Cabaret

by Dana Blankenhorn

Cynicism is the mortal sin of my generation.

We had a lot to be cynical about. Vietnam, Nixon, sex, drugs, and all the rest. Every institution we looked to in our youth failed us.

So we grew into adulthood without ideals, and now America pays the price for that. Because when you don’t really believe in anyone, you’re bound to fall for anything. This sounds like a contradiction but it’s not.

When you have solid values you can measure what you’re told against what you trust. When you lack that foundation you will buy false promises.

Those who know the value of a dollar are frugal, which is the route to economic success. Those who fail to value a dollar are spendthrifts, which is the route to ruin. We grew up without that value and are spending ourselves broke.

Those who grow up with religious faith may question it, even reject it, but we measure faith against faith and make a rational choice. Those who feel they’re without faith will take it like hard liquor, become drunk on faith, which is what Mao was saying, and what "mega-churches" are selling.

The best shorthand is to look at the title of this piece, Cabaret. The musical was not just Lisa Minelli’s greatest role. It was a study in Weimar attitudes, the attitudes that gave rise to Hitler. Those in the cabaret believed in nothing, following the horrors of World War I. They became victims to others who found belief, false belief, even genocidal belief, and who sought to impose it on everyone.

For Germans World War I was, like Vietnam for Americans, a war that came out wrong. Just like those Germans we grew up looking for scapegoats, and bought ideologies that promised them. Liberalism, secularism, easy scapegoats. Muslims are even easier.

Every generation that undergoes a war like Vietnam comes out scarred in the same way. It was that way for southerners after the Civil War, who turned on blacks. It was true, as I noted, for Germans, who turned on Jews. It was true for the French after 1870, who turned on Dreyfuss, for Russian Communists who turned on each other, and for Muslims today, following multiple humiliations.

The certainty of hatred is bred in the residue of defeat.

Because people live longer today than before, 2004 was not the generational election even I expected. It was an endorsement of the same old attitudes, dominated by the scarred veterans of My Generation.

The hope for change and choice must lie beyond us, in a generation that will reject us, as every generation rejects what came before.

Our task, as the losers in our own generation’s war with itself, is to fire that rebellion against our compatriots, their elders. We need to preach idealism to the young, optimism to a generation who are being fed cynicism, and create causes they will wish to fight for.

Not our causes. Their causes.

Peace. The environment. Reconciliation. Humanism.

These are the underlying assumptions of the generation to come, but there has been nothing yet to truly challenge those assumptions, and energize those people, into a real force for good in the world.

Republicans won’t do this. They’re busy with their own trips, with Iraq, with oil, with hatred of gays, of uppity women, of intellectuals. They are what they are.

But as opponents we don’t have to be what we are, or what they are. We can be what we like. And what we like is bound to be of interest to younger people, who are looking for something appealing to hang their lives on, young people who still believe, who have not yet been broken on the wheel of history as we have.

There are plenty of causes, large and small, to energize them. Once again, Howard Dean is right, absolutely, 100% right.

We must do the energizing.

That means we must localize our causes, find small efforts where the work of small cadres of young people can effect real change and energize them for more.

We must teach. We must teach history, we must teach science, we must teach technology and ethics, and the law as it should be.

Finally we must create dreams. It’s in the dreams of people that you see the real future.

I’m something of a student of film history. There’s a lot of futurism in film, because most stories are dreams. Look at the American films of the 1930s and early 1940s, the films that spoke to our parents when they were young. They all told similar stories, and gave similar lessons, about the value of community, of working together, and of believing that tomorrow will be better. Many of today’s stories are quite similar.

Then look at the films of the 1970s and 1980s. Bonnie & Clyde, Easy Rider, Midnight Cowboy. Individuals crushed and broken, destroyed. Futile gestures. Even the success of characters like Norma Rae was fleeting, because you knew the mill would in time be closed. Do your best, these pictures preached, but know that they’re all crooks, that there’s no real hope. Live young, live fast, make a beautiful corpse.

There are exceptions to these rules in both eras. Generations overlap. History isn’t precise or neat. But when you do any experiment you look for the median, for the Bell Curve that describes a multitude of results, and what I’ve written above is, in general, true.

And I think it sets our task well. These are things we can do. We can write, we can teach, we can identify problems and push people toward solving them.

We still have ideals. I’ve seen it in the writing of everyone here.

Pass them on.

Posted by Aldon Hynes at December 8, 2004 2:01 PM | TrackBack