“My whole life, I had been doing everything everybody told me. I went to the right school. I got really good grades. I got all the internships. Then, I couldn’t do anything.”

–Rebecca Chapman, Literary Editor, The New Inquiry, quoted in “New York’s Literary Cubs,” New York Times, 11/30/11

Fortunately for Generation Y, they aren’t sitting around waiting for Generation X to come up with career advice.

Moses Hanson-Harding, a brilliant junior at Swarthmore, told me in a video letter from his semester abroad in Italy that “only the stupidest” among his cohort still expect the promised good job awaiting them at the end of their grueling academic ordeals in high school and college. “Anyone with a realistic expectation by junior year knows that there’s nothing out there for them,” Moses told me.“We have friends who have graduated, so we’re very well aware of the climate. We talk about it. And we’re angry. We’re very angry.”

Those still trying to apply what I call the success algorithm compete as strenuously for unpaid internships as they did for class rank in high school. Adding skills and experiences to a resume through internships and volunteer work remains the standard advice for the young and ambitious. (The pool of talented, well-educated, diligent young workers willing, even desperate, to work for free in order to build their resumes obviates the need for companies to hire entry-level employees who expect things like salary and benefits, but I digress.)  Those shut out of high status/no salary internship opportunities compete instead for low-wage, dead-end employment, a prospect depressing enough even for those who don’t have tens of thousands of dollars in college debt to pay off.  We’re lucky they’re only occupying cities and not burning them to the ground.

But some of them just refuse to play along anymore. Applying their advanced mathematical modeling skills, principles gleaned in micro and macro economics courses, and highly developed critical thinking abilities, they have calculated the odds against them and renounced the attempt to climb a career ladder that was kicked to splinters before they ever got a foot on the first rung. Self-employment is risky compared to a job with a steady paycheck, but when a stable entry-level position with salary and benefits seems as elusive and archaic as a unicorn, why not try it? What do you have to lose?

One group of high-achieving graduates from some of the nation’s best colleges started The New Inquiry, a sophisticated journal of literature and ideas. Their story of giving up on the dream of obtaining entry-level positions, or even unpaid internships, in a notoriously competitive and underpaid field and striking out on their own is equal parts terrifying and inspiring.

It’s terrifying to realize that in this economy, no level of intelligence, achievement and ambition can protect a young person from unemployment. I think a lot of driven high school students believe that they will somehow be immune from the youth unemployment crisis because they will be just a little bit smarter or a little more tenacious, that they will have some edge that will ensure their inclusion in whatever minority for whom the success algorithm still works. The founders of The New Inquiry hold Ivy League bachelor’s and master’s degrees. They graduated magna and summa cum laude. They didn’t forget to do something or do any of it halfway. They did everything their parents, teachers, professors and mentors ever required of them, and more, and it wasn’t enough to get an entry-level job or an unpaid internship in their field.

Their solution of banding together, pooling their extraordinary talents, utilizing their technological wizardry and creating the jobs they wanted, albeit positions no more remunerative than the unpaid internships they couldn’t get, is inspiring because it provides at least one model of what a happy future might look like beyond the success algorithm. Moses told me about a group of artist friends who, realizing that no individual artist can survive economically, plan to live, work, and market their art collectively, minimizing expenses and maximizing the reach of their combined networks. Instead of letting their talents go to waste waiting tables or sweeping the floor in movie theaters, young entrepreneurs challenge themselves, acquire new skills, and do what they love.

Their entrepreneurship is not the quest of rugged individuals, however, but of cooperative groups. Share or Die: Youth in Recession, a collection of essays written by twentysomethings, describes new forms of collective living and working to counter our environmental and economic catastrophes.  Starting a crowdfunded co-op may not have been what a Race to Nowhere high achiever had imagined when she was sleeping four hours a night, taking six AP courses, running the Student Council and leading the field hockey team to the county championship, but it’s more fun than working at Starbucks, and if she’s lucky, eventually pays better.  It may ultimately, as the economy recovers, provide a better foundation when corporations start hiring again than going back to grad school and acquiring more debt. Already, the founders of The New Inquiry have gotten attention and opportunities in the literary world from organizations that wouldn’t look at them this time last year.

They can’t all do it, obviously, and a million start-ups won’t be a viable model for the American economy on a mass scale. Contrary to myth, small businesses are not the primary driver of  American growth, innovation and employment. Someone has to work for the Fortune 500 to pay for the boutique goods and services offered by micro-industries, although a few of today’s start-ups might be tomorrow’s behemoths.  Perhaps some of these little companies will rise to compete with the large corporations that passed on the opportunity to offer the young entrepreneurs their first job. Maybe delicious ironies await us ten years down the road.

*

So what do we tell the children? The teenagers, I mean, the ones who aren’t thinking very much about the future yet, whose notions of the future are still hazy or involve playing professional sports?  Should we tell them all to major in accounting and engineering and nursing?  Graduates in those fields stand a much better chance of employment than art history majors. What models of education best prepare young people to survive and thrive? Should they all learn Mandarin?  Does the bullet-proof credential or skill set exist?  Or has the time come for them to learn to grow their own food, build their own houses, weave their own cloth, brew their own beer, and perform each other’s home surgeries?

(Answers to those questions will, with any luck, appear in Part III of Post-Apocalyptic Career Counseling on March 1st)

***************************************************************

Thanks to Moses Hanson-Harding for cross-Atlantic and intergenerational insights and to Neil Fein of Magnificent Nose for editorial acumen.

