Modern Life

There's a phrase that's entered the American slang lexicon---old school. It's probably been around for ten years, maybe? Old school is contrasted with new school though new school is almost never heard. Old school is a kind of philosophy, which would normally be termed as old-fashioned, except that old-fashioned has a pejorative connotation. People equate old-fashioned with unwilling to change and to embrace the future.

Old school, by contrast, refers to old-fashioned in a good way. I recall when Gar Heard was selected as the Washington Wizards new coach. Right now, the Wizards have gone through a merry-go-round of coaches, having maybe 8 coaches in the last 8 years. This happens when a team loses. The coach is the easiest person to replace. Heard apparently "blew away" owner Abe Pollin in his interview. The phrase stuck partly because Heard did not do much except to continue in the Wizards losing ways.

Heard was said be "old school", a disciplinarian in a sport where multi-millionaires often have more say about how the team is run, than the coach. Professional basketball is not college basketball. In college sports, coaches are kings. Players are not making multi-million dollar salaries. They have to stay in the good graces of the coach, or they never get to play. All the risk is on the players.

At the pro level, coaches have to manage egos. Phil Jackson, former coach of the Chicago Bulls and the Los Angeles Lakers (and coach again of the Lakers), was the zen master who soothed the egos of Jordan, Pippen, Rodman, Shaq, and Kobe, which is no mean feat, and lead him to nine titles. He might represent the best of "new school" thinking where stars have to be treated like stars.

Heard, on the other hand, insisted on his way or the high way, and players quickly checked out. Even the combination of Doug Collins and Michael Jordan were more old-school, berating players like Kwame Brown, and eventually trading Richard Hamilton to the Pistons when he didn't want to toe the Jordan/Collins line. Old school often stresses fundamentals that new school has forgotten. In basketball, that would be passing the ball, playing solid defense, and putting team ahead of flashy individual play.

For lack of a better word, there's now new school elitism and old school elitism. In this case, I use old school elitism is a more disparaging way. I should use old fashioned but that phrase sounds, well, old fashioned, and using the phrase old school serves to highlight the point I want to make.

What am I talking about when I use the word elitism? I'm referring to what people do when they wish to move to a higher level of enlightenment. The ultimate conservative lives in a small town, grows up with a limited set of ideas, and stays within the comfort of those ideas. Small town folks, stereotypically, only know about the small town, about basic values, about limited forms of entertainment. They haven't seen expensive cars. They don't know the latest fashions. They see people much like themselves.

Now, such a person is quickly becoming extinct, but I'm sure such people exist. Elitism requires work. Old style elitism is about being prim and proper. Going to museums. Going to the symphonies. Reading classic works like Jane Austen and Charles Dickens. Watching Merchant-Ivory films. Films by David Lean. It is about beauty over grotesque. If I think of one person who might fit this moniker of old-school elitism, it's Diane Rehm, who hosts her own show on NPR. She'd watch a film like The English Patient, but would avoid experimental films like Gus Van Sant's Gerry or the violent Battle Royale.

New-school elitism is a combination of the obscure that's old-school elite, and a kind of slumming. Forms of entertainment that would normally be poo-poo'ed by the old school. For example, there's a flourishing comic industry that is no longer the Marvel and DC comics of the 70s. The peak of the iceberg of this industry peeks out in movies. Blade, Constantine, Hellboy, Batman Begins, Sin City are all derived from comics from the 90s and the 00s.

The comic industry, once the domain of gawky teenage boys, took a turn. As the industry realized that fanboys weren't boys, but were, instead, 20 something men, prices of comics increased, and the subject matter became more adult-oriented. This may have coincided with the populariity of mangas, Japanese comics. In Japan, there has always been comics aimed at adults. Such serious topics as rape and misogyny are mainstays in mangas. R-rated comics with nudity are common, and given the respect, rather than the derision such comics have in the US.

A new school elitist is just as willing to derive entertainment from violence and non-mainstream humor. I call it elitism, because it very much is. There are a series of t-shirts that I've seen at threadless.com. In particular, I know someone who wore the following: Outbreak Girl shirt. Go to this website, and you'll see dozens of shirts, and yet, this shirt that I've linked to is among the most popular.

Never seen it? I hadn't either until about a week ago. Then I saw it twice in three days. I remarked to a coworker.
It probably says something about new-school elite that they don't want to flaunt this information. Either you get
it and are part of the elite, or you don't, and in that case, you're ignored. Where as old-school elite is often tied
to some degree of wealth, new-school elite is just as likely to be geeky students or those who find their form
of entertainment more compelling than climbing the ladder to achieve "real-world" success.

It takes a great deal of time to be new-school elite. The easiest way is to hang out with others sharing the
same world view. Just by them being there, you get a sense of what is cool. And yet, this stuff is terribly
ephemeral. New-school elite is always on the search for new music. They embrace all sorts of music from
hip-hop to alt-rock to ska to classical music. They watch movies that are out of the mainstream. Documentaries
and films by indie stars Araki or Van Sant. They go to wine and cheese parties and museums and coffee houses.

They hang out at music clubs, and know where the city parties are located. They embrace multi-culturalism,
gay-lesbian rights, environmentalism, and Lance Armstrong. The web has become the outlet for this kind
of elitism. It presents elitism with the kind of access that makes it egalitarian. Where once money was the
currency used for access, now it is search, the ability to find and process information, finding the cultural
milestones being built in the cyberworld, and to assimilate its meaning and significance.

This is the kind of elitism that can get obscure extremely easily. Since no one much cared about the music,
the style, the art of the here-and-now, how can it persist into the there-and-later? There's a sense that
maybe only a few hundred thousand care in a country of nearly three hundred million, and they don't care
that others dont know, because once they figure it out, it's time to move on, to find the next place to hang
out, the next elite thing.

This it the most fleeting kind of hedonism, a curious blend of entertainment and information. This is not the
rock solid fundamentals of mathematics and physics and study of dead languages. Rather than the ability to
reason deeply about what makes the world work, it's about cultural reasoning, determining what is cool here
and now, and cool, really, to this elite. This is not Desperate Housewives, but The World, The Child, The
Wayward Cloud. This is Guns, Germs, and Steel. This is The Blank Slate. This is Califone, The Microphones,
Lungfish. This is the rediscovery of William Shatner and Johnny Cash.

This is intellectual fashion, decided by a new kind of intelligentsia, whose collectively decide what's hot
and what's not. We're podcasting. We're GPSing. We're time shifting our video, our audio, maybe something
to appeal to our olfactory senses? Maybe we'll go out collecting sounds evoking memories of places we've
never quite been to, making shrines to Ben Burtt. Lightsabers and the sound of mowing grass and crackling
fire, of splashes in the water, of mosh pits.

This is the face of the modern American new elite. Are you ready?