An American Dropout’s Observations of Social Decay
Adam Smith from Myth of the 20th Century recently introduced me to the concept of “the aspirational class” and today, as I walked across a high valley bench in the Rocky Mountains, I recalled with some pain the fact that my son does not want me buying gifts for my grandson, and that my younger son won’t use his electronic wallet to help me mail the biannual unwanted gift from the apostate grandfather, saying, “I don’t think a [toy] gun is a good idea with all of the mass shootings going on.”
He then told me that I was not “a good decision maker” and that my brother wasn’t either.
I know my son and prepared him well for the world with creative play, enabling him to excel like no other in his generation that I know of. But, I am a traitor to the money-making cult he has been inducted into and cannot be trusted. Even though I adopted his older brother, when his father walked away, and spent more time with him than any of his friends’ parents, he yet hates me for the same failure that my brother and I have accepted, the failure to own a home, a large suburban home, which was the achieved goal of every one of my older male relatives. When his younger brother said we didn’t make good decisions, my brother and I, he meant that I am homeless and Tony is now a renter. Of course, the reason for our failure, and the failure of many tail-end Boomers and Gen-Xers to own the suburban dream, stems from wage stagnations, inflation and the turning of our wives against us through the media.
While taking a walk, I put away the fact that my own blood despises me because I am a traitor to the cult of Modernity and the gospel of limitless lineal economic growth, and tried to catch a glimpse of the big picture, considering the plight of the generations that nurtured, raised, lied to and hazed me depending on their individual bent, and offer this brief sketch of what I sense is one of the key mechanisms of our terminal decline as humans. I do not see the strict 20-year generations of popular discourse as a fitting tool of inquiry among my family members.
The Elders
My grandparents were all born between 1901 and 1919, and along with my uncles and aunts, were among the worshipped generation of media myth. I knew two of my great grandparents, both born in the 1880s and 1890s. In reviewing my childhood and adult interactions with these folks, down the sad stairs of time until I served as a pallbearer for most of them, I find no difference between the three crops of Americans, including my in-laws and the parents of my closest friends. Whether they fought in the Great Crusade or not, all of these men had the support of their wives and had the simple ambition of staying employed, saving money and making it to the Social Security finish line in sustainable circumstances so that they would not be a burden to their children. All of these folks born between 1880 and 1935 seemed to have the same value system and world view, with every man enjoying unconditional support from his mother, wife, sisters and daughters.
The Bitch Batch
The people I know and in my family who reached adulthood after The Great Sublime Crusade and the American Humiliation, basically coming of age between 1945 and 1975, are generally invested with the materialistic sensibilities of what Adam terms the Aspirational Class. These people almost all lead an unexamined life, believe the media have one overriding goal, a luxurious retirement in a suburban house big enough for ten, shared by their mate only, daily entertainment saturation, fine dining and sumptuous vacations. These folks have typically bought the contract that has them toiling from 25 to 65 for someone else [a term of service ancient folk would have considered cruel] in order to live like an ancient king from 65 to 85. Consider that the Roman Republican soldier served from roughly age 18 to 40, serving the Imperator for 20 years, and was then given a farm and enabled to work for himself for roughly the same amount of time, not losing all of his prime to The System, unless he wanted to be a career soldier. This quest for every man to be a king and every woman a queen results in aspirations being focused on elderly pleasures, with the shaping of children and grandchildren farmed out to mind control agents of the state. The Romans would regard our living cycle as a weirdly slothful form of state cruelty and citizen insanity.
The Lost Boys
Americans I know who have come of age between the American Defeat in Indochina in 1975 and the housing crash of 2008 fall into two categories, the wannabe Boomers cleaving to the Great American Lie, such as my sons, a Gen-Xer and a Millennial, and the Lost Boys, who are increasingly nihilistic, hedonistic, suicidal, cynical and/or dysfunctional. Amongst these two groups it is axiomatic that being successful in no way fits with the world view of my grandfathers. Both broad definitions of atomized people know that they are either with The System or Outside the System or walking an increasingly perilous divide. Both groups tend to dismiss children as a burden and either abandon them to The System or remain happily childless, counting on The System to provide servants for them in their decline from amongst the members of some undying race.