I. Demise of the Standard-Issue Career Advice

Well, that’s only half the truth.

I’ve been feeling a lot of emotions. In 2011, I weathered a midlife crisis, made a new commitment to my writing,  and confronted several serious challenges in my marriage. In the lulls between storms, I’ve tried to think about what the hell had happened to me and what it all meant. All I have to show for it is a theory about the emotional lives of human beings that makes sense to me, at least at the moment. 

With the help of a patient friend over brunch last Sunday, I scribbled it all down in the somewhat insane-looking diagram below, featuring lots of circles and arrows, pluses and minuses, a supplementary t-chart, overlapping bursts of text, and a footnote, all crammed onto one 7” X 5” notebook page.

I offer it in the spirit of inquiry and with the appropriate degree of humility, given that I have no qualifications to theorize about emotions, other than experience and the ability to think about it. (Does one need a doctorate in philosophy or psychology to theorize about emotions on the Internet?) Maybe it is patently obvious, like the famous theory belonging to this lady, but just took me longer than most people to figure out. On the other hand, I certainly don’t assume that it’s correct for everyone, and if you’d like to share your own theory in the comments, I’d love to read it.

So, here it is:

Emotions

I. Emotions are physical

We know that emotions live in the oldest, most primitive part of the brain. They are physical. I used to believe that the physical manifestations of emotion (pounding heart, red face, tense muscles, etc.) were symptoms or side-effects of emotion. I now believe that these are the emotions: that the entire range of physical and (for lack of a better term) spiritual experiences that we call anger, are anger.

What difference does it make whether we consider emotions physical or not? Because if we consider emotions to be abstract, disembodied things that happen to have some disturbing physical symptoms, then we can mistakenly believe that it is possible to reason them away or successfully repress them, and that those irritating physical symptoms will disappear with no ill effects.  But you can’t repress your heartbeat, and you can’t ever really repress a feeling. You can ignore it and hope it goes away, just as hunger pains eventually go away if you ignore the need to eat, but the physical reality will still be present in your body, working its wonders or its mischief, and, like hunger, will return with renewed urgency if not satisfied.

II. Emotions are ALWAYS right

Your emotions cannot be wrong. You can be misinformed and react emotionally to the wrong information (like the elderly, hard-of-hearing woman across the street from us years ago, who, having misheard some bad news, believed that her next-door-neighbor was dead, then collapsed into his arms sobbing for joy when she saw him doing yardwork a few hours later), but what you feel simply is, like any other natural force. Your sadness is correct. Your anger is correct. Your joy is correct. Your love is correct. Even your fear is correct, that most maligned of all emotions, and (not uncoincidentally?) the most obviously physical.

Every feeling you have ever had was absolutely right in its moment. The perception that caused the feeling may have been inaccurate; what you did about the feeling might have been deplorable, but the feeling itself was sovereign. You cannot judge your own emotions or anyone else’s by the standards of either rationality or morality; you can only make those kinds of evaluations for behavior.

Intellect

I. Positive

In an integrated person (and let me know if you happen to run into any), a rainbow bridge stretches between emotions and intellect. The role of the intellect is to interpret feelings, to help us understand why we feel the way we do. If we are patient and loving with ourselves, and really listen to our embodied emotions, we can gain some insight. If the intellect discovers, with its genius for uncovering truths and making connections, that the feeling is based on a misperception, it may, crossing the bridge the other way, be able to gently guide misinformed feelings. No one can ever be talked out of a feeling, but one can be talked into a different perception that may, in turn, alter the emotion.

II. Negative

In some people, the connection between emotion and intellect is a barrier rather than a bridge. The role of the intellect in this case is to repress emotion altogether, or, if the feeling is too strong to be repressed, to misinterpret or delegitimize it.

How did we learn to do such a crazy thing to ourselves? Well, many of us had good teachers. (“Where do you get off being angry at me after all I do for you?” “You shouldn’t be sad–you should be happy that Grandma’s in Heaven now!” “He’ll only break your heart. You really shouldn’t fall in love until you’re done with grad school.” Fill in your own, if you have them, or post them below, if you like.)

We take over where our early teachers left off, scolding ourselves for feeling angry, sad, lonely, exhausted, unappreciated, or unloved. Friends and family are more than willing to help, unfortunately (“Complaining about your job in this economy? You should feel grateful you even have a job!”). The intellect, and even the moral sense, cannot alter the feeling one iota. If you are angry about your rude, thoughtless colleagues, your unemployed friend’s demand that you be grateful can neither talk you out of your anger nor fill you with gratitude. The resulting guilt and rage feels familiar, doesn’t it? “Starving children in Africa would be thrilled to eat what you’re turning up your nose at!” made you feel neither thankful for your least favorite meal nor particularly kindly toward the starving children in Africa.  We don’t want to feel the anger or the guilt, so we try to shut off the conduit of emotions, which is, if my theory is correct, completely impossible.

Cut off from feelings, the intellect can make terrible mistakes in its rush to explain vulnerable emotions away. Hurt or sadness can become anger, a much safer and more powerful feeling. Fear can become disgust or superiority. (“I’m not afraid of gay people, I just find homosexual behavior gross!”) The intellect then makes decisions based on these misinterpreted feelings.  For example, a person feeling unloved may conclude that the relationship simply isn’t working and should be abandoned, instead of sitting patiently with the sad, scary feeling of being unloved, exploring its roots in the past and present, and reaching out to the beloved. I suspect that people who bounce from one relationship to another interpret every negative feeling as a signal to leave, or as evidence that they themselves are truly unlovable.

