About TGATK
I was still a senior at the University of California, Berkeley, the night John McCain conceded the presidency to Barack Obama. I was living with five other young men in a house up on the hills overlooking the campus and the city of Berkeley. The hills were full of big, rich houses – a decidedly different demographic than the people you’d find strewn about the campus, or wandering that countercultural yellow-brick-road, Telegraph Avenue.
It wasn’t where I wanted to sit while the world was changing.
Gathering two of my housemates, I got in my car and made the trip down the hill to see what was going on. We parked illegally, got out, and followed the crowd to the intersection of Telegraph Avenue and Bancroft Street. The crowd of revelers was excited, jumping up and down and chanting. I’m not sure they knew what to do. From time to time, a police car would have to drive through the crowd, and they’d slam their palms on it over and over, but out of jubilation – not the anger that you might expect at this particular locale.
My housemates and I had quickly had enough, as nothing really seemed to be materializing, so we drove home. Rumor had it, people gathered by the campus clock tower and sang the national anthem – something I doubt has happened at Berkeley many times in recent history – and marched the streets until the early (or maybe not so early) hours of the morning.
The next day, campus newspaper The Daily Californian used its cover to run a full-color picture of a woman in the crowd wrapping herself in an American Flag. For the first time in my life, I decided to keep a newspaper to mark an occasion. It rode around in my bag for a long time, the one place that I thought might actually keep it flat and un-creased; now, 8 months later, it’s sitting on my desk, as of yet un-framed but still un-creased.
When I look at it now, I realize that the picture isn’t so much about Barack Obama. Indeed, if time has proven anything, it’s that the political climate of the country hasn’t changed all that much. The partisan bickering that I’ve always found so disheartening hasn’t waned; it has perhaps even intensified. Obama’s grand plans for the financial relationship between the government and its people have been derailed, or at least rendered largely moot, by an economic crisis that wouldn’t have been averted had any of the other candidates won the office. It seems that being a cultural icon and perceived political savior doesn’t mean a lot when it’s time to do the job: at some point, you’ve got to come down from on high and face the music.
What really seems clear now, eight months later, is that John McCain was conceding much more than the race for the presidency. He was conceding something unconstrained by political realities. He was conceding that there was a paradigm shift occurring in how America thinks and behaves; conceding that the way in which America views itself and its place in the world was changing. He was conceding that the Old America’s time was up.
Here’s an anecdote: At home during a break from college, I got into a discussion with my father about politics and the Internet. Now, I felt qualified to talk about the Internet, but I was in no way qualified to talk politics (and still am not). Luckily, my father’s statement, in sum, amounted to the idea that he was happy with the Internet, because it would inevitably increase the honesty of politicians by making it harder for them to hide behind lies, half-truths, or flat-out omissions. This was something I could talk about, because it wasn’t a statement about politics – it was a statement about human nature. In fact, on second thought, this conversation wasn’t about the Internet or politics. It was about the interplay between human nature and the proliferation of information.
My half of the conversation was to say that – all things considered – I didn’t really think politicians would get to be any less crooked. In my estimation, they’d just try harder to hide everything. Ultimately, I told my father, I just don’t think that people change as time passes. I don’t think there are new problems – just new circumstances. People will always try to lie and cheat. At the same time, we’ve already seen how the new circumstance of the Internet freely circulating information has changed the political game (Clinton-Lewinsky breaking on the Drudge Report, for example).
Nevertheless, if my father thought that the Internet essentially meant more information for the common man, and that that was a good thing, then I agreed with him. But would it change human behavior? I didn’t – and don’t – think so.
Days after the conversation, I was still thinking about it. I think it’s safe to say that the Internet will expose more corruption more quickly and effortlessly than other forms of news media ever have. Another question made itself apparent, however: was that better? Is it better to know about every skeleton in every closet of every leader we have? Or is it better to let them lead, except in the most egregious of cases? We know we’ll never find a perfect man… but are we sure we want to be constantly reminded of that?
The questions raised by this conversation provide a cross-section of what this blog hopes to get at: In a world where we are, more than ever before, drowning in a sea of information, what does this wealth of information do to the psyche of a person, or of a people, or of a country?
Why is America changing, and how?
That isn’t an easy question to answer. Therefore, I propose an indirect way of trying to answer it: we look at culture. We look at the movies that are being produced and the songs that are being written. We look at the Web sites that get the most traffic. We look at which news stories are controversial, and which news stories are not. We look at what actually gets reported on. We look at ourselves through what we produce.
That’s the beauty of culture: it truly is by the people, for the people, and of the people. As a result, we can all study it, and we can all understand it. This is a simple technique for answering the aforementioned question that doesn’t require a degree or specialized knowledge or even an elevated position in society. All it takes is a little bit of observation, a little bit of memory, and a lot of living.
So let’s start with movies. The Old America produced one type of movie that was patently American – the Western. It’s a creation myth for our country, typically detailing some element of the move Westward and finding its dramatic conflict in the Settlers’ defense of their way of life against some non-American “other” (ironically, “non-American other” often means “Native American”). Additionally, Westerns are packed with a stock cast of characters – the gunslinger, the effeminate man, the whore with a heart of gold, etc. – that each have something to say about some element of the American condition.
If you ask many people, there is one truly classic, canonical Western: George Stevens’ Shane. Shane is about the struggle of a group of honest farmers against the tyrannical rancher who wants their land. Ambling into town – just in time! – is Shane, a mysterious stranger who turns out to be a gunslinger equipped to fight the rancher and his men.
Shane lodges with the family that the film focuses on, the Staretts, who have a young son named Joey. Joey quickly takes to Shane, idolizing his skill with a pistol and his ability to stand up to the rancher’s men in ways that his father can’t. Joey acts as the eyes of the viewer, actively watching Shane arrive, help his family, save the day, and ride out of town when his work is done. He ends the movie crying towards Shane’s ride off into the distance:
“Shane! Come back!”
America has long been a Gunslinger Nation. So many stops in the American historical narrative – Manifest Destiny, isolationism, even the tale of our entry into World War II – fit perfectly into the self-made creation myth that is decades of Hollywood “Western Films.”
The Gunslinger, central to that myth, has always been something of a veiled manifestation of those most American of values: lonesome, strong, elite, and operating on his own code of ethics, which is imposed upon others whenever necessary.
But that’s all changing.
I see my generation – the Information Generation, if you will – as the Kid in the story, trying to make sense of his Gunslinger idol as he gains the faculties and information to evaluate him properly. What does he think when he reads more into Shane’s dalliances with his mother, or his conflicts with his father? What does he make of the fact that Shane sometimes had to start fights in order to win them? And what is his interpretation of the film’s controversial ending, in which rides away slumped in his saddle after being shot, possibly dead?
Does the Gunslinger live?
All the information we now have at our fingertips is allowing us to re-evaluate who we are, as a people and as individuals. It’s helping us recognize the brilliance of our idols – as a well as their idiocy and ignorance. It’s creating a world in which dubious achievements are a dime a dozen, and no good deed goes un-mocked.
The American psyche is in a state of flux. It’s fragile – but it might come out stronger than before. So I want to know what’s happening. If the defining characteristic of my generation is our unprecedented access to information, where does that leave us? And as for America… what happens next?
Does the Gunslinger live?
