YouTube/CNN Debate Reveals Spoiled Generation?

Narcissistic Brats and Metros featured in Prime-time Presidential Debate

Adrian Pocobelli | July, 28, 2007 | The Population

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Maybe it's the Internet corrupting the young minds. I watched the Democratic YouTube/CNN debate with humour and disdain. More than anything, I was repulsed to see the bitter acrimony of the supposed new generation, who had deen given all the material wants one could ask, lash out at presidential hopefuls in the form of rude and unhappy questioning. If anyone ever needed evidence that money does not buy happiness, this would surely qualify.

To say that it displayed a troubling infantilism, a false confidence built upon projections of the ego, would be putting it mildly. Frankly, many of the questioners seemed downright idiotic, a cringy narcissitic bunch whose rank materialistic know-it-all attitudes pervaded all aspects of tone and speech. How would their ancestors have reacted, especially those who had fought and died for their freedom, upon witnessing this spectacle? It left me wondering: Has a generation been spoiled?

Then there's Lindsay Lohan, whom I, like many others, was quite inspired by when I first saw Mean Girls in the theatre. I remember leaving that night in awe of a truly talented actor destined to represent the new tone and intelligence of her generation (say what you want about Paris and Britney, this one actually had talent!).

Oddly, I never saw another of her movies since. When I see what's happened to her in the meantime, I'm left with a sense of disappointment, thinking how great she could have been. Is she emblematic of a Generation Y that is quickly devolving into a Generation Letdown?

One might say the lack of respect demonstrated by the YouTube questioners was the result of a cynicism that they felt towards the political process rooted in a true sense of being disenfranchised, but one couldn't say that about their lack of class. Narcissistic metrosexuals frothing with rage and throwing tantrums in front of a video camera revealed more a troubling image of decadence than the voice of the new generation, as CNN tried to spin it.

That image is not a glimpse into Generation Y, which is much more intelligent in spirit than the YouTube questioners, but more of a reality check of the looming decadence in our culture. As a fan of the Surrealists and the counterculture that followed, I have no problem with decadence per se, but more with the spoiled attitude that often accompanies it, for which there is reason for concern.

Who are these creeps and why is CNN giving them airtime? I imagine to make themselves look good in comparison. How ironic and typical of them to promote this debate as a kind of power to the people, when, in fact, it seems as though it is CNN itself who is trying to keep down a generation that sees the network as increasingly irrelevant.