The Moral Sense

Morality attempts to instruct us to have the correct feelings and thoughts, when its real job is to tell us how to behave. Governing our behavior is a sufficiently onerous task for the moral sense to perform. It cannot touch our emotions.

When morality tries to dictate emotions, guilt results.

Mothers are particularly prone to feeling guilty about their negative emotions. Is it any wonder, when mothers are constantly lectured by everyone, even perfect strangers in Target, about the correct way to feel? (“Oh, enjoy every minute of your children’s lives! It all goes by so fast!”). But feeling guilty about an emotion doesn’t make it go away; it just compounds the original feeling with guilt, while attempting to drive it underground, where its root causes cannot be addressed.

If a woman is angry at her husband for not sharing equally in child-rearing tasks (which, remember, she’s supposed to enjoy every minute of!), but feels guilty because he works so hard at his job and the children adore him, she tries to repress that anger. Unhealthy? Of course. But worse: it doesn’t get the job done. Our feelings are there for a reason. Like physical pain, negative feelings alert us to problems that we may have the power to address. If her guilt causes her to repress her anger, then she can’t have the conversation that may save the marriage, which begins, “I feel angry at how much the burden of caring for our children falls on me.” They can fight like wildcats or have a calm, reasonable conversation, but at least the problem is out in the open where it can be addressed. All guilt does is keep the anger and its cause a secret from the one person who may be able to help solve the problem.

The best morality can do is to guide the intellect, which can, sometimes, under the right circumstances, change our perceptions and feelings. If I’m feeling irritated at someone who won’t shut up, but I realize that the person is really lonely and just needs to talk to someone, somewhere, about anything, then my moral sense guides my intellect to replace irritation with compassion.  I listen, now, not to the endless stream of chatter, but to the emotional need for human connection beneath it.  Learning to pay attention to my own feelings shows me how to attend to someone else’s.

Application

If this theory is true, then I need to remember a few things:

1. I can never try to tell another human being how to feel.

2. I can never try to tell myself how I ought to feel.

3. I need to listen beneath people’s complex explanations of their mental state to hear the simple, primitive, elemental emotions at the root. Ditto for my own complex explanations.

4. When writing, I need to remember that characters operate the same way and try to represent in language their physical experiences of emotions, not merely their cogitations.

Conclusion

Well, that’s my theory. What’s yours?

***
Thanks to Kathryn Adorney and Alexandra Hanson-Harding for helping me think this through over the past few months. Thanks to Neil Fein of Magnificent Nose and Jeff Gutenberg of Stream of Subconsciousness for excellent editorial feedback on this essay, without which…well, it doesn’t even bear thinking about. Neil, bless him, also did the graphics.

Neil Fein and I on a hayride in 1975. I am the diva in ponytails, Neil, the serious young gentleman in profile.

Today’s bonus essay, “I Don’t Have Time to Believe in Writer’s Block,” can be read on Neil Fein’s blog, Magnificent Nose.  My conviction that writer’s block does not exist is matched in fervor by Neil’s belief that cross-posting is bad form, so please click over to read it there, and while you’re there, enjoy posts by Neil Fein, Ceil Kessler, Sara Greco Goas, and other Nosy Authors. Here’s a taste of the essay:

Last night, I finished writing a draft of a chapter that had tormented me for weeks. It’s one of only a handful of chapters I have left to write for which I had no rough drafts, or even scribbled notes. I needed certain things to happen…in the relationship between the two main characters, so I sent them on a hike to a waterfall. They fought me every step of the way, up the trail and back down again. By the end, though, sorry to have put me through so much trouble, they presented me with three peace offerings: a baptism, a sandwich, and a lie, all of which I can certainly use.

Read the rest.

After the seven-year project of weeding my high school library, one task remained: inventory. I had avoided it for several years, reasoning that there wasn’t much point in carefully accounting for books I would probably discard anyway. If someone had saved me the trouble of weeding Your Future as an Airline Stewardess  by stealing it years ago, well, so much the better.

Scanning every item and uploading long lists of barcodes onto the main library computer took me, with the help of two assistants, three days. The last step commanded the computer to compare the barcodes on the shelf to those in the catalog, minus the ones for checked-out books, and generate a list of what was gone.

If students are digital natives, why do I keep having to show them how to add a printer?

But more to the point, what is the nature of a digital birthright if so many of the students purported to possess it are such naïve, ineffectual, and passive users of technology?

If the students are all, as Alan November said in New Jersey a few years ago, content creators now, why do I see so many of them playing games and consuming videos and other online content, and so few creating them?

And how is it possible that they are all using technology the same way, with the same effect on their brains?

Just a few years ago, we were told that learners are so individual, with their multiple intelligences and diverse learning styles, that perhaps every student should have an IEP. Are they now so monolithic that their brains, skipping a few steps in the customary evolutionary process, are all rewired alike to Apple’s specifications?

And given what we know about neuroplasticity across the lifespan, how is possible that my brain, although I was born before the official break-up of the Beatles, is not?

We cannot begin with the assumption that this (or any other) interesting model of one way to think about the effect of changing technology on all of us, teachers and students alike, is factual in all its particulars.  Unfortunately, its veracity was never up for debate. Questioning  underlying truth-claims is so…so…digital immigrant. Very pre-1980.

My seventh grade homeroom was held in an art classroom containing three long tables with tall stools. When we wandered into junior high school that first morning, searching for familiar faces from our elementary schools, the art teacher invited us to sit wherever we liked. Most of the girls headed to a table on the far side of the room, so I followed. Large athletic boys had taken the opposite table, and closing the square with the teacher’s table at the front of the room were the kids who hadn’t decided quickly enough or didn’t know where they belonged.

