Adios America

Isn’t it a strange thought, despite it’s long standing eventuality, that the grandfathers of America are no longer World War two vets, nor Korean War vets, but Vietnam vets? It occurs to me more and more, as babies continue to spring forth from wombs significantly younger than myself, while the "crazy Vietnam vets" portrayed in films grow older and older. The old beaters on the road, I’ve also noticed, have changed. Before, you could tell a beater by anything that had that long heavy 1970s low-rider shape to it…now it’s just rusted, rickety, falling apart versions of modern cars that fill the "beater" portion of traffic– anything you see from the 1970s has moved into integreous antiquity.

The seventies used to fascinate me, as it was the generation that directly preceded my first generation of existence…much like the eighties generation is currently fascinating most teenagers as we speak. Places left over from that era that I stumbled upon in my early years, largely undisturbed since long before I was born, always had a certain smell to them– the smell of the Watergate era; like damp military issue green wool and discarded oil cans. Yellow newspapers. Grimy nuts and bolts.

When I think of the rotting 70s, images of an old work garage come to mind…but when I think of the rotting 80s, it’s more like some long abandoned sinking-floor office with dirty brown carpet and blinds on the windows. Boxes of clunky outdated electronics stacked about. Maybe a drawer with nothing in it but an old ring binder and a dead Casio calculator..

So the ‘Nam vets are now almost completely eased into grandfather status; the last American generation with any real blood forced on their hands and souls. So now what? What’s left? A bunch of twitter-book my-place tech fairies prancing around the country, face down, eyes glued to their portable electronic device of choice, sucking on the tit of societal "belonging," while completely estranging themselves from their immediate surroundings. Four out of five of my friends who have graduated college have absolutely no use for the degree that they acquired, whether it’s because it was a useless degree from the start, or because the field they set out to participate in has since dried up. Now they work terrible jobs (the lucky ones, the unemployed are not so fortunate) just to throw pebbles at their monstrous student-loan debt, while tweeting and facebooking and myspaceing every aspect of this process as they creep along.