Edward Champion's Return of the Reluctant

I've been thinking a lot about perseverance. Specifically, the persistence of sitting down on a daily basis and accomplishing something great, or at least going out of your way to try something. Anything. And not allowing anything to stand in your way.

I've been thinking the extant factors exist in our society to discourage people. I'm not talking about the standard "You sucks" -- what the Eggers/Julavits touchy-feely crowd calls snark. If a person can't get over himself as the rejection notices or the vicious reviews stack up, they really have no business being a writer.

I'm talking about the other factors that remain unnoticed. The lonely people who try grand things behind closed doors and who we may never know about. The realities of being screwed over by the Bush Administration. The sweatshops allowed to run rampant in an export processing zone to secure our complacency and standard of life. The details in existence that go unobserved because we're all looking at the same suburban universe on an endlessly repeating three-block stretch. The dismantling of funding for the arts. The willingness of people to accept the status quo. The castigation of people who fall outside the corporate cookie cutter for the flimsiest of reasons. And the relatively humorless approach that too many people advocate to get by in life.

Fifteen years after Abbie Hoffman committed suicide, I can't help but ponder how Hoffman's premature self-obliteration turned his legacy into a sham. Hoffman was, as far as I'm concerned, fighting the good fight. Hoffman organized people to levitate the Pentagon. Most notably, he encouraged people to steal his book. He had great ideas (putting out a "newspaper" for the sake of getting free movie passes, foraging off the produce abandoned by supermarkets, to name just two) that ran in the face of conventional wisdom. But, more importantly, Hoffman was a damn giddy bastard. Take away the politics and essentially you have a mischief-maker -- an Andy Kaufman, a Lenny Bruce, an H.L. Mencken. Beyond living out the life of a cliched revolutionary, Hoffman brought a sense of humor that, in the eyes of the government, made him dangerously accessible.

With an anything-goes economy, I had hoped that the 90s would usher in a new era of Merry Pranksters, not necessarily quasi-politically-minded, questionably artistic drug addicts, but people who committed themselves to causes or pursuits that flew in the face of convention. But instead, we had the next generation drop out of college and throw themselves into existence for the money. The aim had shifted from collective rabble-rousing to shameful solipsism. How much were you making? Who did you fuck last night? Who has the best drugs?

When I look back at that decade, the only difference I see between the yuppies of the 1980s and the slackers of the 1990s is that the slackers were lazier about their avarice.

But back to Eggers. With rare exceptions, if we examine the subjects of McSweeney's and Believer dirges, you see a smug bunch that embraces pop culture, nostalgia, and digression. In the month of January alone, on the McSweeney's site, we have "The Lost Journals of Doogie Howser, M.D.", practical endorsement of 1980s advertisement slogans, and riffs on Choose-Your-Own-Adventure -- none of which is about anything more than devoting endless space towards what every Geocities fanboy site from here to Rancho Cucamonga is chronicling.

I recently finished Peter Biskind's Down and Dirty Pictures, which chronicles the rise and fall of cutting-edge independent film in the 1990s. One of Biskind's subjects that struck out for me was Ethan Hawke. Now I've always associated Hawke as a pretty boy. A man who I try to avoid when I see his name associated with a film title. But what I didn't realize about Hawke

Posted by DrMabuse at January 25, 2004 07:46 PM | TrackBack