‘I Have an Opinion and a Participation Trophy!’: Millennials as the Canker on the Modern Body Politic

On November 13^th, 2016, at 4:38 PM, 52-year-old Jackie Kennedy Boomer was driving her 24-year-old license-bereft son Aladdin through the heart of downtown Portland, OR. Near their journey’s end, the following conversation took place:

Jackie: “Okay, Munchkin, do you have your phone?”

Aladdin (who often calls his mother ‘Dank Mom’ on account of that term’s considerable shock value): “Uh, YEAHHHHHH! Please spare me the retarded questions!”

Jackie: “Good! I do worry so about you. Do you need some spending money?”

Aladdin (who is on edge on account of his participation in an epic Twitter flamewar against a 1488er that lasted until 6:30 this morning): “Well, I can’t very well buy any fatties with my toe fungus, that is totally a certainty!!”

Fifty dollars poorer, Jackie proceeded to hand Aladdin the lunch she prepared for him.

Jackie: “All right, sweetie. Here you are. What time should I come pick you up?”

Aladdin: “Gawww! I don’t f***in’ KNOW! Like, one, I guess! Whateves! K, BYE!!!”

Jackie: “Have a good time!”

Aladdin proceeded to storm out of the Prius’s passenger side to join his black-skinned and purple-haired friends in one of the city’s exceptionally relevant and totally organic Never-Trump rallies, where he fought the power by throwing a few brickbats through bookstore windows. It’s good for a chronically unemployed young man to be able to get out once in a while.

 

Millennials. To hear the demographers tell it, they started invading our midst around 1982 and mercifully stopped doing so around the turn of the millennium. So they’ve been among us for a while, and you’d think we’d be used to them by now. With the majority of them having been born in the 90s, though, and with the money-hemorrhaging universities catering to their every whim to secure more of that filthy student loan lucre, they have begun to bare their teeth and subject the rest of us to their halitosis. Hard to believe only three years have elapsed between the introduction of the relatively benign Pajama Boy and the considerably more malignant anti-Trump tantrum riots of this fall.

What’s fueling this spastic, uncoordinated, pretty-fly-for-a-white-guy rage? After all, there have been plenty of other elections that have left the opposing side thoroughly unhappy (including a rather notorious one eight years ago), and things remained relatively tranquil. What we are witnessing today used to be a protest reserved only for blatantly stolen elections. It also cannot be entirely explained by the fact that many of these tykes are being paid far better wages for their presence on the streets than they could earn at any other job, given the brume of torpor that consistently envelops them even on their ‘good’ days.

Of course, the primary blame must be laid on millennials’ parents and their abject failure to ‘train up a child in the way he should go’. Baby boomers and Gen-Xers weren’t content merely to spare the rod: they positively excoriated it. Encouraging free reign, free thought, free expression, and free room and board in their children, those children naturally grew up freely hating their parents for their cringing servility on the one hand and their selfishness in refusing to live forever to shield them from life’s tempests on the other. In his essay ‘A Word to Parents’, Arthur W. Pink, lamenting the sad state of affairs of British ‘Christian’ parenting in the first half of the twentieth century, could have been speaking of today’s familial structure:

In the vast majority of cases the children are not to be blamed nearly so much as the parents. Failure to honor father and mother, wherever it is found, is in large measure due to parental departure from the Scriptural pattern. Nowadays the father considers that he has fulfilled his obligations by providing food and raiment for his children, and by acting occasionally as a species of moral policeman. Too often the mother is content to be a domestic drudge, making herself the slave of her children instead of training them to be useful, performing many a task which her daughters should do, in order to allow them freedom for the frivolous. The consequence has been that the home, which ought to be – for its orderliness, its sanctity, and its reigns of love – a miniature heaven and earth, has degenerated into “a filling station for the day and a parking place for the night” as someone has tersely expressed it.

This, of course, assumes the best-case scenario – that ineffectual dad and ineffectual mom are at least still together. Such is almost the exception rather than the rule for Generation Me. And since most of these children grew up in the custody of their mothers, it’s perhaps unsurprising that on the few occasions Father was able to see them he desperately emphasized their ‘having fun together’ over any sort of moral education. Left in Mother’s hands, such education often consisted of nothing more substantive than to be ‘nice’…which has resulted in disastrous consequences.

In the same piece, Pink provides another telling warning to which latter 20^th-century generations paid little heed:

Before outlining the duties of parents toward their children, let it be pointed out that they cannot properly discipline their children unless they have first learned to govern themselves. How can they expect to subdue self-will in their little ones and check the rise of an angry temper if their own passions are allowed free reign?

‘Free reign’ has been the driving force in western civilization since the end of WWII. And since people have resided in a cloistered manufactured virtual reality world since that time, the dominant passion has proven to be popular culture. This passion has proven so dominant that it has amalgamated itself into the worldview of virtually all parents, with each preceding generation becoming more and more susceptible to its charms. For those who came of age in the 90s, this translates to a presuppositional foundation of existentialist Judeo-ennui more interested in trivialities than in purpose a la Seinfeld, liberally laced with an overcoat of facile romanticism culled from the movies of the Disney Renaissance and topped with a dollop of toilet humor as a representation of cultural achievement, courtesy of American Pie, Family Guy and the like. Often, too, there is the mindless social justice which substitutes for Christian conscience. This hearkens back to experiences of publik skool field trips to see Glory, Schindler’s List, and Philadelphia at the cineplex.

