PETER PAN WAS A GAY

ZIONIST NAZI SURF GOD


“I don’t want to live to be an old man,” said William earnestly. “I’d rather do what I please now and die a little sooner.” (Booth Tarkington, ‘Seventeen’, 1916)


Ok, now that I have your full, hopefully undivided attention, forget everything in the title of this piece that follows ‘Peter Pan’. Sometimes, floating derelict among the flotsam and jetsam of contemporary blogs as I am wont, one must occasionally adopt a vaguely Hollywood approach in an attempt to rise above the debris field of everyday tawdry bloggish sensationalism to gain awareness market share. I have found, in my own many searches for relevance in life, that certain catchwords like ‘GAY’, ‘SURF’ and ‘NAZI’ are sure-fire flares with which to spectacularly light up and bracket the pitch black night that lurks in the vast mass of most others’ pedestrian gray matter (typically flooding and smothering the sensation-beleaguered sensory centers of those afflicted brains). They catch your attention almost as effectively as that big restless bull that snorts alarmingly as one tries to cross the pasture.

As I head into the sunset of life, frantically heeding Dylan Thomas’ prophetic alarum to ‘...not go gentle into that good night’ by engaging in the journalistic equivalent of kicking & screaming, I spend more and more time reflecting on matters such as the quality of life own life, as lived and experienced, as attempted and/or as failed. This typically occurs at zero dark thirty hours in the dead of night: my body wants to sleep but my brain wants to stay up and PARTY!

Most often the subject of this insomniacal analysis is: how exactly did I lose my youthful idealism? How did I become the cynical, curmudgeonly ex-aesthete I thought I’d never be, a creature of comfort who now favors snuggling into my favorite reading chair by the hearth with a cup of hot cocoa,instead of standing on wind-swept mountain summits and chewing on ice chips? Occasionally this inward reflectivity…especially if occurring in the dead hours of night when sleep is a remote and difficult to exorcise ghost of an ambition…takes upon itself a slightly morbid, somewhat depressing nature. At such times this process of endlessly canvassing and quantifying the past course of my reactions to life’s challenges becomes less an exercise in objective analysis and more of a painfully subjective exercise in virtual self-flagellation. On these occasions a non-stop train carrying a precarious cargo of out-of-control past events flashes through the rail station of my mind, not stopping to fully allow discharge of its contents, but rather whizzing past in a blur and leaving the unhappy taint of self-perceived failures and sad regrets in the gray smoke of its nocturnal passage. A good friend once described this state of agitation as that of an insane monkey, jabbering away in a dark corner of the cage to himself as he masturbates. How perfectly grotesque, yet strangely apt an analogue for me, the life-long 'high-grade chimpanzee'!

As a child of the 60s, when my generation felt it had the enlightened prescience and inertial willfulness to deflect the self-destructive course of established American society’s socio-political events, I still vaguely recall being imbued with the sense of unlimited possibilities that youthful exuberance and energy bestows upon my puerile kind. My senses were positively centered in the present moment, leaving little or no room for interest in anything which had gone before nor that which was to follow. Beset by all the highly pressurized nuclear fission that adolescent development carries with it, I, like all my peers, had no sense of death, no fears, no reference within which to frame such a complex, highly esoteric and totally alien concept as an ‘end’ to anything (let alone life itself!). Life for me at that time, I well recall, was an exciting and uninterrupted flow of events, sensations and experiences, pursued on a day-to-day present time basis only, promising limitless new avenues of titillation, exploration, discovery and unending personal conquest.

Thus, when a close friend suddenly met his end on a powerful motorcycle in that jungle-like labyrinth of Oakland (CA) streets that masquerades as civilized East San Francisco Bay Area slurbia, I recall that my most memorable sensation of this moment was a sort of confused, anxious miscomprehension. The person lying there in the hospital’s CCU bed, eyes closed, facial features blurred by the force of the helmet-less impact and kept alive merely by the mechanical life-force being pumped into his lungs by a ventilator, was not, could not be the same person with whom I had so recently relished sharing adventures in a city that literally teemed with dangerous thrills and sublimely exotic hazards. In his place was this near unrecognisable mass of bruised flesh that bore little if any resemblance to the Traviso I had shared similar appetites with. It couldn’t possibly have been the Travis Felts I knew and admired, the dashing, charismatic young fellow who had grown up as the son of a retired US Army surgeon, in a small Mexican fishing village near Ixtapa-Zihuatanejo. No, instead I was confronted by a near-total disconnect of associative meanings and values and left gaping in the after-shock.

