Opinion article I just wrote for the school paper
A Case Against Teen Angst
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Enough is enough! We're fulfilling the stereotypes. We're creating them. We traverse the halls dejectedly, hair in our eyes, hands in our pockets, bemoaning the trials of Teenage Life in This Hard, Hard World. We find solace in the timeless wisdom of one Holden Caulfield, that modern-day hero who dares to pan the very "David Copperfield kind of crap" that we have a test on next week.
But oh, how can you read The Catcher in the Rye with a straight face and champion everything but its irony? Holden feels misunderstood, but we all understood his character after five whining pages. He decries the "phonies" of the world but contradicts himself every other sentence. Let's please not be another generation of teenage cynics, of Holden-wannabes for who-knows-why. Take action! Be brave! Stop fighting the system (don't you realize that you are the system?) and start battling teen angst!
The plethora of exclamation points means I'm shouting that last bit.
I should point out that one of the consequences of teen angst, intentional or not, is the scarceness of exclamation points in language nowadays. It's all right to get excited once in a while -- you can't possibly be jaded by 17. Holden is jaded, you argue. In fact, so is every character in the Salinger canon. But recall that our beloved J.D. has been holed up in a New Hampshire ghost town for the past 40 years, an ill-tempered hermit at odds with the world.
In other words, an angsty old man.
So, momentarily convinced, we stick our battered paperback Catcher into our back pockets and console ourselves with that teenage staple: emo or punk-rock or whatever kids are calling it these days. While, admittedly, those white earbuds are pretty perky-looking (and don't seem to suggest Kurt Cobain's eyeball-clawing misery as did the old scratched-up Discmans and headphones), I fear they convey no fewer simile-laden lyrics and four-minute anthems.
There is in fact a song called "Teen Angst"; I quote it here in its entirety: "How fast we burn, how fast we cry. / Simple we live, simple we die. / Somehow we learn, somehow we cry. / How fast we burn, how fast we die." And curtain.
But of course, no pampered rock stars know how truly harrowing teenage life is, and so we begin to rely on ourselves. I'm all for self-reliance, but there is a point at which we need to turn an objective eye on ourselves. And that point is poetry.
Now, I realize that it's cool (actually I have no barometer whatsoever when it comes to cool -- but so I've been told) to scrawl original verse on every blank surface that presents itself. After all, God must have invented those smooth white rubber soles on Chuck Taylors for a reason, right? But Cummings is not as easy to emulate as one might guess, and nobody bothers to attempt a sestina -- the one poetry form that gets better the more ridiculous the words.
But hey, don't take my word for it. Reputable newspaper The Onion conducted a groundbreaking study that found striking correlations between divorce in a family and the angsty poetry that often results. Divorce is, the article notes, more prevalent than ever, "And that's tragic, because what comes out of that bitterness and heartbreak is some of the worst poetry you'll ever hear." What's more, "[the] researchers also found a strong correlation between the nature of a particular divorce and quality of poetry. In 90 percent of divorces categorized as 'amicable,' the breakup results in rhyming poems, usually with irritating, 'sing-songish' A-B-A-B rhyme schemes. The more acrimonious the split, however, the greater the odds of a child turning to other, more wretch-inducing poetic forms: Eighty-five percent of contested divorces end in free verse, the study found, and three in four divorces involving custody battles end in haiku."
Chalk it up to experience, though -- we've all written at least a few lines of atrocious verse at a time when we were too upset to bother with punctuation and coherence. We've all felt misunderstood. And we're all misfits, of a sort. For all my griping, I ought to admit that I, too, have read all the Salinger and Plath and Kerouac I could get my angsty little hands on. I even read Go Ask Alice, back in my diary-keeping days, though in my defense I couldn't identify with it.
The difference is in attitude. I maintain that irony is not dead, that cynicism is physically harmful, and that there is no shame in being an indefatigable optimist. So wipe that scowl off your face, tug out those earbuds, and let Holden rest in peace. You're young and lucky and very, very attractive. And after all: that sestina is beckoning.
