War after Internet and MTV

I began my twenties in a time of war. Yet not the glamorous protests and music of the Vietnam war, my father’s generation’s war. In high school my father had Jim Morrison to embody the soul of the generation’s confused and reactionary youth and quickly there after faded away in a passionate last stand of the drugs and slurred words of musicians death. I was seven years old when Kurt Cobain ended his life in Seattle, leaving behind his generation’s collection of depressed yet aggressively anti-establishment youth who quickly found, as Cobain had, that the establishment they so despised had found a way to profit from them, and suddenly they all had logos sown into their foreheads. No, this war was different. The same confused and reactionary spirit lingered on yet this time it seemed the establishment had learned the error of its ways. This was a war against terror, a war of ideology. There could be no lost ground in this war. Our President knew well of the happenings during the Vietnam era regarding American youth, he was one, and the new global mega brand technologically enhanced establishment had no time for a spirited nemesis in the form of our nations youth, its most important core market for both profit and labor manufacturing. Vietnam was an era for poetry and beautiful music, this was a new world, a new kind of war and the youth had no choice but to react against such a war in a manor opposite than their parents had: easy submission, collectively shared thought and general apathy. I saw American troops storm a desert when the task had already been done 12 years before with no real substantive argument for why either effort was necessary in the first place. It was a war of culture, inside the country. A war where attitudes of east was pitted against south and the middle of the country became a virtual no man’s land to those residing on the edges, and for those in the middle, the edges of America was a vast and empty wasteland, morally at least. Generalizations and stereotyping must be applied in this description when I almost certainly know that they are as absurd as I knew then when I heard others using them. The times, though, the times were spun with stereotypes of all kinds. The label took upon an unprecedented importance in these times; every concept became a marketing strategy or cultural standard. Sacred things, if there were such things, died out at this time. My father had Jim Morrison, who died in a blaze of the tragic misunderstanding of the power of excess. After Cobain found that the reaction against the system could be used as a product by the system itself, he let the world know how he felt. I had Thom Yorke, who, in a great irony, moved to a small area near London to start a family and let his music come straight to us via internet and cared too little about appearances to do such a thing as die in a tragic rock star icon sort of manor, which showed the story had been found a bit lack luster by then, at least to him. We entered into our teenage years in a country where a man could disenfranchise thousands of voters and have his insiders steel the Presidency while society turned to making light of it on Saturday Night Live. We saw what our place was, and what their power was capable of, even when we were thirteen and fourteen part of us must have known the way our world now worked, and what happened to those who opposed that order. Easy acceptance was all our newly commercialized MTV minds were capable of, thanks to the endless effort of the corporate world to spin beautiful images of what we were supposed to be, which was feed to us daily, our parents embraced or complained, but everyone accepted.