We spent a lot of time in homeroom in junior high, so that visceral first-day decision proved crucial. As I sat with the girls day after day, hearing my clothes, face, mannerisms, hair and general worthiness to breathe air assessed negatively, I looked longingly at the boys excluded from the cool boys’ group, who sat at that miscellaneous middle table and never stopped laughing. I wondered what was so funny. I saw them furiously scribbling on notebook paper, shoving the paper around the circle, adding onto each other’s scrawls, and laughing again. One day, I caught a glimpse of what they were up to: they were drawing comics of our classmates, our teachers, robots, spaceships, aliens, and each other. As I tried to keep one ear tuned to their table while keeping up with the inanities at my own, I learned that comic books, sci-fi, video games, and someone named Monty Python made up the bulk of their conversation. If they looked like total dorks, it didn’t appear to concern them at all. 

One day, I’d had enough, particularly from one queen bee who had discovered that my father worked at the factory owned by close friends of her parents’ and decided that this made me an even less valuable human being than previously imagined. I picked up my books. “Where are you going?” the girls asked, curious and maybe frightened. Changing tables and making decisions were wrong, simply not allowed. I didn’t answer. I just carried my stuff over to the comic-book boys’ table and sat in the empty stool. The boys looked at me for a moment in astonishment, and then resumed their normal Monty Python- and Mad Magazine-inflected conversation, including me as much as their rudimentary social skills and my complete lack of drawing ability, knowledge about computers, exposure to Mad Magazine, or interest in sci-fi and comic books permitted.

The girls’ table reacted with horror. Sitting with these geeky boys was social suicide, and they tried to persuade me to move back, some out of concern, some out of pique to have lost a target. But I had weighed the benefits and risks of trying to remain part of respectable seventh-grade society, and had cast my lot decisively with the freaks.

I have never looked back.

*

II. Madonna and John Hughes

That’s how it used to be in the pre-Internet, pre-Glee, pre-It Gets Better, pre-Lady Gaga era.  Being a freak (a term I am using broadly and lovingly to include bohemians, punks, artists, nerds, deviants, geeks, etc.) meant swearing allegiance to a small, despised, but fascinating tribe with its own customs and norms, defined in opposition to the mainstream. Dual citizenship was rarely permitted or desired. “Notes on Black,” first published in the Village Voice in the 80s, elucidates the mindset:

Hello, I get a nosebleed above Twenty-Third Street, and I will never tell you to ‘have a nice day.’ I believe nothing on television. Sure, I’ll talk about Zydeco music. I cried when Dali died. Don’t try to tell me about Julian Schnabel. … I was a dweeb in high school. I write, or maybe I paint. I have criminally low self-esteem, body flaws that I think hideous, and never go to bed until dawn. Leave me alone.

…Used to be, if you went to a party wearing all black and saw someone else, a total stranger, wearing all black, you could go up to him and say, “Let’s get outa here.”

Not all sub-tribes wore black or harbored opinions about Julian Schnabel, but most had some kind of distinguishing aesthetic by which fellow freaks could spot them, making nametags unnecessary.

Identification as a freak, regardless of subgroup, meant that you had evaluated the economics of conformity and found either that the rewards weren’t worth the prodigious, exhausting effort it would have taken to fake normal every day, or that you were too far gone even to fake it. The benefits of identifying as a freak were entirely intrinsic. One neither wanted nor expected any validation from the culture at large, which was just as well, because the popular culture’s messages about difference only looked encouraging at a distance. Sure, Madonna had a chart-topping hit called “Express Yourself,” but the purpose of self-expression in that song was for a girl to win a “big strong hand to lift you to your higher ground.” That wasn’t quite the kind of self-expression for which a freak had sacrificed the opportunity to have a normal adolescence.

The Breakfast Club seemed to celebrate cross-clique unity, but disappointed girl-freaks everywhere when Molly Ringwald’s Princess gave Ally Sheedy’s Basketcase a makeover, revealing her, Cinderella-like, to have been beautiful all along, so that Emilio Estevez’s Athlete could fall for her.  But isn’t that what Princesses were telling Basketcases all the time?  Why don’t you just fix your hair and put on some makeup and act normal?

Appealing as it was, The Breakfast Club didn’t celebrate difference; it elided it.  All the impossibly gorgeous teenagers were revealed to suffer similar pain beneath their superficial differences, but the famous theme song  doubts they will remember the innocent truth of their deep connection when  Monday morning dawns:  “As you walk on by, will you call my name?  Or will you walk away?”  In all the John Hughes teen movies of the 1980s, marginal characters made temporary alliances across the bright-line boundaries of class and clique, but the borders remained otherwise well-defended.  Polarization formed the root of the films’ central conflicts, so Hughes couldn’t really couldn’t afford to interrogate those boundaries too closely.

What was a self-respecting freak to do?  Seduced, perhaps for an evening or a weekend by Hughes’ chimerical adolescent agape, or by some other bone of acceptance the popular culture pretended to throw, the freaks returned to school on Monday, a bit more cynical, knowing the answer to the question that only a simple mind would ask.

*

III. Demarites

Two good angels whispered in my ear in the spring of 1988.  One told me to apply to Rutgers, even though my guidance counselor, who apparently believed that I was headed for low-wage employment and early marriage, told me I would probably never get into that or any other college. The other one told me to check off the box for special-interest housing on the postcard that came with my admissions packet to Rutgers College.

