Love and irony

One uninvited guest of the last 30 years is irony. Life today, as we all know, is constantly self-aware. "The Daily Show" has replaced the evening news. David Foster Wallace has replaced Allen Ginsberg. Reality TV has replaced sitcoms. Advertisement has replaced everything. Irony is anathema to love; it is its opposite. Irony takes a large world and makes it very small, conceals it within a turned phrase; love freezes the world, expands a point into the universe. Lou Reed, who has spanned our generations, sings that love is "turning time around."

I have not been in love. So maybe love is not any of those things. Most of my friends my age (22, 23) have not been in love, either, even the ones who have been in ultracommitted, I can't live without you type relationships. It is something, but it's not love. Perhaps we're holding out for something that isn't there. In the meantime we date, date and date some more. Properly protected, there's no harm in getting laid while waiting for The One to sway her hips in our direction. Maybe modern birth control reinforces this; condoms turn sex into a "yes, but" affair. But with all that sex, can a true love make herself heard? It worked for your generation.

Life since last September has not only been ironic, but also stained with the possibility of radical human evil. Unlike the hippies who begat us, I don't think we have the confidence that we will change the world forever for the good, or even that this is possible. We have to think local. Italo Calvino writes of one way of escaping despair: "Seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."

The simple sentence "I love you" is the most powerful one in our language. It does not discriminate based on wealth, race or intelligence. Love is an unconditionally good thing, but the promise of it is a weapon, accessible to all. When I fall in love it will be with the fervor of a born again finding his Lord Almighty. Car commercials, budget cuts, half-caff lattes and existential loneliness can go screw themselves. Instead of irony and fear is certainty: this small thing, this love -- I know, we know.

Of course, there are so many things in relationships between indifference and self-obliterating love, and not everything that is self-obliterating is love. Love may strike like a flash flood or may swell slowly over the course of years, but it will exist as long as we believe in it.

Fighting for it.

-- Alexander P. Nyren

Beatlemania vs. Batmania

I think one of the key experiences in my cultural development as a child was sitting in my parents' living room in 1989 at the age of 9, reading a story in the society section of Newsweek about the merchandising campaign behind that summer's "Batman" movie. The writer had dubbed the craze "Batmania," and it seemed to my somewhat naive 9-year-old mind that there were larger forces at work -- perhaps I was mistaking commerce for something more profound.

Anyway, I wondered aloud to my father if this so-called Batmania could be something important, something to remember. I had an idea that each generation has defining events, and was there a chance that this one was mine? My father flatly replied, "No. Nothing will ever be as big as Beatlemania." And that settled it.

I still think about that comment, years later. I think it still colors a lot of my perceptions. Dad was very specific: What would be bigger than Beatlemania? Nothing. Absolutely nothing that came out of my generation, no defining event, could ever hope to achieve the lasting significance of Beatlemania. I don't know if Dad was consciously trying to perpetuate a sort of cultural imperialism of his generation, or if he was mistaking a personal reaction for larger social significance, or if he really was right: American culture being what it was in the early 1960s and before, no single event could ever have as much of an impact. I still wonder.

That's what it's felt like to me. There has always been this shadow hanging over my generation. This applies to any area of culture, from lifestyle to sex to relationships. I know other baby boomers and fortysomethings who have told me about the great sexual revolution of the '60s, the complete accessibility to any kind of carnal pleasure and the total eradication of any kind of traditional value system that would inhibit such pursuits. Sex as metaphor for social revolution, I suppose. Today that seems impossible to me -- unthinkable, really. My relationships with women have been very small in comparison. I certainly wouldn't claim to speak for every man and woman born between 1970 and 1985, but as a 22-year-old male, I don't sense that there's any sense of history or global purpose or importance: It's simply two people getting together and doing their best in a world that's much, much bigger than both of them. I think the majority of my generation regards love and particularly sex as a completely personal act, with little or no political or cultural impact -- that's certainly how I view it. Perhaps that has led to some problems, particularly in regards to HIV/AIDS.

Regardless, it's like sitting around listening to, say, Sleater-Kinney or the White Stripes. I truly believe that the music being made by these groups is the most important music in the world. But there's that little nagging voice in the back of my head, cocking its eyebrow and saying, "How on earth do you think the White Stripes could possibly stack up against the Beatles?" And I don't know how to answer that voice.

-- Andy Sturdevant

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