However, the fact of his death never quite sank in on me quite as profoundly as it had with his black girlfriend, a well-educated, if experientially confused young grad student who tolerated his wild ways and obvious attraction to other women with the sober resignation of a soldier facing a firing squad.

Reflecting back on that moment, it’s hard to admit that my own true awareness of life then was almost that of a mute rock mindlessly unconcerned within the wildly rushing torrent of glacial water that surged wildly over it. So many were the stimulations and sensations of those times that my deep and insatiable thirst for experience never allowed me to pause for very long to reflect on any one thing. I well recall, after becoming quite substantially attracted to the Daoist writings of Eastern Asian sages in my 20s, the phrase ‘The Way’ (also known as the ‘water way’, an analogue for Daoist acceptance of perpetual change) and how perfectly it suited my concept of life. Life was seminally fluidic to me then, a constant and unending ebbing and flowing of experiential stimuli that permitted virtually no pause for thought whatsoever. Go! Go! Go! A river flowing perpetually down the mountain towards the sea, taking any one or more of many possible courses. That was life for me then. To be lived strictly as it occurred, without qualification. Youthfulness, viewed from that vantage seems a form of immortality to the young.

All that marked me off slightly from all my peers at that moment was an inherent inward turning reflectivity, no doubt more of the reaction a sensitive person would have as a normal consequence than something overt and palpably intelligent. Since my natural inclination to all physical stimuli was and had always been that of a sea anemone, a sort of protective, reflective retraction reflex, there was for me, in the face of disasters like Traviso’s accident, much internalized automatic data cross-checking and indexing to process. Sad as it was, his death was therefore eventually filed away as a useful learning experience on several levels. 1) I learned that lower class scum-suckers cruising around in cars while high on drugs could be lethal vectors (QED: the car & occupants who had killed Traviso); 2) since I also drive motorcycles, the fact that that it could just as easily have been me as him also emerged from the murky depths of my thinking-well like a shape-shifting black wraith keen to impress me with the fact that death occurred even to those whom the Gods favored; and finally 3), I reflected on the fact that although the whole point of life seemed to be (at that time) to absorb inexhaustible experience, large parts of that experience might and very likely could be fatal.

I suppose if I had been any other one of my youthful cohorts, I would likely have shrugged this off and continued to pursue a James Dean state of enlightened youthful bohemianism, but for some off reason all of this unsettling disharmony greatly impressed me, thereby radically increasing the prospect of my perhaps eventually reaching an old and degenerative state (like a properly seasoned old man), instead of going out in a flash of blazing glory (the prime imperative of all directed youthful energies, after all!). Pity!

And sure enough, despite all the possible likely sad ends that awaited me at certain forks in the trail of life, here I am presently on the threshold of being 70, reasonably intact and still possessive of a head and four limbs…but with gray matter teetering precipitously on the brink of senilia and amygdala threatening to take a permanent vacation at any time. Part of me intensely regrets this, of course, since it still seems that the best possible end to life would occur while one was young and in one’s prime (like James Dean), but I seem destined after all to end up just like countless others in my generation, gasping for breath as an ancient geezer on DNR (Do Not Resuscitate) precautions. Death with dignity as a geezer? Impossible, unless one is young, full of energized flame & fire, and hell-bent for posterity either in pursuit of a gorgeous young female, or some impossibly romantic cause or another.

But this is all backstory, you see, since I have just finished an excellent book that helps put all of this adolescent angst into much clearer crystalised perspective. The book in reference is author Jon Savage’s 2007 book ‘TEENAGE: THE CREATION OF YOUTH CULTURE’, and I would highly recommend it to you if you’ve ever uttered the words ‘God damned teenager!’ in a fit of frustration (or some such equally satisfyingly condemnative epithet) over being presented with a kid (who should know better) doing something really stupid.

