Zeitgeist, or, The Reivers
by Jon Worley

Back in the days when "alternative" music was stuff only geeks and people who wore a lot of black liked, there was a band called the Reivers. A Faulknerian reference, if you didn't catch it off the bat. Faulkner was more popular than usual with mordantly depressed white kids back in the mid-eighties, or at least it seemed that way because there were two bands who had recorded under the name "The Reivers". So one of them became Zeitgeist. You know, as in the mood of the populace. An ironic new name, if you cared to think about it for more than a minute. Which, of course, is why such people listened to such uniformly depressing "alternative" music.

My main point here is that someone should have noticed that a lot of college student types were seriously into Faulkner. I mean, there was even a band wandering around with the unwieldy name "Absalom, Absalom". A smart person might have asked what this portended. And an even smarter person might have spent a few days pondering the question. My own answer is that, faced with the cosmic realities of the baby bust (now commonly known as Generation X), a lot of us discovered that we were "doomed" to lives of exploration and experience. Sociologists defined the whole "slacker" notion soon after, and now it's safe to say that there are probably a million or so would-be Gen X academics squeezed out by the baby boom generation. Instead of pontificating for the benefit of impressionable youth, what we do is sit around and ponder, without the benefit of tenure, while our younger cousins race toward the endowed chairs that are just beginning to be fitted for "vacancy" signs.

As a result of all this excessive pondering, I have come to one inescapable conclusion concerning zeitgeist: Politicians had better be paying attention to what folks are watching and hearing. Alright, so I wrote candidate Clinton a note on this very subject back in 1992, even going so far as to make a tape of popular political anthems (featuring bands like Bad Religion, Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Body Count, etc.) and explaining why it is so very important to comprehend what all this stuff means. I got a nice photocopied form letter back. Too bad for them. After all, if the Democrats had bothered to check out the grosses on Falling Down, they might have saved their collective butts in 1994.

After viewing The American President, I made the prediction that if the movie grossed $100 million, Clinton was a shoo-in for re-election. I reasoned that if a large number of people identified with an excessively liberal Pres as portrayed by Michael Douglas, they certainly could get in bed with a moderate ladies man like Bill Clinton. The movie did not quite make my watermark tally, but it was the most-viewed movie on airplanes in 1996 (don't ask me how I know this; it is a fact). So score one (or at least a half) for my theory.

The machines are already grinding toward election 1998, and I must warn he Republicans that the box-office news is not good for their causes. The biggest hit of the fall is a rock-bottom-budget flick called The Full Monty. It details the experiences of out-of-work steelworkers who turn to stripping as a way of gaining respect and making ends meet. It's also damned funny. I shan't give away the ending, but they don't keep their hats on.

On the musical front, the biggest splash this fall has been made by veteran British punkers Chumbawamba, who decided to spruce up their musical approach while sharpening their a-bit-to-the-left-of-socialist lyrics. Okay, so the big hit is "Tubthumping", a nice little ditty about not letting The Man keep you down that has been interpreted by many as a generic "Up With People" type of song. It even got used as the rousing finale of the "Scott Hamilton Staggers On The Ice" special (again, please don't ask me how I know this). But the rest of the album is devoted to such causes as exposing relatively right-wing union leadership, chastising immigration opponents and repeating a general "down with capitalism" theme. Yes, Mr. Corporate America, those are your children mindlessly repeating the words "It's a trickledown theory/And it's coming to me...It's a sinking ship/Drip, drip, drip".

Eloquent? Hardly. And that's not the point. Kids love Chumbawamba, and folks who have never before considered entering an art house are packing little out-of-the way theaters to catch The Full Monty. It's doesn't matter how high the art is. What matters is that people are transfixed by the stuff. If I were in charge of Republican legislative initiatives for the next year, I'd make sure to at least pretend to care about the unwashed and the unwanted. Because more and more of the supposed "middle class" are getting worried about slippage.

And so my prediction? The Dems will do much better in the 1998 elections than most parties in control of the White House generally do in off-year elections. They might even take back the House. Remember, the freshman class of 1996 actually contained real honest-to-God liberals, the first such creatures sighted in Washington in more than a decade. I'm not about to declare a bandwagon move or anything, but remember that fact 9 years from now when a Republican president wakes up to find his party stomped by liberals in off-year elections.

Conservatives have yet begun to face the sound and the fury of a nation scorned.

Jon Worley is a much bigger fan of the "theory" of William Faulkner than of his actual books.

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