That little checkmark landed me in Demarest Hall, the dorm officially designated for students interested in the fine arts, humanities, and foreign languages, and unofficially for those devoted to the hunt for self-expression, truth, joy and late-night revelation, those who were “mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time,” who felt everything deeply and far too much.  If you’ve read The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, you’ve had a glimpse into the crazy, beautiful life of Demarest, where its author, Junot Diaz, lived and wrote.

Demarites were required to produce a project for their section every semester, in addition to whatever projects they were working on for classes or on their own, so the place blazed with creative energy day and night.  A jam was always on somewhere if you needed to play or listen. People were forever writing, singing, drawing, composing, sculpting, rehearsing or painting something.  A stroll down the Philosophy section’s hallway guaranteed a strange conversation, if you were in the market for one. Someone was always desperately in love, or heartbroken or overjoyed. Emotions ran high, and Demarest has witnessed, tragically, several suicides over the years, but Demarites also celebrate life, perhaps most dramatically in the “Reaffirmation of Existence” rite. Antic silliness often overrode the angst. Sometimes, things were on fire.

Demarest was a revelation: here was my tribe, my people, at last! It had its own traditions, language, rituals and mythology, and living there felt like a homecoming to many a previously-isolated freak who hadn’t known there was a home to come home to. Before the World Wide Web in the mid-90s made it possible for ordinary people to connect with strangers around similar interests, free of geography, an adolescent freak living in a small town might not have the slightest notion of his membership in a larger nation, and might well assume that she was the only one of her kind.  Finding kindred spirits felt rare and precious when you didn’t know how many of them were out there, and until we came to Demarest, some of us had no idea.  The sense of belonging and acceptance was so profound that it left a permanent mark. Ex-Demarites, only half-jokingly, or maybe less than half, call themselves and the worldwide community of those who have ever lived there, Demarest-in-Exile.

Kid-freaks today grow up knowing that no matter how strange they are, they can find an online community of precisely similar oddballs. Most know that  geeks like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs can grow up to accrue fortunes and wield power, regardless of whether they ever had a date for the prom.  They know that dreamers, punks, emo kids, and other high school undesirables grow up to create the art, movies, books and games that re-awaken the imagination of a public that has had it beaten out of them.  And most kid-freaks know, although the reminder can never hurt, that It Gets Better. They self-identify younger, find one another sooner, and grow in pride and confidence. A former student of mine lived in Demarest two years ago, and from what he said, it sounded like not much had changed except that the students are more sophisticated than we ever were, perhaps because they grew up with the knowledge that their people were out there somewhere, or no more than a few clicks away. Demarest isn’t water in the desert to them, the way it was to me and a few other people.

Almost everyone I still know who lived in Demarest twenty years ago grew up to have more or less conventional lives of employment, marriage, parenthood and community life. Few, I would imagine, wear the external regalia of their inner freak that made it so easy once to tell who was in what camp. Nametags would help, but in adulthood we need to look a little more carefully, to ask questions of new acquaintances and listen between the lines of their answers. Demarites are not the only souls in exile, and you never know who might be part of the diaspora.

*

IV. Glee, Lady Gaga, and “Raise Your Glass”

What happens when a group that crosses geographic and economic boundaries forms and connects?  It becomes a demographic. Before freaks could even recover from their breathless rejoicing in their new, technologically-enabled connections, corporations began to work out how to claim their quirkiness and sell it back to them in attractive packaging, and, while they were at it, market it to a mass audience, as well. Over the past several years, weird has gone mainstream to great success.

This summer, I took my daughter to see Glee: The 3D Concert Movie, and found myself blown away, not so much by the talents of the twentysomething performers, which are impressive, nor the brutal, redundant explicitness of 3D live action, which is not, but by how drastically freakhood has changed since I was a young freak.

Only half the movie is what one might expect in a concert film: lots of performances and screaming fans. The other half of the movie consists of testimonials from Gleeks about how the TV show changed their lives. Three fans, one a gay teen who survived bullying in middle school, one a little person elected Prom Princess, and one a young woman with Asperger’s syndrome, become co-stars of the film, telling a quasi-religious redemption narrative about exclusion and humiliation healed by Glee’s gospel of self-acceptance. Hundreds of other fans featured for a few moments wear the kind of t-shirts worn by Glee cast members in the Born This Way episode, which announce in large font the character’s flaws (“Bitch,” “Bad Attitude,”), perceived flaws (“Four Eyes”), or inborn traits (“Brown Eyes,” “Likes Boys”). Young Gleeks gathering outside the Meadowlands for the concert show off their own homemade shirts announcing whatever traits they think make them weird or different, and flashing the iconic L for loser on their foreheads. The scene outside the stadium, at least as presented in the movie, is a high-spirited, high-decibel celebration of difference and diversity featuring mostly white middle-class teens from northern New Jersey and their resigned-looking parents.

It was odd, and I didn’t understand it.  When I was a teenage outcast, I had a small group of fellow eccentrics with whom to celebrate and commiserate, but there was neither a mass-scale stadium show at which to do so, nor a TV show bleating the message that it was awesome to be different.  One of the intrinsic rewards of being a freak had always been the knowledge that you were part of a small, select group privileged to cast a knowing eye on the rest of humanity. It wouldn’t have been much fun if the rest of humanity also consisted of freaks, or, God forbid, were in on the joke.  The Izod Center in the Meadowlands holds 20,000 people. Freaks have always been a tiny minority, so statistically speaking, the attendees at the concert can’t all be freaks, no matter what their t-shirts say.