You see, ‘TEENAGE’ is a brilliant examination of the state of being youthful, more specifically of that highly irritating state of being a youthful pain-in-the-ass (to those of us who have passed safely over the stormy seas of adolescence and continued to grow into mature adulthood) who is seemingly hell-bent on causing us older folk extreme irritation. Despite having no children of my own, I can assure you, as the world’s greatest living authority on everything, that this is a book you will not only greatly benefit from but will undoubtedly also enjoy immensely (it’s also very readable, by the way).

In modern America, the semi-schizophrenic, fragmented and disjointed daily life we all are presently forced to lead (by the corporate marketeering puppeteers who jerk our strings…and you ARE, you know, whether you are consciously aware of it or not) leaves little time for analysis of anything (least of all things like a presidential election, LoL). Hence whenever adolescence once again grabs our attention in the form of a youthful school mass shooter or a drug/gangbanger, who among us does not pause, if only for ever so brief a moment, to wonder ‘why?’ Fortunately for those of you who are not inherently prone to exhaustive, intellectual self-flagellation (AKA: reflective analysis) as am I, Jon Savage has reached back to the very beginnings of what we today carelessly refer to as ‘pop-culture’, which would be far more accurately served by the simpler term ‘youth culture’.

In his book, Savage examines the origins of what is now dispassionately referred to as predictable, transitional behavioral dysfunction of post pubescent youths, a process that first began to be recognized roughly in the mid-1800s, consequent to the rise of industrialism. It may be surprising to some to learn that prior to that time, there really was no perceived problem with young people as a class, aged 12 or so to about 15. Society was too regulated by existing conventions & norms then, and misbehaving young people very quickly encountered the full wrath of an angry father who demanded absolutely obedience to his wishes.

Of course at that time there were no massively influential social dynamics at work quite equal to our modern internet and electronic media and the massively homogenising internet would take another half century before even being conceived. Books as popular regular fare with younger individuals barely existed and today’s highly materialistic, consumer society with its precisely defined and carefully targeted youth market simply didn’t exist.

Savage begins his assay by pointing to the near-subliminal desire in all sentient adolescent creatures to remain in a graceful state of perpetual youthfulness and abandon forever, citing the 19th century children’s story, by JM Barrie, of PETER PAN as an archetype. He eventually points to the late 1800s era, with its rising European traditions of post-industrial enabled militarism (i.e. the Franco-Prussian War), still later to the First World War and then to the German National Socialist rise to power in the 20s & 30s, marking them as key way points on the path to the first real development of a coherent, discrete & permanent under-culture of youthful rebelliousness. In both England and in Germany (the two major industrial powers of the period), these traditions gained in particular strength: in England due to what he describes as a tradition of ‘muscular Christianity’ derived from England's armed colonial empire, and in Germany concurrent with a sharp up-tick in latent (pre-existing) Prussian social regimentation (that grew into the later Nazi Youth Movement).

Citing the first youth gangs of industrial society that originated in the burgeoning cities (caused by collateral effects of modern industrialised society) of the late 1800s, and later the turn of the century counter-culture youth movements (such as the ‘Wandervogel’ youths in Germany) that developed impetus from the massive tragedies and dislocations caused by modern industrialised warfare, Savage observes that while these trends were attributable to very specific shifts in the world’s political-economic world history, it wasn’t until much later, when American marketing & advertising media developed ways of exploiting youthful angst that things began to take on a distinctly sinister (and uniquely American) form.

Youthful rebelliousness has always existed, of course, being one of the more profoundly predictable psycho-physical side effects of puberty, with the onset of all its powerful stimuli and life-altering sensations. What the modern world-wide political/economic struggles did was amplify and multiply what is essentially a singular and individual process (puberty) by an order of magnitude and direct it en masse towards that object of perceived youthful hatred (the older establishment), thanks to the pervasive impact of science & technology throughout human societies everywhere. Even then, the overall impact of ‘youth movements’ was still somewhat limited in that each contained its own formative elements that arose mostly from within (and not from without), each in its own particular, insular geographic locale.

