StopTime

Ever notice how History has sputtered to a halt in the United States?

Oh, yes, it’s true. A little demonstration? Okay, take, for example, something as simple as our slang.

If flower children at a Sixties’ Happening ever shouted, “Eat my dust!” and “Twenty-three skiddoo!” and “You’re the bee’s knees!”, their corny Twenties’ slang would’ve made grownups laugh.

Why? Because, as every adult knows, the young in their generation naturally personify the New; they live and breathe this hot minute’s au-courant fashions. The vital element is to defy the grownups’ ears, to have a private language only other kids can understand.

Now my demonstration of social stasis in the US goes even deeper because let’s suppose the hippie guys at the Happening had also taken to wearing 40-year-old raccoon skin coats and porkpie hats, and the girls rolled their stockings and  baked marcel waves into their hair — what then? …Well, for one thing, there never would’ve actually been the revolutionary post-war phenomenon of an international pacifist youth culture.

Instead, of course, as far as Sixties’ slang goes, what really happened was the boomer kids popularized such era-specific expressions as “Bummer,” which came from surfers via the Hells Angels; and “Blow my mind”: an LSD-cult mantra. Plus, Forties Black jazz  had already enshrined “cool” as the highest compliment in White America.

Okay, now let’s fast-forward to our officially global, multi-cultural and maxi-diverse Third Millennium… Stop, look and listen. The children have stopped changing. They are no longer the harbingers of the Next Big Thing.

Listen to 2012 children talking together, and monitor the media aimed at their messy little heads, then examine how so many are dressing. What you notice is, aside from their using hi-tech and social media jargon, today’s kids are basically being trained from youth up to be Boomers Redux.

We can only imagine what’s going on in the government schools, but try watching the Disney Channel. ‘Duxers everywhere not only say “cool,” “bummer” and “blows my mind” with straight faces, even more sinisterly, these generational epigones of newness have also taken to aping 50-year-old fashions.

Check out the #Occupiers, the pop stars, college kids, online personalities. At a rest stop last month, I saw four young men in period costumes straight off a Summer of Love San Francisco rock LP album cover. I had to bite my tongue to keep from yelling: “Big Brother and the Holding Company called! They want their image back.”

Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West uses the term “pseudomorphosis” (“false change”) to indicate historical situations in which a dominant older culture forces a younger, more vital people to abandon whatever might be their own native interests in order to use-up their fresh energies by reanimating — by pretending in all things to be like — the exhausted but tyrannical older regime.

Pseudomorphosis is, I think, as good a definition as any of what is being done to our children. As to why this peace-crime is being committed against human nature at its greenest and most vulnerable, and by whom, well, dear friends, if you don’t know, I aint-a gonna tell yuh.

It wouldn’t be groovy.