So it’s only to be expected that their progeny have all grown up to be little better than ugly-tempered baby opossums. We should not be surprised that they are regularly scanning their smartphones for pornography by age five and are not yet potty trained by age ten. Their parents might have found inspiration in that Pelagian line from Field of Dreams: ‘if you build it, they will come.’ Being even more morally inert and even more narcissistic, Millennials have adapted this phrase to their own needs: ‘if you will it, they will come’. Not wishing to shatter the tender paradigm of their little princesses of both genders (or of neither gender, if that be the individual xe-child’s ‘will’), their parents have encouraged them to hold onto this erroneous mirage for as long as possible, and society has been more than happy to pick up the slack when these parents’ influence on their children begins to wane. In his seminal 1964 counter-revolutionary treatise None Dare Call It Treason, author John Stormer proffers a memorable example of entitlement indoctrination:

Recall the story, if you are old enough, in the first grade readers about the hardworking little squirrel who gathered and stored nuts for the winter. The story had a moral: work hard and save wisely for uncertain days ahead.

For today’s six-year old, that story has been rewritten. The new version is entitled ‘Ask For It’. In it, a little squirrel named Bobby ate nuts from a tree during the summer. Other squirrels suggested that Bobby put some nuts away for winter. As Bobby Squirrel didn’t like to work, he ignored the advice.

Winter came and one morning Bobby awakened to find the world covered with snow – and all the nuts were gone from the tree. He got awfully hungry but remembered that a boy who lived in a white house had taken some of the nuts from his tree during the summer. Bobby went to the white house and gave a squirrel call. A door opened and a ‘fine brown nut’ rolled out. Bobby Squirrel learned his lesson. The story concludes:

‘Well!’ thought Bobby. ‘I know how to get my dinner. All I have to do is ask for it!’ (p. 110)

Imagine that story repeated over and over again throughout the course of a child’s life, with scarcely any variation in the level of sophistication until said child reaches thirty or so, and you have a classical education, Millennial-style. Unsurprisingly, it is also the classic paternalistic indoctrination of a perpetual bondservant. What despotism would not wish to use such inculcation to full advantage? What army of resistance can a passel of very, very, very special and unique libertines ever hope to muster against jack-booted federal thugs? It is extremely telling that, in his last round of parceling out Presidential Medal of Freedom trinkets, Obama chose to honor preponderantly actors, athletes, belle of the lesbian ball Ellen DeGeneres, and Lorne Michaels, the Judaic creator of Saturday Night Live, that repository of Establishment-sanctioned edge. Gone are the days when diplomats affiliated with the Council on Foreign Relations, globalist authors, and classical musicians with Stalinist sympathies serving as the vanguard of the New World Order. Today, he who runs the Circus Maximus runs the world, baby!

Thus we are burdened with the unhappy result – a three- or four-times-removed post-Christian generation who perceives the entirety of God’s creation as a raunchy kindergarten that they alone should be privileged to operate. Older generations would have been too ashamed to admit they were part of a centre of ‘higher’ learning that offered its students safe spaces crammed with Play-Doh, coloring books, and comfort foods. Not this one, though. Older generations took pride in their thick skin and couldn’t even comprehend enshrining political correctness as a constitutional amendment. Not this one, though. Older generations looked upon Christian covenant marriage as something more than a mere whim to be disposed of when it ‘broke’, like an obsolescent phone or a non-adorable puppy. Not this one, though. Is it any wonder that so many Millennials are obsessed with rape culture? Never wanting to reach the age of accountability themselves, they look upon adulthood itself as the most odious form of rape.

I would be remiss if I also did not point out that this is not the exclusive problem of the Millennial left. The smaller yet still influential Millennial right also shows a propensity towards internet insularity and denigration of both Christianity and volkish tradition. This is, after all, the Millennial subset that passively allows the campy sodomite Milo Yiannopoulos to be their spokesman, despite the fact that his core principles contain little more than worship of the flipped bird.¹ This is the subset that prefers ‘kek’ to Dabney, dank memes to the Book of Kells and Pilgrim’s Progress, and membership in 4chan and 8chan (I don’t know the difference and have little interest in correcting that ignorance) to congregations and families. This is the subset that whoops, ‘You go girl!’ when reading of an abrasive and foul-mouthed woman who confronts an MSNBC reporter and, rather than upbraid her for her feminist tactics and demeanor, creates an anime image in her honor instead. The wish-fulfillment fantasies of certain of those who would bestow the title ‘God Emperor’ upon Donald Trump are every bit as delusional as those who howled pitiable peals of anguish over the electoral fate of the Teflon mobster Hillary Clinton.

All is not hopeless, though. God’s election certainly is not uni-generational. I personally know more than a few outstanding Christian Millennials who find their own cohorts even more repellent than I do. To those good folks, I entreat: please, whenever the opportunity presents itself, belittle and shame the perverted Peter Pans within your midst and, should they remain reprobate, kick the dust off your heels and consign them to the fetid safe space they have claimed as their own. We oldsters will thank you profusely for doing so.

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