Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, April 29, 1994 TAG: 9404290106
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-15 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: By AMY E. SCHWARTZ
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
This cramped angle of vision affords one advantage: from it you can see the fallacy of a link that's been widely if implicitly assumed in commentary on Nixon and Watergate. To wit: Nixon and the Watergate crimes helped destroy Americans' confidence in their leaders; this caused American trust in authority and institutions to plummet; thus, everyone is investigated now, everyone is tainted, the young have no heroes and this is the reason for the anguish and anomie of Generation X. Cobain's suicide is being taken as a kind of confirmation of the actual existence of this spreading nihilism and despair of the 20ish.
The idea that a despairing sense of the world has anything to do with '60s upheaval and '70s governmental crisis is dangerous. First, it makes a classic cultural memory mistake: assuming there's any direct resemblance between experiencing Watergate-style upheavals as a thinking adult and witnessing them as a blank-slate child. Second, it sets up barriers to discussion of the bigger, more current, maybe more combatable forces that press on the young.
Hanging present-day anomie and moral vacuum on Richard Nixon is part of hanging them on the '60s, which is more fun and politically explosive, to be sure, than hanging them on large, boring forces like the collapse of education.
For adults who had lived under presidents they revered, I can see how the fall of a president could be frightening and unnerving. But think of it from ``our'' side. When Watergate hit the papers, I was 11; it was the first public crisis of magnitude I was old enough to follow even distantly. And the unfolding drama of pursuit and resignation was, from this standpoint, amazing and thrilling; I was, in an 11-year-old way, proud.
The rage of Cobain-age kids at the system and leaders - and, more, the helplessness - reminds me of a different lobe of feeling from those years, one that came not from the events occurring in politics but from the experience of not following politics at all. In the years between Watergate and my 20th birthday I almost never picked up a paper, and, though I'm embarrassed by it now, I can still shiver with the feeling of chaos and unreason national politics gives you from that dark distance.
The ``X-er'' loss, then, isn't of faith in the system but of information about it; information, that is, with enough depth to provide a conceivable target for efforts of any sort. It's a truism that reading gives such depth and TV news mostly cannot. It's hard to argue that the MTV take on the news can offer any sense of the system, let alone when it's coupled with ever-shorter hours spent reading and ever-shorter classroom hours spent talking about the nation's civics or recent history.
Something similar is true of the second great cultural engine of disillusion, closer to the surface than national politics and in its way even more relentless - TV commercials. These gradually drum in the conviction that any narrative you see, any story you hear, from Ring Around the Collar to a homely tale of sparkling glassware, is being staged for you by someone who wants your cash.
People my age and younger are famous for our attachment to ``The Brady Bunch,'' not merely because it's cheesy and we are a cynical crowd, but because, when it comes right down to it, that's what we got while information and culture of a better kind were slowly fading from our education, whether about politics or literature. The rage and sadness and disengagement of Cobain and the rest may be in that sense mainly an education problem.
Amy E. Schwartz is a member of the Washington Post editorial page staff.
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