24
Popular Culture Review
The name of today’s game, in other words, isn’t so much being there
(individually) as it is being there for each other (collectively).
II
Not long ago one of my non-traditional (re-entry) university students
shared a disturbing personal anecdote with me. Her ten-year-old daughter had
come home from school in tears one afternoon. When asked what the problem
was, she said, “Mom, you and Dad have to get a divorce.” Pressed to explain, the
girl revealed that she was being mercilessly taunted in school because she
happened to be the only student (boy or girl) in her class with two parents living
at home. This so aroused the scorn (and, of course, the envy) of her classmates
that the only solution, she felt, was for her parents to go the way of the parents of
her peers. Damaged by divorce as all children are, these kids were clearly doing
the very human thing of attempting to pass the hurt on to someone else—in this
case, to my student’s distraught daughter.
Admittedly, this is an extreme case. More commonly, as social
psychologists routinely point out, what happens is that children of divorce learn to
cope on coming of age by avoiding deep commitments—sometimes by not
marrying at all. Indeed, over the years, but particularly during the past ten years
or so, I’ve had a number of female students tell me that they wanted to have
children “as long as I don’t have to get married.”
In recent decades, signs and portents of a postmodern youthful ethos of
chill may be found in the etymological “de-evolution” of the meaning(s) of words
expressing states of extreme emotion. In today’s vulgate, for instance, passion
connotes raw, one-dimensional sex, not the multi-dimensional states of feeling of
yesteryear. According to Peter N. Steams, even during my parents’ generation:11
Dictionary definitions of ‘emotion’ . . . [were becoming]
increasingly bland. Noah Webster had spiced his definition
with terms like ‘vivid’ and ‘passionate,’ but by the 1950s his
heirs were equating emotions with the blander word ‘feelings’
and were noting that varying strengths of feeling might be
involved in emotion.12
Platonic friendships among postmodern kids of the same and opposite sex are far
more plentiful than they were in the Baby Boomer era, when the antediluvian
ethos of “falling in love,” with all its romantic agonies and ecstasies, was still the
ultimate. To achieve this goal, and according to the psychology of passion a la
the medieval Romance o f Tristan and Iseult and its literary progeny, what
Boomers “needed” was the presence of parents to throw roadblocks in front of
their romances and therefore give them deeper and more delicious meanings. But