THE DIGNITY OF YOUTH
I'm no fan of hipsterdom (it says a lot that it takes preppy-ism to make hipsterdom look goood, sort of like it takes feudalism to make laissez-faire capitalism look good). But this David Brooks column railing against hipster parents who dress their kids in hipster outfits is just silly (makes John Tierney look good - almost). To read Brooks, you'd think that the hipsters were the first and only parents to impose their particular culture on their children. Everybody else must just dress their kids in what they'd be wearing in the state of nature, right? What with all the sneering about the counterculture's dupes, he never quite gets around to specifying what that should be - just that it has something to do with "the dignity of youth." I'll take a baby T-shirt that says "My Mom's Blog Is Better Than Your Mom's Blog" over one with a big Nike swoosh any day.
posted by Josh Eidelson at 2/27/2007 01:38:00 AM
5 Comments:
my personal favorite:
"Future Dead Person"
A lot of what bugged me about that column was the assumption, for whatever reason, that there's something wrong with feeding your kids Sufjan or the White Stripes or organic baby food or whatever. I introduced my brother to indie rock when he was six because I love it and wanted to share it with him. I'll raise my kids on baseball and apple pie and hip hop and labor politics because they matter to me, and because unlike, say, Tanqueray they're not bad for babies. The column was mostly just a statement of how narrow Brooks' taste and range of experience are.
"The column was mostly just a statement of how narrow Brooks' taste and range of experience are."
Not that we should be surprised. Kind of a pattern with his columns.
Also from Glarkware, my other favorite is one in M*A*S*H* colors/font, with a picture of a 1970s Chinook, that says "Yeah, I was in the shit."
That cracks me up.
I want DB to start selling YouthDignity babywear on CafePress.
On a second read it's more harmless, a less pithy version of that episode of Daria in which Jake Morgendorfer cries, "'Edgy?' What does it mean?! What is this word?!"
—Maureen
Clearly, the world would be a better place if all of us young people just wrote more biographies of Charles Hill.
Post a Comment
<< Home