The method to this generation’s madness and the pros and cons of “Fight Club”

Medical science is keeping us alive long enough to watch our own bodies decay. Our minds… Medical science is keeping us alive long enough to watch our own bodies decay. Our minds deflate until our souls are nothing but squirming tadpoles trapped in a pocket of water nestled between nearly airless folds of the once life-size blow-up doll we so needed to be all our lives.

By the time we near graduation, we realize the perverse design behind the current college payment plan. They show us just enough to need to change things, and after a few years we become certain that somehow we can. But, of course, by that point, we’re so saddled with debt we’ve few choices, and none of them involve bumming around Paris or Venice, seeking whiskey enlightenment while striving to redefine the world’s view of what an American is.

The Puritan work ethic has been contorted into a nationally mandated responsibility to consume with maximum efficiency. Our nation is dying of obesity, and somehow half the population is still starving itself in accordance with the latest trend.

We’re paranoid about security. We condemn violence in youngsters and at school, but celebrate it in films, cheer at it on the football field and ferociously worship it on the field of battle. And still, Fox News is shocked that high school kids are having backyard-boxing matches with bikini mud wrestling between rounds.

As the recording of one such bout was played, Fox’s anchor noted the viciousness of the blows. I noted the boxing gloves, and thought it was tamer than it ought to be with all every one of us keeps locked up.

I took my little sister on her school’s camping trip, and an old hippy sat around the campfire and asked me about my generation. He commented that we have no hope. We have no faith that things will improve. I agreed, but added that our lack of hope compounds our growing desperation. It’s a desperation that’s not unique to those of us freshly in our 20s. It’s been smoldering for quite some time.

“Fight Club,” with its vaguely disturbing sexual content — Marla’s pillow talk, a powerful homosexual undertone and anti-materialist rhetoric — is a fine representation of the unexpressed and mounting desperation of those born at the same time as the PC. But it’s written for people a decade older than us.

There’s little new here. Old, rich people cause problems and then have their puppet news outlets feign shock so they can preserve a semblance of dignity with those of their peers who are genuinely confused and concerned about what’s happening to the youth. They’re wondering why we won’t settle down. Why we keep pushing things so far beyond what is safe. Why our teen-age rebellions implode or explode instead of fading to maturity.

The answer is simple: We’re terrified.

We know we’re going to settle down. We’re going to settle down, and we’re going to settle for being shocked and concerned, and we don’t know what to do about it. So, we punch some people. My only real objection to these unauthorized fights is that we’re punching each other when there are people out there far more deserving of a decent right hook.

Email Zak Sharif at rzs8@pitt.edu.