Old Guard
There's an Old White Guard in this country terrified of losing its culture that continually decides to act out of fear in its agressive method of defense.
This old guard is terrified that their kids will grow up speaking Spanish and turn gay, so they hate on immigrants and queer people and call us the end of Western civilization and say that we must be kept out and oppressed until we go away.
There's many layers to all of this; political, economic, and sociocultural considerations. But on the sociocultural front, it seems pretty obvious that the OWG is scared shitless.
I'm in an old guard myself, and here I preach to the choir. Most of you all are "older fans" in the anime and/or jrock world. With you, I'm happy to sit around on our online porch and ponder these whippersnappers who have it easy. This Cartoon Network Generation who will look back on their childhood someday and remember Gundam Wing and Pokemon instead of the Disney Afternoon and, I don't know, Earthworm Jim.
But when I put aside my own personal sense of severe distance from the new fans and WTFery and think just in terms of my general feelings about human society, I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled for the multicultural advancement going on here.
And I am seriously Old Guard. I don't just remember learning kana to find the Sailor Moon tapes at the neighborhood Japanese video rental store (lucky to have one, wasn't I?). I remember friends who learned kanji to play imported Final Fantasy games that are now translated and on Playstation disks. I remember LARPing in the woods, and know nothing of Everquest. I remember spending hours listening to the radio to tape a Smashing Pumpkins song that I could now go buy instantly for 99 cents or steal illegally in minutes.
But you know what? The new ways of fandom don't invalidate the old, and what's worth appreciating in culture continues to be appreciated. There will always be rabid fans who keep their own ways of doing things going, so long as these methods make sense. People will still learn kanji to game in the original Japanese. D&D will probably outlast a million other methods of role-playing. And honestly, who the hell really misses taping shit off the radio? ...I kinda do, but only because I'm nostalgic like that.
The traditions we were a part of can certainly survive if we do the following:
1) Speak of our love for them.
2) Continue to engage in them when possible.
3) Never diss the new fans' fandom to the actual new fans. That's what old fans are for; for grumbling together. XD
The new fans will appreciate what we appreciate if we're welcoming and inviting about it. And it's because of the new methods that the new fans can get their hands on everything we fought tooth and nail for. That means that if they really, really want to watch every single episode of Marmalade Boy, they can just donwload the torrent over a couple nights and voila! we can all bitch about Miki together.
We all know that for each and every one of us, we experienced a Golden Era of Something or Other that No One Growing Up Now will Ever Understand. But today, they can come closer to it than ever. On XM Satellite Radio I can listen to a channel dedicated primarily to the greatest music ever created in American alt rock history, that of the mid to sort of late nineties. Am I wrong? Of course. Am I absolutely right? You bet. Your answer will depend on your tastes and when you were born. But with XM, some thirteen-year-old out there has the possibility of hearing Squirrel Nut Zippers on the radio again. And then, s/he can go buy some Dir en Grey at Walmart...
The Old White Guard has got it all wrong in yelling and screaming about how horrible us queers are and how Spanish will warp their children's minds. Their traditions will survive as long as young people think they're cool.
If we were more embracing of queer culture and of the Mexican immigrants that seem to be terrifying the OWG, you'd probably see more kids speaking Spanish and dating within their sex. But het relationships and the English language have many awesome things to them (they do not include guys feeling forced to pick up the tab, nor do they include a spelling system that makes English ridiculous to learn as a foreign language). They're not going anywhere. They are not going to stop being the dominant mode of things in our society here in America. But attempts to outlaw gay marriage at the constitutional level or create English-only laws only say to me that the OWG is freakin' scared that maybe their institutions aren't cool enough to survive the generations unless they ban all other options.
In my ideal world, the place that I live in would be something like that bar from Star Wars. The one where no two people look alike and no two conversations sound alike. There's so much more to learn and enjoy from a multicultural environment than can be discovered in a monoculture, and why the OWG can be so disinterested in other ways of experiencing life is beyond me personally. But we all should be given the option.
With the insane amount of options we have today, the numbers of anime and jrock fans have swelled unbelievably. While the new fans don't know what it was like to be us old fans, we don't know what it's like to be them. It strikes me that this generation is going to be far more open-minded than us as a whole, having grown up with the internet and instant worldwide communication since age zero and having gotten to meet Yoshiki at age nine and thus probably starting to slash him at the onset of puberty instead of at the onset of high school.
And maybe that's part of what has the OWG so scared. They don't know how to handle a generation accustomed to such exposure to so many different possibilities of how to live life, and they don't know how to make their own way of life look as exciting, so they have to resort to scare tactics and banninating everything that could compete.
Can you imagine if every time you went to Otakon, you were met by people marching around with placards stating THE CARTOON NETWORK IS SIN...? You may remember the Cartoon Network as the Flintstones channel and sort of want to agree due to the proliferation of dubs. But then you'll remember that you spent last night hunting for episodes of Aquateen.
If us Old Guard fans had stuck to our ways, we'd all be trading crappy VHS tapes in a pocky-filled back room while two guys in the Old Old Guard corner muttered about how we didn't understand the true glory of Macross while they put together their original Gundam series model kits. We've evolved and we can appreciate what the new wave has brought us, while still nostalgically enjoying our memories of our Golden Eras.
If only the OWG here were more like that, instead of always positioning themselves as a dam to block the flow of the natural evolution of culture, America would be as a whole a vastly improved place to live.
