Chickens, Light Bulbs, Grandpa, etc.
[Frederica Mathewes-Greene  02/22 06:11 PM]

Boy, I'm really disappointed that question about vaccinating chickens wasn't a joke. It seemed so promising.

And no light bulb joke has actually made me laugh out loud yet. I'm still waiting. Queen Victoria over here.

OK, Rod, I'll see your "shared sense of ironic distance from consumerist mass culture" and I'll raise you: CCs are conservative (that is, honor tradition) when it comes to sexual mores. There's a negative side to that (anti- promiscuity, divorce, abortion) and a positive side (pro- investing lots of resources and energy in family and hearth). Further, it's probably rooted in faith, since merely asserting conservative sexual values has little sticking power alone.

I'm thinking about how, in this conversation, "family" means "my spouse and kids;" it doesn't mean "my parents and grandparents." The older generation is a little tougher to get your arms around; lots more strain and stress, some due to these very identity and values issues.

How many of us, I wonder, are free-floating particles looking for a way to get grounded? In the hippie days, escaping from the homelife orbit was exhilarating. Now, maybe, things have gone too far; there's too much anonymity, too much facelessness. It's scary to be so free and context-less. Maybe the resistance to mass culture, and the yearning for home, have a shared root. Life is like looking through the tiny window of a space capsule. We're trying to rediscover the forces that held people together, that gave them meaning and identity, and held them to a particular place. We crave the local, specific, and the very trendy "authentic." Everybody craves authenticity, and anything that convincingly delivers it quickly gets a bar code.