One of the major ‘youth culture’ groups Savage initially focuses on is the Boy Scout movement, the English youth program (begun by Baden-Powell) dedicated to directing the volatility of youthfulness towards goals more consistent with the traditional aims & ideals of established British colonial culture. A near perfect example of what he terms ‘Muscular Christianity’, the British Boy Scout movement evolved into a system that embraced & promoted a uniquely British form of mind-set, that of the English ‘game-up’ milieu of organized sportsmanship (competition admixed substratively by a strong sense of peer ‘fair-play’ and gentlemanly etiquette). Baden-Powell’s original scout movement would shortly take off in a more uniquely American direction as scouting in the US drew heavily upon the culture of Native Americans (‘Indians’) to develop a singular national flavor all of its own. As always, both groups were begun to help control and channel youthful energies in a socially productive manner, and away from the sort of random and often violent nihilism that often took hold among older children in post-industrial society. In that sense, the Scouting groups did achieve their goals quite admirably. This same process would soon find an even more perfect expression in the channeling and reforming of the leftist German ‘Wandervogels’ into the nationalistic Hitler Youth, somewhat later.

Another of the two major influences upon youth, and largely attributable to the stark after effects of the ‘Great War’s' (WW1) death & destruction (that youth viewed as a betrayal and sacrifice of the young by the old), was the injection of the new Black ‘Jazz’ music into American mainstream culture. Quickly gaining favor among disillusioned young middle-class white Americans, who felt spent, betrayed and cynically used by the initiators of the First World War, jazz was embraced as a wild new antidote to post-war depression and malaise. At first a novelty, it quickly came to be regarded as a popular sub-culture favorite for its frenetic musical expressions of wild youthful energy, sexuality and abandon. And of course, as it gained influence among the young, it drew the extreme scorn and severe censure of older individuals, to whom it was anathema; naturally, that merely increased its popularity, for whatever the ‘oldsters’ hated was enthusiastically seized upon by the ‘youngsters’.

It was not only the youthful many who embraced the new ‘jazz age’, but a great number of returning war veterans who had had their own adolescent idylls ripped to shreds by the war, their formerly care-free dreams shredded utterly by the violence that the war had brought with it. Accustomed to living on the razor’s edge of life on the battlefields, the wild and ‘dangerously delicious new music of jazz presented a suitably ‘savage’, yet toned down civilian substitute for the inhuman hazards of warfare.

As jazz (the original word was ‘jass’, which is an African word for sex and sexual intercourse) gained ground with the white upper-middle classes, it also helped elevate awareness of oppressed Black Americans and popularize consciousness of their previously marginalised presence within American society. Whereas before they had remained largely regarded as merely a distinctly dispossessed under-class that had been freed during the Civil War (and still very much the subject of extreme prejudice directed to them by many White Americans), now their cultural contribution to America in the form of jazz music promoted Blacks to a higher level of recognition as a legitimate social group by America at large. This would ultimately lead, thanks to the evolution of ‘Black consciousness’ (a movement as much aided and assisted by passionately leftist liberal progressive Whites in subsequent decades, as by the Blacks themselves) to the definitive affirmations of the 1950s Civil Rights Movement and beyond.

Meanwhile, owing to the fact that the First World War had ended in a stalemated armistice, rather than in a definitive military defeat of one side by the other, the seeds had been sewn for a dangerous reemergence of Prussian militarism in the form of German Nationalism and Italian Fascism, both of which successfully captured the imagination and energies of youthful spirit and harnessed them to serve the extreme nationalistic causes of both European nations.

Nowhere did this harnessing of youthful energy and free-spiritedness succeed more perfectly than in the German National Socialist youth organization, the Hitler Jugend (Hitler Youth, including its BdM Nazi girls’ organization). Again, the manipulative and powerful older generation had seemingly found a magical key (propaganda and pervasive social conditioning) to unlock & harness youthful energies, diverting them to its own single-minded political and economic ambitions.

The importance of the German success in redefining youthfulness for its own purposes is notable, for although the value of mass propaganda (reference Edward Bernay’s seminal 1929 work ’Propaganda’ and Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 ‘The Crowd’, among others) proved particularly useful groundwork in achieving this goal, it was as yet untainted by what would later become American materialist capitalism’s singularly immense contribution to the task of controlling emerging youth culture: the sinister co-option of American youthful rebelliousness by commercial marketing and advertising forces. In its highest expression (to come many years later) it would comprise a highly sophisticated process wherein trends in youth culture would be picked up, evaluated, analysed, commercially digested and fed back to the same youths in the formidably processed form of materialistic consumer products, produced, popularized and sold to them for high profit.