- - - - -
Enough is enough! We're fulfilling the stereotypes. We're creating them. We traverse the halls dejectedly, hair in our eyes, hands in our pockets, bemoaning the trials of Teenage Life in This Hard, Hard World. We find solace in the timeless wisdom of one Holden Caulfield, that modern-day hero who dares to pan the very "David Copperfield kind of crap" that we have a test on next week.
But oh, how can you read The Catcher in the Rye with a straight face and champion everything but its irony? Holden feels misunderstood, but we all understood his character after five whining pages. He decries the "phonies" of the world but contradicts himself every other sentence. Let's please not be another generation of teenage cynics, of Holden-wannabes for who-knows-why. Take action! Be brave! Stop fighting the system (don't you realize that you are the system?) and start battling teen angst!
The plethora of exclamation points means I'm shouting that last bit.
I should point out that one of the consequences of teen angst, intentional or not, is the scarceness of exclamation points in language nowadays. It's all right to get excited once in a while -- you can't possibly be jaded by 17. Holden is jaded, you argue. In fact, so is every character in the Salinger canon. But recall that our beloved J.D. has been holed up in a New Hampshire ghost town for the past 40 years, an ill-tempered hermit at odds with the world.
In other words, an angsty old man.
So, momentarily convinced, we stick our battered paperback Catcher into our back pockets and console ourselves with that teenage staple: emo or punk-rock or whatever kids are calling it these days. While, admittedly, those white earbuds are pretty perky-looking (and don't seem to suggest Kurt Cobain's eyeball-clawing misery as did the old scratched-up Discmans and headphones), I fear they convey no fewer simile-laden lyrics and four-minute anthems.
There is in fact a song called "Teen Angst"; I quote it here in its entirety: "How fast we burn, how fast we cry. / Simple we live, simple we die. / Somehow we learn, somehow we cry. / How fast we burn, how fast we die." And curtain.
But of course, no pampered rock stars know how truly harrowing teenage life is, and so we begin to rely on ourselves. I'm all for self-reliance, but there is a point at which we need to turn an objective eye on ourselves. And that point is poetry.
Now, I realize that it's cool (actually I have no barometer whatsoever when it comes to cool -- but so I've been told) to scrawl original verse on every blank surface that presents itself. After all, God must have invented those smooth white rubber soles on Chuck Taylors for a reason, right? But Cummings is not as easy to emulate as one might guess, and nobody bothers to attempt a sestina -- the one poetry form that gets better the more ridiculous the words.
But hey, don't take my word for it. Reputable newspaper The Onion conducted a groundbreaking study that found striking correlations between divorce in a family and the angsty poetry that often results. Divorce is, the article notes, more prevalent than ever, "And that's tragic, because what comes out of that bitterness and heartbreak is some of the worst poetry you'll ever hear." What's more, "[the] researchers also found a strong correlation between the nature of a particular divorce and quality of poetry. In 90 percent of divorces categorized as 'amicable,' the breakup results in rhyming poems, usually with irritating, 'sing-songish' A-B-A-B rhyme schemes. The more acrimonious the split, however, the greater the odds of a child turning to other, more wretch-inducing poetic forms: Eighty-five percent of contested divorces end in free verse, the study found, and three in four divorces involving custody battles end in haiku."
Chalk it up to experience, though -- we've all written at least a few lines of atrocious verse at a time when we were too upset to bother with punctuation and coherence. We've all felt misunderstood. And we're all misfits, of a sort. For all my griping, I ought to admit that I, too, have read all the Salinger and Plath and Kerouac I could get my angsty little hands on. I even read Go Ask Alice, back in my diary-keeping days, though in my defense I couldn't identify with it.
The difference is in attitude. I maintain that irony is not dead, that cynicism is physically harmful, and that there is no shame in being an indefatigable optimist. So wipe that scowl off your face, tug out those earbuds, and let Holden rest in peace. You're young and lucky and very, very attractive. And after all: that sestina is beckoning.