The Woke and the Joke
As Modernity transmogrifies into something resembling an autistic girl’s conflated interpretation of the weird speculative fiction visions of Huxley, Orwell and Dick and in no way represents what people of my parents and grandparents generations ever dreamed we were headed to, I have noticed a sharp divide between the types of people that have come of age in the past ten years and they fall into three camps:
-1. Drug zombies
-2. Media zombies
-3. Atomized individuals
There is no decent collective left for thinking people that can survive the peril of plain sight and the baleful eye of the overlords and their zombie hordes. In my view, this festering, filthy-minded nation is now a seedbed for something worse and better. For I have noticed that a percentage of young men, much higher than in former times, in this latest iteration of our kind have awakened from the long sleep of the Greatest Lie Ever Sold to an easily grasped reality, that America hates them with its every waning breath and the dogs of this striped beast are ravening for their body and soul in all the hues of humanity—as the good people look away or cheer according to the twist of their crooked conscience. It is surely not easy to awaken to the fact that you are a ghost haunting a house that hates you. But those who survive it, I would like to think, will do so with the cunning and resilience of Odysseus, and when old, in whatever community sprouts from the ruin of this doomed idea, might be able tell a tale to the young, of a time when honor was the lowest evil, sloth was the greatest good, unearned guilt was a holy sacrament, and a pale face brought down upon its reviled owner the wrath of a man made god.
James is a full-time writer, part-time coach and part-time wage slave with an extensive history of brain trauma. Check out: http://www.jameslafond.com/
You people need Christ. The decline you have observed in your family is that of a body bereft of spirit. An unconscious deer “running dead” towards the inevitable pile-up. Everything good in the West you remember was Christian. Everything left after the West abandoned Christ is just what we started with.
Dear Mr. LaFond:
The sexual revolution (which of course, and as you well know, started decades before the 1960s with the Boomers – my parents’ generation) is responsible for what you discuss in these musings. I feel for you, Sir. Not to denigrate my poor mother, who is a good and decent person (by human standards) in her own way, but she divorced my father when I was ten years old for purely selfish reasons. Some years later, after two more failed marriages, my mother was discussing her regrets for the stupid, selfish decisions she’d made in her life, with her mother and her sister, when my grandmother said to her, “that’s what I call living!” You see where I’m headed with this, right? My mom came by her attitude towards marriage and family honest.
Fortunately for me (as opposed to my younger sister) I was given the choice a year after the divorce to live with my dad, and I took it and never looked back. My father remarried and raised me thence forward in a very stable environment; in a small town, surrounded by people who supported him instead of undermining everything he was trying to do in raising me, as we witness so often taking place today, with all this idiotic nonsense about “toxic masculinity” and this and that.
I suppose it is small consolation, but your boys could have turned out worse – much worse. There is at least hope. We’re told the story in the scriptures of the prodigal son for a reason, and I trust your son will awaken to the reality of the lie that is ‘Merica’ at some point. I have eight children, among whom are four girls. One of my daughters gave us some trouble a few years ago. My approach to her rebellion against my authority was to simply cast her out of the garden that is her family of origin until she came back to her senses, however long that should take. In the grand scheme of things it was a short three years; in the immediate scheme of things that three years seemed like forever. All the while I was taking heat from all directions, but I was resolved in my decision and never once deviated from it, all the pressure to do so notwithstanding.
“Tough Love” is a very real and effective tool. The problem in modern times is that very few of us have the intestinal fortitude (and the faith it takes) to carry it out to its conclusion. In my father’s time he had the support of the broader community to help him carry it out, as I mentioned. In our own time we lack that support, and are therefore relegated to “going it alone” for all intents and purposes. I’m not trying to say “I’m strong, and you’re weak,” by any means. What I am saying, though, is that sometimes you gotta cut a man (or woman) loose and let him come back to his senses in his own time. And damn the immediate consequences! In my case this was made easier because, of course, I had young children still at home that I could not, in good conscience, sacrifice for the sake of one rebellious spirit. I also had a great deal of faith that if I just stuck to my principles our daughter would eventually come to the realization that she had betrayed the only people on God’s earth who really cared about her and her future. And so she did, thank the Lord!