Two of the musical numbers performed in the Glee concert complicate the question further. One is the Pink anthem, “Raise Your Glass.”

So raise your glass if you are wrong
In all the right ways, all my underdogs.
We will never be, never be anything but loud
And nitty gritty, dirty little freaks.

Are you wrong in all the right ways? Of course you are!  The most abject slave to fashion, or the most straitlaced member of the church choir, is secretly proud of being wrong in all the right ways (“I can’t help needing to look fabulous every day! What can I say?  It’s my little failing.”  “I just have to do what’s right, regardless of the lax morals of the heathen society around me!  I’m just stubborn that way!”)  It’s akin to the dreaded interview question about one’s greatest weakness, to which the only correct answer is, “I really drive myself too hard sometimes.” People believe their flaws to be charming or noble, taken in the right light, probably because the ones that can be interpreted that way are the only ones to which we confess. “I’m oblivious to the ways in which my selfishness hurts the people who mean the most to me” doesn’t make the cut, but “I’m always late because I have no sense of time” sounds romantic and insouciant. Pink gets it.

She collects her listeners into a small band of wild, carefree trainwrecks with whom a famous pop star closely identifies, while making certain that almost no one can psychologically exclude herself from the group, even though she calls them “dirty little freaks.” (I’ll answer to geek and nerd cheerfully, but even I have to draw the line at “dirty little freak.”) It’s brilliant, really, more of a marketing concept for a song than an actual lyric, and it worked: the song is an international hit and one of those tunes we’ll never hear the end of. Twenty years from now, when someone holds a 2010s nostalgia party, “Raise Your Glass” will make the playlist because millions of people felt included in Pink’s cadre of misunderstood rebels.

Pink brands her underdogs in the same way Lady Gaga gathers her Little Monsters unto herself in her own intergalactic hit, “Born This Way,” whose message is that no matter who you are, God made you that way; therefore, you are beautiful and perfect as you are. The prelude to the video adds a Gaga creation myth in which she gives birth to a new race of loving, non-judgmental grotesques.  In her new theology, freaks are all Lady Gaga’s cosmic, monstrous children, simultaneously a tiny, marginalized cult, and enough to fill a new Gaga universe and, not coincidentally, the Lady’s own prodigious, presumably meat-lined, pockets. Camille Paglia writes:

“There is a monumental disconnect between Gaga’s melodramatic self-portrayal as a lonely, rebellious, marginalised artist and the powerful corporate apparatus that bankrolled her makeover and has steamrollered her songs into heavy rotation on radio stations everywhere.”

Paglia’s criticism is spot-on, but fails to account for why so many millions want to be her Little Monsters.  It’s strange isn’t it? Why are large numbers of young people so eager to identify themselves as outsiders? Wasn’t conformity the project of teen popular culture ever since the 1920s? Isn’t the function of pop stars to tell everyone what is cool and how best to avoid the taint of the misfit? And what does the trend mean for genuine outsiders? Freaks have always had their own music and heroes, and even a marginally freakish kid knows that Lady Gaga is a risible, derivative, corporate fraud, but if everyone is a freak, then no one is.  And if everyone identifies as an oddball, then any TV show, movie, or pop goddess that plays to that demographic won’t be a cult classic, but a chart-topping, mass-culture hit, leaving the young members of the tribe, ironically, more marginalized than ever.

V. The Wages of Conformity and Occupy Wall Street

But what does any of this have to do with Occupy Wall Street? What connects opting out of normalcy, a popular culture that suddenly glorifies freakiness, and a political movement of disaffected young people taking to the streets?

The connecting thread is the social contract of conformity offered to every middle-class American child, which was discovered over the past decade or so to be written on a cloud in invisible ink. The contract read:

Do what is expected of you, following your parents’ and teachers’ instructions as well as you can, and you will be rewarded with security.

People who knew they didn’t fit in  examined the social contract and found that they would not be able to hold up their end of it while holding onto their souls. This is not to say that some freaks didn’t grow up to be wildly successful. Some did, but on their own terms, often banding together with other freaks in creative artistic and business partnerships.

When economic times were good, the social contract functioned reasonably well for the middle class. Children who followed social norms and did well in school went to college, majored in something that interested them, and sooner or later found work that paid the bills. They married, had children, and advised those children to take the same deal.

But a number of trends endangered the contract, beginning twenty years ago or more: Corporations downsized and outsourced. The American workforce grew much more efficient. Manufacturing moved overseas. The population increased. Wages stagnated. Then, we suffered a terrorist attack, and a right-wing government rammed through policies that disempowered workers and deified corporations, while the public was too scared of terrorists (and Congresscritters of being called unpatriotic on Fox News) to object.

Gradually, the social contract morphed into this:

Do everything that could possibly be expected of you, much better than the other kids can do it, and you might be rewarded with the chance of staying in the socio-economic class into which you were born. Maybe.

The middle class took note and ramped up the parenting, producing the anxious helicopter parents that everyone loves to mock and no one tries to understand. Helicopter parenting is simply parental love expressed as fear. Adults witnessed in their workplaces how much higher expectations had become since they were young, how much more each employee was expected to produce for lower real wages and less security. They lost their jobs or watched others lose theirs, while the people in the C-suites got richer and more entrenched, whether they succeeded or failed.

