In the words of Ani Difranco, I have earned my disillusionment.

Jonah Loadpants, National Grue:
The Most Cynical Generation

Right-wingers have a very complicated relationship with “the kids these days”.

On one hand, they hate them. I mean, that’s been true of every conservative movement of every age. Demonizing and despising the youth and blaming them for everything wrong in society largely because the march of social evolution means the youth by and large are less willing to support the dominant bigotry of the times, whether that be against black people, women, queers, the poor, or so on. The youth are a convenient scapegoat for the simple fact that one cannot stop time in place until one is fully interred with the rot of worms.

On the other hand, they fucking hate them. Whoever is the youth represents more than a more liberal generation or a group whose strange pop tastes in music and clothing baffle and confuse them. They are also often a symbol. Unfortunately in our society, there is often a presumption that once one has “grown up” and “become an adult”, they are done learning and growing.

As such, for bitter conservatives, the youth represent missed chances. Because they believe that things like exploratory sex, experimentation with drugs, or enjoyment of life are only reserved for the young and they must live a squalid joyless existence because that is what it means to be an “adult”.

Now this is clearly bullshit and it’s especially bullshit when one notes that the only reason that bitter conservatives think the young get to enjoy themselves and they don’t is because when they were young, they entombed themselves in the same self-crafted misery and self-denial that “robbed” them of the chance to explore themselves and figure out what they really wanted. And it also ignores that anyone at any age can try whatever they like or learn whatever they like assuming they have the financial means to do so.

Shorter (or the last port before Jungle):

• Yo kids! The beatings will continue until morale improves.

But at the same time, conservatives are growing painfully aware that the long-worn strategy of selling ancient bigotries and terrible policies to white men who want to feel special is starting to fail. They could fix it by abandoning a form of bigotry, making genuine appeals on behalf of a minority community and earnestly campaigning for their rights. But since that would involve A) admitting fault and B) treating the filthy refuse like actual people, that’s right out.

So instead they are reduced to circling around white young men, hoping they can convince them to get on board with their “racial duties” by ranting at them about how much they are filthy morons who deserve death, but somehow should also vote for them.

And as clearly effective as this strategy would normally be, it has hit the unfortunate snag of the small, tiny fact that conservatives have spent a huge amount of effort demonizing young millennials and trying to do everything they can to block them from participating in the economy, separate them from the gears of government, and otherwise just learn to hate everything associated with America and capitalism.

All of which adds up to-

In case you hadn’t heard, young people these days — a.k.a “the Millennials” — are the most cynical and distrusting generation ever recorded.

Yeah, that.

It turns out you try and scam a generation from birth and then reveal the system to be a machine uncaring for their plight and unresponsive to their suffering and overuse terms like marriage, duty, America, family, etc… then those same people who have been repeatedly fucked will grow to distrust those who abandoned or swindled them on the “American dream”.

It’s part of what comes from obviously, cynically lying to a generation and then giving them access to a whole world’s worth of information. From buying out all sources of information and using them only to sell bullshit and training a generation to distrust all those in authority.

Hell, it’s pretty much the same thing that happened with that much vaunted “Boomer Generation”, who managed some impressive cynicism. Or hell, most disenfranchised youth movements for the last 50 years (origin of metal, punk, rap, etc… anyone?).

But okay, let’s buy this shit sandwich. Young people are cynically refusing to buy your bullshit like they’re supposed to. What’s the skinny?

Only 19 percent think most people can be trusted. According to a big study from the Pew Research Center, they are less attached to marriage, religion, and political institutions than Gen Xers,

Gosh, I am definitely sure this has nothing to do with conservatives trying to sell bigotry as the same thing as those words, thus leading people who rejected the bigotry to reject the institutions those words represented as well.

I mean, there’s only so many polemics on how marriage means stifling gender roles, religion means anti-gay and anti-women bigotry, capitalism as the brutal exploitation of the poor, and so on, before you just go “to hell with all of it” rather than trying to twist yourself into knots on behalf of a word that has never meant anything else in the public debate.

But hey, that doesn’t count because being conservative means never having to accept consequences for your successes. So what else have you got for me?

Baby Boomers, and the other demographic flavors journalists love to use.

Wait.

Hold up one second. Are you actually trying to argue that generations are a liberal media conspiracy? That’s just… wow.