With the Second World War almost certainly guaranteed by the seething standoff that traditional national enmities lingering after the first war had allowed to smolder, the second war was conducted on a global scale far surpassing that of the first. The resulting devastation could be logically anticipated (had anyone cared to consider the matter) due to the near exponential expansion of military science and armament production technology occurring since 1918.  The world-wide carnage and unimaginably massive social reordering that the end of the war in 1945 found set the stage for America’s emergence not only as a world power, but also as the single major cultural and economic influence for the rest of the world.

Guaranteed by the fact that almost alone, America had remained entirely intact after the war, with all the tremendous economic power it had marshalled to fight the war still whole, the United States quickly leveraged its economic influence among the other nations of the world. Many of them had been utterly ruined by the war and were subsequently dependent upon the United States as a powerful economic resource for virtually everything required for rebuilding their war-ravaged nations.

Today generally recognized as a ‘golden age’ of American economic growth and influence, America’s post-war preeminence as a wealthy nation quickly induced a wide range of effects on all levels of American society. Not least among them was the emergence of the new Black civil rights movement and a whole new generation of post-war youth who quickly saw through the heartless materialism and economic convention conferred upon society by the older order of society. This created in turn a whole new wave of youthful rebelliousness and frustration, albeit one ironically fueled and to an appreciable extent enabled by a surfeit of materialist consumer goods, rather than by a scarcity of them.

New wealth and middle class leisure in the 50s led to a class of adolescents who were not only relatively well-off (possessed of substantial personal discretionary wealth of their own), but who were also imbued with greater freedom, autonomy and personal latitude for expression of their desires. Too much of it. The lower classes, for their part largely denied these new perks of post-war power & privilege, began to envy and desire the things they themselves could not yet attain. This helped lead to youth and ethnic crime & violence as a way of participating in the material equality that American ideals of 'equality' suggested they also were entitled to.

Meanwhile, having come of age itself in the two post-war economies, the ‘science’ of American materialist consumerism had rapidly taken form as an entirely new area of applied macro-economic science: that of corporate commercial consumer marketing to the masses. With the near-subconscious objective being to create, support & sustain an entire way of life through the fostering of unreflective, reflexive secular material consumerism in the United States, tremendous amounts of effort were expended by corporations in an effort to develop ways of exploiting not just the masses of simple-minded, thoughtless masses, but a whole new consumer market comprised of America’s youth. Youth were, of course, unreflective by nature and were therefore theoretically least capable of resisting sophisticated marketing campaigns intended to influence them. To say the powerful new youth market share was ravenously viewed by Madison Avenue the same way an untapped Middle Eastern oil field would be by millionaire Texas oilmen, is considerably understating things.

Not only were American post-war youth as disenfranchised and rebellious as every generation had been before them, this time things were significantly different. They now had huge sums of personal discretionary wealth to spend on creature comforts and whims that caught their fancy. The commercial advertising and marketing industries of American set to work not only to capture that wealth, but to cleverly use the principal of co-optive feedback to seize upon youth fads and fancies and amplify them for corporate gain. High among these youthful preoccupations were team sports, which in subsequent years evolved from their basic original form of wholesome recreation into today’s massively money-tainted & corporately controlled ‘professional sports’ franchises, with annual aggregate profits exceeding hundreds of billions of dollars. A corollary dynamic of this process found professional sports transformed into one of the few socially acceptable venues within which previously ostracised Blacks could not only gain social recognition, but eventually turn into horrendously over-paid ‘super stars’ who became middle-class darlings and wildly popular celebrities in their own right. From this developed today’s archetypal Black professional super-star athlete who often acts like a semi-violent thug in his personal affairs, but who nevertheless receives annual sports contracts of several millions of dollars, and wild adulation from fawning crowds (of diminished capacity sports ‘fans’), for a simple ability to kick a ball over a goal post, or throw it into a small metal hoop).

