and how we Gen-Xers were a bunch of slackers and bellyachers. How we had no fire in said belly. How we were lazy and didn't get it, how we were not active enough in politics. How we should get out of our Mom's basement. I heard about how the popular culture of the sixties meant something, and how the only good songs came out of that decade. How raves were drug fueled nihilist parties. When I would hear that one, I would ask, "well, what about Woodstock? And all the other concerts of the time? they had their fair share of illicit drugs, did they not?" At this I would hear rage and fuminations, and long discourse about how their popular cultural expressions were so much more mind expanding and meaningful for the planet, how they were looking to change the world and the people in it, so, it did not matter if someone dropped a little acid now and then. That was good for society. Not like the nineties, where kids use drugs just to get high.

When I was a bit younger, I lived through the 80's, and had 80's clothes and styles, and listened to 80's music, only to find that about five years ago, there was a wave of nostalgia about the 80's, and 80's parties and revival of films. Recently, there has been a revival of the 90's, but with much less flannel.

And, in the Jenkins White Paper we read this week, we have a number of scholars reporting for the MacArthur foundation, suggesting that we use "participatory culture" as a way to bridge the gap between youth and not-youth. It would be good, though, to really look behind the curtain on this one, and to find out what is going on. Kids, historically, have found ways to express their creativity, particularly in artistic, or not so artistic, ways. We all did it. We drew things on our notebooks, we wrote graffitti on walls, we formed bands and played "our" music. We raged against machines of all types. We put our energy into what we thought we could control and change, and rejected the wisdom of our elders because it wasn't the coolness of today. In the 90's people started getting tattoos, writing zines ---which, in pre-HTML days, were written on paper, then photocopied and distributed in the coffee shops were we all hung out to do our poetry slams.

And, now, all that is done with digital tools online (well, not the tattoos, you still have to go to a shop for that.) And, it is sanctioned by authorities. And, I don't want it to have official approval.
I kind of like the old system, where teachers are stuck behind one generation, having had hopefully honed some perspective on methods and reasons why they teach. I want kids to rebel against something still, because there is nothing more honest and creative than a child who has something to prove. Even if it is that rainbow unicorns can kick butt.