Is it any wonder that parents overreacted, and swore that their own children would be survivors and winners? Why else would a sane mother or father sign their children up for town, school and travel teams, some in multiple sports? The kids, at least, get to run around in the fresh air and have some fun before exhaustion and early injuries ruin the fun. For the parents, it’s nothing but expense and commuting. Why else would parents hire ruinously pricey tutors to supplement the instruction in even excellent schools, plus pay for SAT courses and private guidance counselors? Why would parents micromanage a child’s academic career to the extent that some schools felt they had no choice but to use open online gradebooks, so that parents would know the moment a quiz was graded how it affected their child’s GPA and class rank? Why do they urge their kids to participate in as many extra-curricular activities as three students of the previous generation would have managed? What sane person would cut short their children’s childhood, driving them to work harder and longer at younger and younger ages, until sleep deprivation became a widespread health crisis among American youth? Only love and fear could make parents engage in behaviors so patently insane: love for their children and fear for their children’s endangered futures.

These parents and their exhausted kids maintained their ironclad faith in the meritocracy. They believed that whichever Superchildren worked the hardest and achieved the most would still manage to survive in the increasingly competitive global marketplace. But the last few years have shaken that faith. Many recent college graduates, even those with graduate degrees, have found themselves burdened with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt, unemployed or underemployed, living with their parents, and losing hope. According to Timothy Egan in the New York Times,

Employment rates and starting salaries have fallen off a cliff for new college graduates in the last two years. One study found that 55 percent of humanities majors newly released from school are either not working or hold jobs that require no college degree.

Even those who have found work will never catch up economically.  Graduating during a recession depresses wages for most or all of a career. Many of these Organization Kids must be wondering what exactly it was that they traded their childhoods for, and why, if they kept up their end of that scary new social contract, there isn’t even an entry-level job waiting for them at the end.

Normal isn’t looking too good. The crumbs promised in the social contract are too meager to warrant the effort, and rewards of conformity have never seemed less worth trading your soul for. Suddenly, the freaks seem to have the right attitude. With obscene income inequality and high unemployment, even someone who follows all the rules perfectly and does all the extra-credit assignments life offers can still end up with $80,000 in student loan debt, a part-time job at Starbucks, and a room at home decorated with Star Wars posters. Merit may have nothing at all to do with it. And in that case, why not reconnect with the creative, rebellious spirit whose needs were long ago sublimated to the demands of Advanced Placement courses and Community Service Credits? Why not raise your glass and sing along with Pink calling you a dirty little freak?

And if there is a large gathering in your city in which people your age and older are finally standing up and asking what became of the social contract, and why corporations are not only considered people, but people with considerably more rights than actual people, why not dig a sleeping bag out of the attic, make a sign, and join in? Why not announce publicly that you didn’t lose the game? That you played it with all your heart, but it was rigged, and you’re not going to play it anymore? Why not rebel, critique, camp out, speak into the people’s mic, play the drum? What, finally, do you have to lose?

***********************

Well, that’s it: five posts in five days, 4300+ words expounding upon Freaks, Gleeks, Demarites, and Occupy Wall Street. I’m not certain what possessed me to do it this way. It was certainly exhausting. Thank you for reading it, which may have been nearly as exhausting.  Please leave me a comment below with your thoughts or reactions to the series.  You can tell me I’m wrong.  I can take it. 

Perfect Whole will skip the November 15th post and return in all its bloggy glory on December 1st, giving the inboxes of loyal subscribers a much-needed rest.

]]> https://perfectwhole.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/freaks-gleeks-demarites-and-occupy-wall-street-a-five-day-series-part-i/feed/ 11 juliegoldberg https://perfectwhole.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/reframing-bullying-not-popular-but-powerful/ https://perfectwhole.wordpress.com/2011/10/14/reframing-bullying-not-popular-but-powerful/#comments Fri, 14 Oct 2011 04:01:55 +0000 Julie Goldberg http://perfectwhole.wordpress.com/?p=234 Continue reading →]]>

Image © Michael Verhoef, 2010

Lies Told to Bullying Victims Over the Years: A Compendium

The people who torment you are popular, a word that means “well-liked.” If people whom everyone else likes find you unacceptable, then the problem is obviously you.  Of course, physical and verbal assault and harassment are strictly against the rules of our school, but we adults are powerless to stop it. Besides, kids will be kids, and what you’re suffering isn’t serious. If you ignore it, it will stop.  Bullying is a normal part of growing up, which is also the best time of your life– trust us. However, if you were really a good kid, you would feel sorry for bullies because they have low self-esteem and a lot of problems at home. The damage that bullying is doing to your self-esteem does not cross our minds, but if you complain too much, you’re a whiner, which is why you’re bullied in the first place.  If you attempt to commit suicide, or even mention suicidal feelings, then you’re clearly mentally ill, and we are absolved of any responsibility for you. We’re not a mental hospital, are we?  If only you would change.

Every one of those lies did unspeakable harm to generations of bullied kids. Some of those kids killed themselves quickly, others slowly, self-medicating with drugs and alcohol and other addictions. Some have post-traumatic stress disorder, a condition which places them, emotionally, right back in the moment of their greatest helplessness whenever the memories of abuse are triggered.  Some survived.

I could write torrents of words about each one of these myths, but other people are all over it. The myth no one else is addressing, though, the one that really gets inside the heart of the bullied child, is popularity.  Ask even a kindergarten-aged victim, “Who picks on you at school?” and the child will probably answer, “The popular kids.”

What does it mean to be popular?  The most popular restaurant in town buzzes with people who love the food. Disney World is a popular vacation destination. The world’s most popular soft drink is Coke.  Popular places and things are easy to understand: they’re the ones a plurality of people like, even love. But popular people, particularly in school, are not necessarily the best-beloved.