I was expecting many forms of stupidity in this rant about millennials, but I’ll admit I wasn’t actually expecting you to start trying to argue against the existence of generations themselves in order to try and sell your argument that all “proper” white people should sign up with the bigot brigade or be considered race traitors.

They like their friends, their digital “social networks,” and their toys, and that’s about it.

…Heh.

It’s just cute when older conservatives try and express just why they hate those damn youngsters.

I mean, just look at that first one. Ooh, how dare millennials have friends instead of a pool of like-minded individuals that are used as tools to exploit. Grr, real human interactions with people they love is the worst!

And the last one seems to be the bizarre temporal jealousy that often crops its head during rants against poor people. Ooh, how dare you have access to a technology that was considered luxury or non-existent when I was young, but has now become ubiquitous and which I have a much fancier version than you have access to. Clearly you are living in luxury and I am somehow hard done by you. I mean, you have so called “computers” when in my day you couldn’t fit a computer in a house. LUCKY BITCH!

And the middle one… I mean, how else are we supposed to interpret that other than a bitter whine about how these kids today understand the bleeping and blooping of this confounded internet, which would be sad even if it wasn’t stated on a long running website of which Jonah Goldberg is considered the “head”.

Talk about disproving meritocracy in four words.

Not even a majority will call themselves “patriotic.”

Gosh, I suspect none of that has to do with tying “patriotic” with a host of horrifying civil rights abuses against people foreign and domestic during a lot of our formative years. Nor how it was used by conservatives to mean supporting endless wars, endless wars where friends of ours went off to die and become traumatized for nothing more than our vice president’s enrichment and our president’s daddy issues and worries about not being “manly” enough.

Oh wait, I’m sorry, I broke wingnut rules nos. 1 and 2: Never talk about the Bush Administration.

Probably more dismaying for liberals: Of any living generation, they are the least likely to call themselves environmentalists.

I’m sure pretending that all young people are just like the libertarians that make up the totality of your “Young Republican Brigades” is the only thing that helps you sleep at night after grappling with the night terror over shackling your life to a literally dying pyramid scam, but…

Sadly, No!

Now, I should say that I often find generational stereotyping pretty annoying.

Oh do you now? Well, that’s pretty surprising seeing as how you-

Oh what’s that, you’re actually just bummed because you were born a Gen Xer instead of the time-traveling Silent Generationer you always wanted to be? Well, that makes a lot more sense.

For instance, there was no “greatest generation.” Sure, there were a bunch of great Americans who stormed the beaches of Normandy. But is some guy who was in jail in 1943 for petty larceny deserving of special respect because he was born around the same time as a guy who won the Medal of Honor during WWII?

Well, yeah. No one fits the generationial stereotypes perfectly. That’s sort of the thing about stereotypes. Reducing the complexity of human experience into an expected series of behaviors resists the reality of our wonderful diversity and just leads to bigoted understands of complex people.

But of course, seeing as how you are Jonah “Liberal Fascism” Goldberg, I doubt this is setting up a polemic against stereotypes as it is trying desperately to summon conservatives out of the murky depths of the millennials so as to keep the scam running a little longer.

Honor, glory, and respect are earned individually, not collectively.

Oh and also wanting to lower the regard fellow conservatives automatically give to older spokesmen and those who’ve been to war in order to try and boost your name in that circle before the money runs out.

Because lacking those “friends” that have so cruelly been hoarded by those bastard kids, trying to angle oneself up the hierarchy is the only entertainment one can find.

Also, heh, at the notion that honor, glory, and respect could ever be genuinely earned by the likes of Nepotism Poster Child Jonah.

Politicians pander to young people,

Since when?

I mean, maybe I have been in a Phillip K. Dick-esque altered state for the last 20+ years of my life, but I seem to have completely missed the part where elected officials have given a single fuck about the way the system affects the young instead of endlessly debating whether or not the insane fears of senile goat-fuckers will be coddled enough while we die and suffer in silence.

I mean, maybe I just dreamed the way that youth-based protests of the 2000s and late 90s were dismissed as “sad copycats of clearly superior Boomer protests” or the way that youth-based movements were deliberately ignored by the media, or the way that things like the impact of the Depression on youth or spiraling student loans were focused on, instead of assuming that if the stock market and its effect on 401Ks was fixed, we were all good.

Maybe I was in a drug-fueled psycho-coma when I saw my generation dismissed from the conversation about torture, declining civil rights, queer rights, feminism, and so on based on perceptions of our age while we had “serious” conversations about whether there were secret muslims in the government, “death panels”, or whether or not the middle class tax cut for being a parent or a homeowner would be enough.

