probabilityfields

She called me Tuck, which is what her mother used to call her father. All male Browners were called Tuck. When the line began to pale, producing a series of aesthetes and incompetents, they gave the name to any man who married into the family, within reason. I was the fisrt of these and kept expecting to hear a note of overrefined irony in their voices when they called me by that name. I thought that when tradition becomes too flexible, irony enters the voice. Nasality, sarcasm, self-caricature and so on. They would punish me by mocking themselves. But they were sweet about it, entirely sincere, even grateful to me for allowing them to carry on.
–from Don DeLillio’s White Noise.

I think this paragraph is nice little allegory for American culture these days. Tradition is seen as a needless trifle and so we look back on it and assert our position outside and above it with irony. See the Darkness, the Eagles of Death Metal, The Dukes of Hazzard and Starsky and Hutch movies. See I Love the 70s/80s/90s. See the swarms on Sixth Street brandishing new clothes that look to have been salvaged from the sets of cheesy teenage love comedies from 1985.

Why have we become so amused by mocking ourselves? Did our cultural tradition fail to deliver some time in the 90s? Why didn’t we just reject it and create the 00s? Didn’t the punks arise out of the barren dusty fields of the abandoned hippie communes? Wasn’t grunge a simultaneous rejection of 80s consumerism and half-baked anarchist schemes? a fear of AIDS? Has it culminated in a rejection of rejection, a resignation of cultural tradition? AIDS doesn’t matter anymore, we can afford the pills. Sincerity is dead. The factory has closed, leaving a marketing team to rearrange the artifacts of what was disowned so it could be possessed new. It is not pastiche, the clever critical dissonance that encourages action. It’s masturbation, for contemplation only.