Hip To Be Square?

Ah, adolescence! I remember it well. I have it on the highest authority, the Bride, that I've never progressed out of adolescence.

When we first enter this age, many of us rebelled. We disagreed with our elders just for argument's sake, tried to do things our parent's wouldn't approve of. We read revolutionary, subversive material, fought The Man.

I did all of this. I wanted never to be conformist, to be, in older terms, a square. I was what I now call primary cool.

But I noticed all the other primary cool people did the same exact things in the same exact way. We were trying to show just how individual we were, and wound up wearing the same clothes and thinking the same thoughts as 90% of our generation. Our identical rebellions made us interchangeable bodies of a generation.

But I thought maybe I could do better. So I went for secondary cool. I started ignoring current fashion, and reading what would be revolutionary to the revolutionaries.

I read it all. Hitler and Heinlein. Friedman and Falwell. Gorbachev and Gingrich. Mao and Marx, both Karl and Groucho (Groucho is MUCH better!).

I didn't have the words for what I was doing until later. In the movie "Platoon" (1986), the character Junior summed it up, "Simple. Free your mind and your ass will follow."

Now I look around at the youth of today. They get the similar tats in similar places. Just style, no substance. They get similar piercings. Style. They wear similar baggy clothes. Style. (Trust me kids, the time to wear tight clothes is NOW. If you wait a decade or two, your body will remove that option from you.)

When I look at the substance of the majority of youth, and of older revolutionaries, it's just funny. Instead of "fightin' The Man", you're supporting him. You're not fighting the establishment, you're supporting it. What's next, tweed jackets with elbow patches and finger sandwiches?

You have come to revel in group think. You do not seek individuality in any substantive way, you seek to fit in with the establishment. You are not cool. Not Hip.

You, and the sixties holdouts are now the squares.

And since you might not read this, or think about it, and I can't present these thoughts in interpretive dance, I'll give it to you musically:



The Grey Man