Oh wait, this is a conservative land. They lost a public debate or two, so clearly the filthy youngsters and the queers must have stolen all of their rights and left them penniless and alone on the steppes of Outer Syberia.

and lots of young people fall for it. And that speaks well of neither. Politicians pander to “youth” because it’s a time-saving way to trawl for votes and volunteer door-knockers wholesale. It’s the difference between using a gill net and a fishing pole. “You’re great because you were born more recently than other people” is the lamest form of flattery I can think of.

More (ableist term for sucky) than saying that people are great because they were born a long time ago or because they happened to be born male or white or heterosexual or cissexual or to rich parents who can connect you to powerful high-paying positions while possessing zero motivation or ability to succeed at anything.

I mean, if we’re just measuring direct negative impact on the world and society, then what you imagine is happening to young people would be levels upon levels upon levels behind the raw damage that comes from centering our entire society on coddling the children of privilege and swaddling them in fictions about how they’ve “earned” their positions of extreme wealth by having the “talent” to have a large number of rich relatives and friends willing to cover your ass and support you every time you fuck up.

When politicians invoke generational stereotypes, what they are really doing is saying, “Act your age.”

Of course, they are… Yeah, by invoking generational stereotypes and shitting on the young, they are just telling their citizens to act their proper ages and be proper citizens…

Of course, that might be slightly true in the form of societal pressure to conform to self-destructive and embittering behaviors for the sake of fulfilling “social conventions” that will lead to an unsatisfying life wasted on the altar of consumptive capitalism.

All the calls for “generational stereotypes” in the form of yelling at our white young for failing to live up to the expectations of self-destruction in a way that ignores that they simply can’t access the orgy of houses, cars, random household gadgets, and keeping up with the Joneses that previous generations could, are all about trying to keep a vicious circle of distraction going long after the well has run dry and the squirming masses no longer have the funds to do so.

It burns you that you can no longer socially pressure others to buy bigger and bigger houses, supporting spiraling bubbles you could use to pretend that the economy was actually doing well. That the old scams have been rendered useless by your own successes and that the young seem to be straight up rejecting the suburban fantasy and its paranoid sprint to the grave in favor of just trying to survive in the towering urban cities, surrounded by multiculturalism and what meager entertainment they can afford.

That, in fact, conspicuous consumption, buying things for the sake of showing one is richer than others has become a cruelty in most circles owing to the way that poverty has become commonplace for our generation.

That the capitalism scam may have run its course and there is only a scant few decades before the voices who recall the Cold War with horror are no longer loud enough to drown out the many who want something humane and survivable.

What’s pathetic is when young people unwittingly follow that advice.

Wait, did you invent that bizarre “telling young people they suck is just saying ‘act your age'” story just to set up this tired joke about how young people be all young and ignorant?

…

Sigh, well played, you vegan*.

For example, Barack Obama won the youth vote by huge margins in 2008 (66 percent among under-30s) and 2012 (60 percent). He did this in no small part by pandering to the vanity of young people. Sure, he addressed “youth issues” like student loans. Yes, he also mirrored their views on some social issues (though not gay marriage in ’08).

Heh. You know, I kinda love reading these Jonah droppings, because no one, bar no one, is as good as he is at accidental self-refutation mid-whine.

I mean, here he is trying to dismiss the pettiness and shallowness of the entitled and stupid youth.

So what does he choose to use as an example?

Supporting “political candidates” who “share their viewpoints” and “care about whether they live or die” as if overabusing the scare-quotes will make basic self-interest and not voting against one’s principles were cruel betrayals of the fundamental order because of the Constitutional rights of conservatives to get all the money and votes of everyone because they say so, so there.

But hey, acting like you are entitled to the money and support of those you hate and have trained to hate you has been the primary strategy of conservatives for years now, so why stop now just because it’s making you increasingly irrelevant and quaint?

Obama’s ambivalence toward seemingly clichéd patriotic gestures (remember the endless controversy about whether he would wear a flag pin?) sent an important signal to young voters raised on the snark of The Daily Show and weary of talk of “freedom fries.”

Ha! Him ignoring our obvious and desperate smear tactic based on bizarre rules suddenly invented because he was black and a Democrat was only because he was sending secret mind-control signals to the youth vote that he really was the secret commie muslin we thought he was.