This old guard is terrified that their kids will grow up speaking Spanish and turn gay, so they hate on immigrants and queer people and call us the end of Western civilization and say that we must be kept out and oppressed until we go away.
There's many layers to all of this; political, economic, and sociocultural considerations. But on the sociocultural front, it seems pretty obvious that the OWG is scared shitless.
I'm in an old guard myself, and here I preach to the choir. Most of you all are "older fans" in the anime and/or jrock world. With you, I'm happy to sit around on our online porch and ponder these whippersnappers who have it easy. This Cartoon Network Generation who will look back on their childhood someday and remember Gundam Wing and Pokemon instead of the Disney Afternoon and, I don't know, Earthworm Jim.
But when I put aside my own personal sense of severe distance from the new fans and WTFery and think just in terms of my general feelings about human society, I'm thrilled. I'm thrilled for the multicultural advancement going on here.
And I am seriously Old Guard. I don't just remember learning kana to find the Sailor Moon tapes at the neighborhood Japanese video rental store (lucky to have one, wasn't I?). I remember friends who learned kanji to play imported Final Fantasy games that are now translated and on Playstation disks. I remember LARPing in the woods, and know nothing of Everquest. I remember spending hours listening to the radio to tape a Smashing Pumpkins song that I could now go buy instantly for 99 cents or steal illegally in minutes.
But you know what? The new ways of fandom don't invalidate the old, and what's worth appreciating in culture continues to be appreciated. There will always be rabid fans who keep their own ways of doing things going, so long as these methods make sense. People will still learn kanji to game in the original Japanese. D&D will probably outlast a million other methods of role-playing. And honestly, who the hell really misses taping shit off the radio? ...I kinda do, but only because I'm nostalgic like that.
The traditions we were a part of can certainly survive if we do the following:
1) Speak of our love for them.
2) Continue to engage in them when possible.
3) Never diss the new fans' fandom to the actual new fans. That's what old fans are for; for grumbling together. XD
The new fans will appreciate what we appreciate if we're welcoming and inviting about it. And it's because of the new methods that the new fans can get their hands on everything we fought tooth and nail for. That means that if they really, really want to watch every single episode of Marmalade Boy, they can just donwload the torrent over a couple nights and voila! we can all bitch about Miki together.
We all know that for each and every one of us, we experienced a Golden Era of Something or Other that No One Growing Up Now will Ever Understand. But today, they can come closer to it than ever. On XM Satellite Radio I can listen to a channel dedicated primarily to the greatest music ever created in American alt rock history, that of the mid to sort of late nineties. Am I wrong? Of course. Am I absolutely right? You bet. Your answer will depend on your tastes and when you were born. But with XM, some thirteen-year-old out there has the possibility of hearing Squirrel Nut Zippers on the radio again. And then, s/he can go buy some Dir en Grey at Walmart...
The Old White Guard has got it all wrong in yelling and screaming about how horrible us queers are and how Spanish will warp their children's minds. Their traditions will survive as long as young people think they're cool.
If we were more embracing of queer culture and of the Mexican immigrants that seem to be terrifying the OWG, you'd probably see more kids speaking Spanish and dating within their sex. But het relationships and the English language have many awesome things to them (they do not include guys feeling forced to pick up the tab, nor do they include a spelling system that makes English ridiculous to learn as a foreign language). They're not going anywhere. They are not going to stop being the dominant mode of things in our society here in America. But attempts to outlaw gay marriage at the constitutional level or create English-only laws only say to me that the OWG is freakin' scared that maybe their institutions aren't cool enough to survive the generations unless they ban all other options.
In my ideal world, the place that I live in would be something like that bar from Star Wars. The one where no two people look alike and no two conversations sound alike. There's so much more to learn and enjoy from a multicultural environment than can be discovered in a monoculture, and why the OWG can be so disinterested in other ways of experiencing life is beyond me personally. But we all should be given the option.
With the insane amount of options we have today, the numbers of anime and jrock fans have swelled unbelievably. While the new fans don't know what it was like to be us old fans, we don't know what it's like to be them. It strikes me that this generation is going to be far more open-minded than us as a whole, having grown up with the internet and instant worldwide communication since age zero and having gotten to meet Yoshiki at age nine and thus probably starting to slash him at the onset of puberty instead of at the onset of high school.
And maybe that's part of what has the OWG so scared. They don't know how to handle a generation accustomed to such exposure to so many different possibilities of how to live life, and they don't know how to make their own way of life look as exciting, so they have to resort to scare tactics and banninating everything that could compete.
Can you imagine if every time you went to Otakon, you were met by people marching around with placards stating THE CARTOON NETWORK IS SIN...? You may remember the Cartoon Network as the Flintstones channel and sort of want to agree due to the proliferation of dubs. But then you'll remember that you spent last night hunting for episodes of Aquateen.
If us Old Guard fans had stuck to our ways, we'd all be trading crappy VHS tapes in a pocky-filled back room while two guys in the Old Old Guard corner muttered about how we didn't understand the true glory of Macross while they put together their original Gundam series model kits. We've evolved and we can appreciate what the new wave has brought us, while still nostalgically enjoying our memories of our Golden Eras.
If only the OWG here were more like that, instead of always positioning themselves as a dam to block the flow of the natural evolution of culture, America would be as a whole a vastly improved place to live.