Party Like its 2021
Everything is going to get better! We only need to work together and believe! After all, aren’t the injustices of the past only momentary diversions from the long and graceful arc that was so eloquently foretold?
I have made my career peddling hope like this to young people, rural farmers and myriad others. But have any of you seen that arc actually turn? The trope of hope is less and less convincing, to young people especially. Every time I launch into this soliloquy, I can now see their eyes rolling and the whispers beginning.
After all, what does anyone who was born after 2001 (or even 1974) know about hope? Have we given them anything really to hope for, beyond the Internet, self-driving cars and trips to Mars for the rich? What faith can they have in our world’s economic and political institutions, when they see the rampant destruction and inequality that they have left in their wake? Who or what are they supposed to believe in, exactly?
The tacit implication is that hope usually consists of technocratic and/or bureaucratic solutions to the worlds’ problems. That young people must rise up and join the same failed institutions of the past, and somehow reform them, or at least ameliorate their worst excesses. They must “Code for America”, or engage in X for “development”, or start “B corps” and social enterprises that mitigate corporate excess through a steadfast commitment to values and deliberative governance.
However, what exactly have these failed institutions done in their lifetimes to justify any such enthusiasm or loyalty? When surrounded by corrupt, racist, classist, and destructive institutions, or inefficient and apathetic ones, often with a demonstrated track record of moral and organizational failings. Where are these young people supposed to go to “be the change they wish to see in the world”? How do they find others to work with, and how do they support themselves collectively on the margins of an unjust and unequal society?
No doubt thousands (if not millions) around the world are following various kinds of revolutionary paths. But it is not easy, and it is not for everyone, and I think everyone would rest a bit easier knowing these two facts. After all, why should all young people be responsible for cleaning up the messes their parents and grandparents made? Isn’t there another option besides sacrificing yourself to the machine, or making yourself an instrument of it?
Surely, there is. And yet, even in the most critical of theory, the exhortation remains the same. Hope! We can create a better world if we try together! In any sophisticated contemporary essay on hope or liberation, it might end with Chiapas or Syria or Occupy (or all 3), about feminist and anarchist collectives living in jungles or deserts or in the metropole, somehow managing to squeak out an existence either at the margins of the world or in the midst of it.
This potent and heady mix combines in a predictable way with the protestant work ethic upon which this country was based. Hope must be strenuous, hope must involve hard work and sacrifice. Either you book a ticket to a far off place, or you buy a tent and camp out in your local public square, or you start a social enterprise — but the grind remains the same. Suffering is hope, hope is suffering.
Are we having fun yet? Before we sacrifice together, shouldn’t we laugh together? Isn’t collective love and exuberance the most radical and revolutionary act that you can engage in? There was a reason that the “law and order” campaign instituted by Mayor Giuliani after September 11th included a renewed emphasis on enforcing cabaret laws on the cities bars and clubs. Where there is dancing, there is joy, and where there is joy, there is love, and there is nothing more dangerous to power.
So, let them dance, I say. If it truly is the end of the world, we should party like it. Instead of a green new deal, can we have an underground dance club? Instead of solar panels and electric cars, a kick ass house party? But we have to be careful not to drop the spot to everyone. Because the best parties exist in a kind of moral ether — not legal, but not quite illegal either. Not yet the thing that everyone is doing, but just the right bodies in shared convalescence.
Parties are about more than consumption, or subsumption. Or, more accurately, subsumption and consumption of the right things, at the right times, in the right ways. Because. in the end, we are our rituals (“activity patterns”), and the ones we have now aren’t cutting it. Netflix and chill? Is that our motto for liberation, or just another way to forget the pain?