I remember a boy and a girl in my junior high and high school who were universally liked for all the right reasons.  Kim and Craig (names changed to protect the evolved) were clear-eyed and kind.  Kim was (and remains) vivacious, interested in others, quick to laugh, generous with a compliment.  At an age when most of us were criminally narcissistic, Kim knew what people needed to hear and had the magnanimity to say it.  Craig was an all-around good kid with the warmest smile I’ve ever seen on a teenage boy (he still has it as a grown-up).  He was an athlete, but not a jock; an excellent student, but not a grind; an Eagle Scout, but not a prig.  He had friends in every social group, every academic level, every part of town.  Yet, if you had asked anyone in my graduating class to name the most popular boy and girl in our year, their names probably wouldn’t have come up, because “popular” means something different from “widely admired and beloved” among children and teenagers. (The song “Popular” from the musical Wicked is a witty, knowing take on the kind of popularity that counts in school.) The best-loved kids are never bullies, but the popular ones sometimes are.

The popular clique can mean the kids who are wealthy, good-looking, athletic, confident, and entitled, in some schools.  In others, it can mean the tough, defiant kids no one messes with.  It’s the group that many other kids long to join and try to emulate, but its mystique depends on exclusivity.  You can’t apply for membership.  You can’t ask them if you can play.  If you have to ask, you’re not in.  Kids outside the group may feel a variety of emotions about them: envy, resentment, contempt, longing, and self-pity, but not love. Definitely not love.

The word “popular” in this context, then, is a misnomer.  These kids aren’t widely admired, like Craig and Kim, or enjoyed by the masses, like Coke and Disney World, because they are not exactly popular, but powerful. In some communities, even the adults don’t dare to cross them.  Like a multinational corporation headquartered in the Cayman Islands, this group plays by its own rules with no court of appeals.  But in a language in which we famously park on driveways and drive on parkways, what difference does it make if we call them “popular” instead of “powerful”?

It might make all the difference in the world to bullied kids.

Imagine their perspective.  It’s bad enough to be unsafe, deprived of one’s dignity in a thousand ways each day: mocked, beaten, tripped, stolen from, lied about on the Internet, humiliated.  It’s worse if those who engage in the behavior are labelled with the word used to describe something the whole world loves.  If a criminal robs and beats up a 12-year-old on his way home from school, everyone’s outraged sympathies lie with the victim.  If kids regarded as “popular” abuse the 12-year-old, some people wonder what’s wrong with the victim, himself included.  After all, if the kids who are the social equivalent of Coke and Disney World hate you that much, what is wrong with you?  Can it ever be made right, or should you just commit suicide, as some of your tormentors suggest?  Connotations kill.

Bullying is the exercise of power against a person who doesn’t have any.  Powerful children understand this very well, and bullied children are bewildered by it.  A young man recently told me about two girls in his high school science class who would steal school supplies out of his backpack or off his desk, scribble on his immaculate notebook, destroy his homework, flick sharp objects near his eyes. When he objected, the girls would tell him that it was their right to take whatever they wanted, that it was a free country and that he had no right to stop them from doing anything they wanted to do to him.  His rights, of course, were nonexistent. The girls flummoxed this polite, intelligent boy. He was physically larger than they, but helpless to stop kids so assured of their own power. Bullies act from exactly such a position of entitlement, as if to say: I do this to you because I can, and because there is nothing you can do to stop me.  The classic advice to punch the bully in the nose, though ill-advised in the post-Columbine, zero-tolerance era, remains correct in its theory of power, sending the message that this victim is no longer safe to victimize, and that a new, more pliant one will have to be found.

The power dynamic also explains why the politically correct and well-meaning attempt to teach “conflict resolution skills” to address bullying is so utterly misguided. Conflict resolution assumes equality, a situation in which peers whose objectives are at odds can work out a compromise. But bullies and victims have no issues to work out. The bully would like to use his or her power to abuse and dehumanize the victim. The victim would like to be treated as a human being possessed of rights and dignity.  There is no ground for compromise.  The correct analogy is domestic abuse, for which not even the most starry-eyed optimist recommends conflict resolution.

New Jersey’s new Anti-Bullying Bill of Rights, as well as new anti-bullying laws passed in Connecticut and Massachusetts, finally takes the power dynamics of bullying seriously.  Schools can no longer dismiss bullying as a normal part of childhood or pin the blame on the victim for being too sensitive, too opinionated, too gay, too fat, too ugly, too smart, too stupid, or just too strange. The law forces school administrators to challenge bullies and their sometimes equally powerful and aggressive parents.  It requires schools to initiate an investigation at the first incident of harassment, bullying or intimidation, and to take a series of forceful actions to ensure that the bullying stops immediately, whether it occurs in school, off school grounds, or even online.  The law threatens consequences stopping barely short of the wrath of God. Some administrators worry that the new policies are too extreme, but it will be refreshing to see schools forced to err on the side of victims, at least until the litigation begins.

The subtext of the law is, finally, an acknowledgment that bullying is about power and that only a show of power greater than that of the bully can end it. Administrators, parents, and the police are presumed to have enough institutional power to overcome the social power of the bully.

Do they?  Will the new policies work?  I don’t know.  They will certainly work better than the old policy of ignoring bullying, which doesn’t work at all, as generations of victims can attest– those of us who survived, that is.

The new anti-bullying laws may not be popular, but I hope that they are powerful.

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Julie Goldberg is writing a novel about, in part, the psychological trauma of bullying.

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