It’s all of a piece, when you think about it. The Me Generation, that sobriquet of opprobrium for the Baby Boomers, is especially appropriate when looking at Team GOP’s plans for Medicare – if you’re over 55, you have nothing to worry about, you will get the same quality government-run free health care as ever. If you’re under 55? Root hog or die.
When you think about it, that’s the Randian ethos at its finest: I got mine, fuck you. It’s become elevated to a cultural imperative – think of the solipsistic drivers that make driving in California so noxious, especially since they always seem to be one-to-a-vehicle. Think of the reality-TV ethic, which is how we wind up with everything from Kardashians to Jersey Shore to Honey Boo Boo – it doesn’t matter why I’m famous so long as you spell my name right, and often. Look at me, look at me, look at me.
Hell, just look at the whiny-ass titty-babies who fancy themselves captains of industry, masters of the universe – they got filthy rich off the Bush Decade, they got made whole by bailouts, they got the stock market roaring all the way back, and yet because Obama hurt their precious fee-fees and suggested they might need to pay the same tax they did during those brutally business-oppresive 1990s, he is beyond the pale and must be vanquished. I got mine, fuck you.
Maybe that’s how I got to be how I am. I didn’t have Boomer parents, so I didn’t get the Millennial you-are-a-very-special-snowflake routine (which I can only assume stems from projecting yourself on your kids) – I was legit gifted and all I ever got was browbeaten with enough humility for any three Buddhist monks. Think of others. Think of the greater good. Non nobis solum. Team spirit. Born to be second-in-command, vice president, senior noncom, the wingman. I wonder sometimes if the egomania I affected back in the late 80s – or in 2003-04 – might have been better off as real arrogance, real self-confidence, as something other than a front. Actually, by the end of 2003 it probably wasn’t a front – I was genuinely supremely confident in my abilities, at least at the office. Honestly I wouldn’t mind getting back there at some point, and I’d even try not to be an ass about it.
Ultimately, that’s the question: because if you think of others, and nobody else does, you’ll get plowed under. Prisoner’s dilemma. If everyone else is a dick and you aren’t, you get crushed; if nobody else is a dick and you are, you get your way (at the expense of being liked, I suppose), if nobody is a dick then we’re living in fantasyland, if everybody’s a dick then there is no society. So if society as a whole is radically oriented toward the mad dickish – where the hell do we go from there?
Actually, never mind. Hell kind of covers it. Sartre was right.