… sigh. Apparently by “acting one’s age” he means, acting like a 4-year-old trying to win an argument.

But the overall gestalt was more about fostering a sense of inclusion in a “movement” of some kind; “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for” and all of that nonsense.

You know, if you read pretty much any of these screeds about the evils of the millennials, most of it is devoted to our supposed shallowness. A disconnected, mobile-device-addicted squadron of disaffected hipsters shrugging through life with no concern about the world around us.

And every time to illustrate this, they inevitably circle back to some demonstration of caring about the greater world, about seeking to be part of a movement, of giving back, of trying to do something to improve things as if this somehow was the same thing.

And the reason is simple. The type of aggressive asshole who needs to beat up on kids without social power in order to feel like a big man who hasn’t wasted one’s life chasing a toxic fantasy of “how they were supposed to be” have been soaked in a constant roux of “anti-hippie” propaganda about how evil it is to do anything to improve our society in any way or belong to any organization except one’s church.

And as such, the notion that people could care and fight even though they are under attack (for reals), is so alien it might as well be from the Sirius star system.

They refuse to believe that it isn’t about cynicism and exploitation because that’s the world they inhabit and cannot escape from.

Which makes this whole “ooh, isn’t it terrible about how cynical young people are about our cynical sales tactics” an abominable form of victim-blaming IT’S ALWAYS PROJECTION designed to ease the consciences of those who view the likes of Jonah to be too young to be trusted.

Which is another one of those “Be thankful you aren’t winning the culture war you are fighting for” things.

Obama promised that government could be the vehicle that would carry us to the sunny uplands of history.

Ha! Silly Obama being an optimist who is aware of the last 100 years of history. Having hope is for losers. Burp, fart, aren’t Millennials so damn cynical?!?

He took the aesthetic of a Pepsi marketing rollout and pasted it onto a presidential campaign.

But, as Mario Cuomo once said, politicians campaign in poetry but govern in prose. And the prose of the Obama years has been an incoherent and disillusioning run-on sentence. His signature achievement, Obamacare, was designed from the outset to screw young people, overcharging them for products they don’t need in order to subsidize older Americans.

And here we get the real reason why Jonah is jumping mad about the “cynicism” and disbelief of filthy millennials.

The bitterness he has that he designed this totally cool bullshit reason why young people should abandon Obama and join his cool new conservative revivalism and no one is fucking buying it. I mean, he put in all this effort into writing like… almost a dozen stories selling the same fiction and trying to will it to be true and then young people betrayed him by not being fucking idiots willing to fuck themselves over to benefit the fantasies of right-wing idiots.

And that’s unfair. Because he actually tried at something, for once, and the world didn’t fawn itself over him and twist into the shape he wanted like his years of privilege have trained him was supposed to happen.

And that’s just… WAH! ALL THE WAH!

Young people loved it when Obama called George W. Bush’s deficits “unpatriotic” because they saddled Millennials with debt. That was $7 trillion borrowed dollars ago.

Uh huh. Yeah, that was what they were talking about and not noting the outright theft of the nation, illegal expansions of state power into torture while hiding behind the flag, accusing all dissent of being “treason” and acting accordingly, and pointing out that all the “deficit” bullshit that wingnuts pull out everytime a Democratic candidate is elected is just an obvious smokescreen they don’t really care about.

Nope, that makes you sound bad, so instead make it like young liberals were calling deficits unpatriotic before their “chosen candidate” did it because it still counts as hypocrisy if you have to tie yourself in a pretzel and ignore everything that was actually said.

You know, just in case you needed any more proof that this shit log was from the writer of “Liberal Fascism”.

“Idealistic” Democrats have spent the Obama years circling the wagons around parasitic teachers’ unions at the expense of poor minority kids (rich people have school choice already).

Man, I wonder why wingnuts are having so much difficulty making inroads with everyone and are so unpopular when they are so good at making friends with various constituencies and not actively demonizing any group that vaguely gets in their chosen fascists’ ways.

It’s a mystery!

The shovel-ready jobs were a fraudulent talking point used to justify pouring money into constituencies that already have jobs.

Which had nothing to do with Republicans deliberately resisting any attempt to create any make-work program in a cynical attempt to win the 2012 election and MOMMY, THEY ARE TRYING TO MAKE ME ACCEPT RESPONSIBILITY FOR MY ACTIONS, MOMMY!