Yet, the crowning achievement of American corporate capitalistic democracy, as regards its interactions with rebellious youth, shortly took an entirely new form. This was perhaps first seen in the inter-war period, when the new youthful obsession with wild music and new forms of dance was kept fed by commercial catering to the personality cult of its heroes and stars (think Frank Sinatra, movie stars, et al), but it was only in the post-war years of the 1950s that corporate commercialism achieved its highest expression of success. A very good example of this is found in the surfing craze that hit so many American ‘teens’ in the early 50s; another is the so-called Beat Movement (also of the 50s).

Imported from Hawaiian roots, surfing first emerged as a distinctly unique youth pastime providing the all-important core image of the inherently insular, ‘lonely’ and misunderstood youth, a con-conformist model that found great traction for its rejection of social convention in preference to a figurative and virtual embrace of the ocean (with nature itself providing an important analogous symbol to youths of wild, seething, uncontrollable power & energy).

The early surf culture began as a loosely collective, but still simple, basic and commonly shared eclectic passion. Riding the waves with custom surfboards largely made by individuals in garages and small shops, surfers were quite happy to be regarded as misunderstood social outcasts. But with the sudden mass popularity of surfing, (tremendously amplified by Hollywood’s discovery of the marketing potential ‘purpose-made-to-object’ youth movies, such as ‘Gidget’, the 'Beach Blanket Bingo' films, et al, that occurred as the 1960s dawned), surfing suddenly found itself the relentless target of American corporate consumer marketing, with a massive profusion of companies dedicated to producing pricey consumer surfing products (mass-produced surfboards, surfing clothing & apparel, personal products and related items that captured the projected essence of surfing). Surfing competitions, formerly informal and highly localized, suddenly gained corporate sponsors. Obscene amounts of corporate money very quickly turned what had formerly been a loose activity of social outcasts on the fringe into the biggest and most carefully orchestrated mass teen fad ever. As a result, the former insularity & inclusivity of surfing had now become the object of nationwide youthful fascination.

As large amounts of corporate capital poured into the surfing ‘market’, the surf scene predictably began to morph into a monster of mindlessly coopted commitment to only one thing: mass consumption of manufactured material goods and services related to the sport, not at all unlike the trademarking franchise activities of professional sports teams, with billions of dollars of profit soon being generated. Today, surfing bears little or no resemblance to the wildly popular, quirky & esoteric activity for solitary loners it had originally been. In short, all the pure joy and natural appeal of the activity had been seized upon, collared and domesticated much as a wild dog would be, by American high-profits capitalist enterprise.

Another youth trend that grew rapidly in the post-war era was the Beat movement, ostensibly an indirect extension of the so-called ‘lost generation’ period of avant garde creativity ('Dada', etc.) produced in the wake of the First World War. Although embraced to a far lesser extent by American corporate consumerism (after all, how do you easily ‘corporatise’ a poem, a piece of artwork, a thought, or a literary work? That is, how do you tamely domesticate it as a cash-cow for profit?), America’s fascination with the ‘Beat counterculture’ brought together and amalgamated formerly ‘way-out’ disparate sub-groups like Black musicians and creative White social critics/artists, etc., and to no small extent caught the asesthetic fancy of highly exclusive elements of the White Middle and Upper Classes. Yet there seemed no effective way of turning this very distinctive and largely nihilistic Beat sub-culture into a highly profitable area of corporate consumerism (how? by selling commercially manufactured berets, false goatees, shades and/or bongos?). In short order, the original rebellious Kerouacian bohemian had suddenly been commercialized into the cute but harmlessly amusing ‘Maynard Krebs’ Beatnik character in ‘The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis’ TV series.

With the consequent emergence of archetypal American rock and roll music of the 1950s, itself a symbiotic synthesis of many indigenous subcultural currents (jazz, traditional folk music, rhythm & blues, etc.), a whole new expression of youthful exuberance was captured and indemnified, admixing successfully with the latent vanguard California ‘car culture’ and other elements to provide an entirely new and highly profitable youth phenomenon (one that led directly to the Beatles, the ‘English sound’, ‘heavy metal’ and the music of the succeeding ‘Hip generation’ artists) that could be exploited for profit.

