La Fin de La Semaine Essay Question: Special "You Bastid Kids Get Off My Lawn" Edition

[I originally posted a version of this back in 2010, but for a couple of reasons -- lingering depression brought on by this week's Snowpocalypse, thinking as I have of late how sad it is that my generation had Beatles and Stones while today's yoots are stuck with Geese and Goose, things of that nature -- I decided to run it by you again. -- S.S.]

So I had occasion this week to re-read Jules Feiffer's superb 1965 The Great Comic Book Heroes, still one of the best books ever written about pop culture and one that had a huge impact on me when it first came out. Feiffer concludes it with the following paragraph; he's talking specifically about comics, but in retrospect, I now I think the point he's really making is somewhat broader.

Comic books, which had few public (as opposed to professional) defenders in the days when Dr. Wertham was attacking them, are now looked back on by an increasing number of my generation as samples of our youthful innocence instead of our youthful corruption. A sign, perhaps, of the potency of that corruption. A corruption -- a lie, really -- that put us in charge, however, temporarily, of the world in which we lived and gave us the means, however arbitrary, of defining right from wrong, good from bad, hero from villain. It is something for which old fans can understandably pine -- almost as if having become overly conscious of the imposition of junk on our adult values: on our architecture, our highways, our advertising, our mass media, our politics -- and even in the air we breathe, flying black chunks of it -- we have staged a retreat to a better remembered brand of junk. A junk that knew its place was underground where it had no power and thus only titillated, rather than above ground where it truly has power -- and thus, only depresses.

As I said, Feiffer was talking specifically about comics, but he might just as well have been talking about...oh my gosh -- rock and related pop musics, no?

And if so, the question arises -- is what Feiffer's getting at just a philistine old man's prejudice or an actually valid point?

Discuss.

I go back and forth on this, BTW. 😎

Meanwhile, have a great weekend, everybody!!!