Obama is hell-bent on raising the minimum wage, which will help people with jobs — particularly well-paying union jobs that tie compensation to multiples of the minimum wage. But it won’t help young people get their first jobs, which are harder to find these days than legal weed.

Dig at “young people smoking weed” as if the last 50 years haven’t proven that nearly everyone in this country has smoked weed at one point or another? Check. Rant about something that directly affects a disproportionate number of young people because it’s tied with the specter of poverty? Check. Random dig at unions as if the death of unions wasn’t largely responsible for the way workers are routinely mistreated these days? Check.

Ignoring the entire “we need to free job creators to create more jobs” tactic whenever you have to acknowledge the reality of joblessness and record profits? Check. Blaming young people for it and trying to act like increasing the minimum wage wouldn’t serve to let young people quit some of their jobs thus freeing them for others if jobs worked the way right-wingers want to pretend they do? Check check check.

Also, wanted to note here that pretty much nobody I know works a job, anymore. They either work no jobs because they have been rendered unemployed and are scrambling for whatever work they can piece together before they go homeless. Or they work several jobs because one job doesn’t even begin to pay the bills. I’m working something upwards of 10 jobs at the moment. And I barely pay the bills.

This is not uncommon in the economy Reaganism built.

Senate Democrats just held an utterly bogus pseudo-filibuster on global warming against a legislative body they control. They proposed no legislation, preferring instead to put on a kabuki show for rich donors justifiably wondering what Obama’s “Year of Action” actually means.

It’s true, Millennials remain more liberal and look more favorably toward big government than other age groups. But people grow up. They may well learn that their cynicism towards marriage and God — time-honored sources of happiness — was misplaced as the single life gets old and they find the one or the One they were waiting for.

Okay, sure, you are more liberal and are less willing to die yourself into knots to fit our bullshit system, but you’ll become secretly conservative as you get older. You’ll see! We don’t need to change anything, you’ll come to us if we’re patient enough.

WHY AREN’T YOU JOINING US, YOU RACE TRAITORS!

Talk about misinterpreting the march of social history. Yes, it’s likely that those who were once considered liberal for almost supporting gay rights and kinda sorta understanding that women work for a living will be considered backwards in future days when trans* rights and poly visibility and anti-ace-discrimination laws are the talk of the land.

But that doesn’t mean the clock will wind backwards and suddenly make segregation, anti-gay-marriage, and religious dominism the hot shit again.

You will have to evolve or die to the motion of history. Same as everyone else.

Similarly, the hot embers of their ardor for big government may cool as they realize the poetry rarely gets translated into prose. And for that, Barack Obama will deserve a fair share of the credit. For nothing breeds disillusionment and cynicism more than the failure to deliver.

Which would be the crowning centerpiece of all of this, wouldn’t it?

The fact that conservative’s first, last, and only mode of response to the floodgates being opened wide and the first timid steps towards progress has been to snap up the hand-brake and slam on the brakes, trying to make sure nothing ever happens so everyone is so disillusioned that only deliberately delusional old farts with nothing better to do than to vote their fear that aliens are working with muslims to steal their teeth.

That this cynical tactic of deliberate wrecking of society if they are no longer allowed to dominate it and if those deemed lesser try and have their voice heard is the central thing of all of this.

All of the demonizing teachers, cynically cashing in on white male resentment of non-white, non-men gaining rights, ranting about the evils of young people are all part of a tactic to be elected for the sake of winning as if this thing that was so important to ourselves as a nation and our planet was just a sports competition winding down to its last minutes.

And now while we narrow the gap and try to repair the massive damage you have caused in your myopic quest to “win”, you want to whine about the fact that you are out of nasty tricks and ways to steal the game.

And I’m sorry, but no. Evolve or die, assholes. Either accept the meritocracy you so claim to fight for and its judgement of your skills or accept that there are some things you can’t fight for and bite the bullet and actually become something positive.

Either way, I’m sure the shock will kill you.

And the saddest thing of all is that no one will bother to notice.

---

‘Shorter’ concept created by Daniel Davies and perfected by Elton Beard. Number one of things loved by millennials? Having an overpaid nepotism-benefiting incompetent sneering at you because him and his ilk have trashed the global economy and refuse to step out of the way of those trying to fix it. We are aware of all Internet traditions.™

---

*Glancing at a series of vegan cookbooks one day, I discovered that no one, bar none, loves terrible jokes and especially terrible puns more than vegans. In fact, punning may be the truest form of veganism, even above eschewing meat and dairy.