By this time, America’s corporate commercialistic marketing forces were fully geared-up to co-opt this latest expression of youthful rebelliousness and began to cleverly subvert, digest and regurgitate it in the form of salable commodities back to the youths themselves. The brief time interval between corporate pick-up of new youth trends was now so short that it became hard to tell a fresh & genuine form of youth rebellion from a commercially manufactured one. Of course, by this time, America’s core focus has also been increasingly reprogrammed from traditional formative values (church, religion, family tradition and cultural heritage influences) to that of the new 'religion' of blatant secular material consumerism. Consumerism became the new rallying cry of immensely powerful corporations who sought to reduce the entire nation to a subservient status of material dependency, a society existing solely to consume commercially produced goods with the intent being to therein stabilize & sustain the economy. It helps to think analogeously of America as a sort of commercial pig farm, kept and maintained exclusively for the purpose of producing bacon. As such, America's new ethos of 'mass democratic material consumerism' constituted an entirely new and unique form of socio-economic national government!

With the soon-to-develop electronic revolution that personal computers and the internet ushered in, the stage was largely set for almost absolute and unfettered propagation of further and entirely new corporate consumer objectives. Today we may see the results of this all around us as masses of ‘average’ and largely unreflective fellow Americans seemingly live day-to-day for little more than the wherewithal to purchase the next expensive new electronic consumable item, or subscribe to the latest herd-fancy trend (such as social media, with all its demonstrated potential for wreaking catastrophic attenuation of the basic ability to think intelligently and/or reason affectively). Enhancing and radically accelerating already existing and widespread social anomie, the new electronic media/infotainment/internet merely brings on further polar segmentation and isolation of the scattered elements of American society (amplifying the social devisiveness of so called ‘multi-culturalism’ or ‘diversity’, to just name two key dynamics involved in the process).

Today, to a tremendous extent, corporate America has so successfully achieved mastery of these efforts as to be able to not just actively feed (parasitically) upon the American youth culture’s need for rebelliousness, but to actually take sub-cultural clues from the youth culture and use them to synthesise entirely new but complexly subtle forms of faddism and adolescent fascination that are almost entirely artificial (that is, synthetically ’created’, bearing little in common with existing social realities). An example to think of in this context is the development of so-called ‘Extreme Sports’. A proactive corporate exploitation of youthful energy through the erection of complex marketing structures aimed at ‘cultivating’ the ‘crop’ that is best expressed as profitability. This perhaps stands alone as one of the most overarching achievements of the established economic order in our nation. America has actually managed to turn traditional youthful rebelliousness into a golden goose that produces gobs and gobs of money, a feat only possible in a laissez-faire capitalistic consumer culture (such as ours) that is relentlessly dedicated to prioritizing everything solely by its (artificially ascribed) profitibilityl!

If you have any interest in the truly important phenomenon of turbulent passage that is youthful adolescence on the path to maturity, I highly recommend author Jon Savage’s book ‘Teenage: The Creation of a Youth Culture’ to you. This is one of those major jewels of insight that all of us owe it to ourselves to avail, not least as an utterly captivating and excellent read that will bring much insight & pleasurable knowledge in the perusal. Furthermore, it makes extremely valuable connections and provides important continuities of both history and social development that help square our own theories and impressions with the facts of the past events that form our present.

In my own case, although I have always been broadly aware of the interactions of all the social dynamics he so masterfully chronicles and indexes, I have still found it to be exceptionally helpful, even fascinating, to come across a person such as Savage who has managed to give those abstruse ideas and outlooks coherent order with citations of worthy factual & historical relevance. Reluctantly, I have late come to accept my own intellectual mediocrity, which requires reliance on others (such as Savage) who are far more astute and cogently capable than I to truly make sense of things my own mind only grasps at inefficiently.

As a parting shot, I might add that as I sit here poised on the edge of eternity (and knowing all too well that in the ultimate finality, ALL is merely human vanity and therefore productive of absolutely nothing that is eternal and lasting), I can truthfully say “Thank God (or What/Whomever), that I do not myself have any offspring of my own!” And I extend to all of you who do, my very deepest and most sincere empathy.

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‘TEENAGE: THE CREATION OF YOUTH CULTURE’, a book by Jon Savage, 2007, Viking, Penguin Books Ltd, England, ISBN-10: 0670038377, ISBN-13: 978-0670038374.