T-shirts, sweatpants, jackets, and workout clothes proudly bearing the university name 'Hollister' appeared seemingly overnight, first on teenagers, then cropping up in the wardrobes of Americans in their twenties, perhaps as old as thirty. They were stylish clothes, attractively cut, up-to-the-minute in terms of fashion, and of course there's no such place as 'Hollister' - it was simply a designer clothing line made to look like school-spirit wear. Among college students one saw Hollister-brand clothes far more often than any other college wear, indeed more than most school-name-bearing outfits combined. That the most popular college in America apparently didn't exist was no great surprise or disappointment; one expected little from one's countrymen, or perhaps pretended to for social reasons. But the cynicism of it was bothersome. America's beloved Hollister University didn't even pretend to exist - it wasn't a fake college so much as set of pointers to where a fake college might have been had anyone cared enough to bother finishing the fantasy. A fake college would have had fake classes, imaginary professors, maybe even a make-believe location in some state ending in a vowel. Hollister had supporters, who constituted the school all on their own, indirectly. Unpaid advertisers. Actually no, this wasn't the upsetting part either; it was the creeping grey feeling that everything else also worked that way. Not just Disneyworld and political parties but everything: the names of cities, family reunions, church barbecues, marriage. One worried, maybe - in moments of idle melancholy - that the things one loved or just wanted weren't really things at all, just variables, things to put one's desire into. It was a rough time for people inclined to be upset by such things; but then, most times are.
Solipsism and private worry first, and then this:
A Hollister-clad high-schooler sat down in a café holding a capacious shoulder bag the colour of bubble gum; in college-logo letters it said 'Make PINK Not War.' The phrase meant nothing, but neither did anything else, so you could accept it. But the girl almost certainly hadn't given even a moment's thought to the origin of the slogan, was unlikely to have had any contact with members of the liberation-sexology counterculture that produced it, probably related more closely to whatever corporate subdivision had co-opted and branded the word 'PINK' than to the shift in sexual mores that had helped make such stupid low-grade commercial prurience a key facet of modern American culture. For whatever reason, the girl's shoulder bag was 'cool'; and that symbol-system had no relation whatsoever to any other. Cool was its own end. That it emerged from a 'manufactured consensus' didn't matter to the teenagers who (literally) lived and died by it, because they were powerless anyhow, so their commercial subjection wasn't news. It certainly wasn't cool to worry about where cool came from, and no one wanted to be reminded of how little their choices mattered.
There was your horror, right there: realizing that 'cool' was a closed system, self-perpetuating and self-justifying, the grand game children played because they were forbidden from engaging in the equally grotesque but more productive games of adulthood, barred from meaningful power struggles and so free to pervert one another's senses of themselves at each crucial developmental stage by means of monstrous status games. 'Cool' was ultimately another mechanism by which children's time was filled because adults didn't trust them to take active part in society.
The creation of the 'teenager' had epiphenomenally produced a commercial popular culture whose purpose was to justify the powerlessness and meaninglessness of teenage life - and so pop narratives obsessively returned to high school and pubescent coming-of-age, insisting that teenage life was Terribly Important but rarely acknowledging that teenage unhappiness is mostly a function of the absolute debilitating arbitrariness of 'adulthood' being marked by numerical age. The emptiness and stupidity of teenage culture was in part a function of teenagers' ignorance and irresponsibility, but those shortcomings only arose in the first place because adolescents were treated at every turn as children-plus-sex-drives, were kept from serious work and the pursuit of self-directed projects, stuck with self-organization for recreational purposes and left to figure out for themselves that their power - their joy - came from precisely those 'onerous' adult commitments and organizations they found so constricting.
So the 'real horror' of 'Make PINK Not War' wasn't that it said nothing, helped nothing, arbitrarily divorced modern struggles from historical ones, made everyone stupider, cost real money for fake pleasure. The sin didn't belong to the teenager in the café - she's gone now, I'm alone here with my preoccupations - nor even to those who made and sold her the bag, who were guilty only of greed and lack of imagination (which are of course the same thing). The sin was the belief that children are happy being belittled and infantilized, popular culture(s) that provided only meaningless choices - fashion - and force-fed children mere pleasure at the expense of real joy. Of course teenagers made bad choices: if the alternative to braindead, insipid pop fashion is the unmotivated drudgery of standardized institutional education and - its intended end - the moneygrubbing business/financial rat race, of course kids will choose empty pleasures. Joy comes from working hard at what we believe in, of course; and children are permitted to believe in and fight for nothing more complex or meaningful than a 'university' that doesn't even pretend to actually exist.
Pop culture is for idiots and children because that's the only way we can justify denying the joy of truly empathetic open-minded creativity to our children. It's a mechanism of control.
The complexity of certain popular narratives - like the effectiveness of individual classrooms - is a function of well-meaning individuals resolving to make the best of a bad situation. The culture was built on any number of fictions; that's what culture is, fiction made operable. 'Make PINK Not War' served a straightforward purpose, namely to obscure an unpleasant truth: There's no such thing as a teenager. The transformation of 'ages 13 to 18 or 19' into some sort of demographic halfway house forced hundreds of millions to spend the better part of their second decades looking like young adults and acting like children for lack of anything worthwhile to do. No wonder they spent all their free time figuring out ways to touch one another's genitals without alerting the authorities: until they were pronounced 'grownups,' there was nothing else for them to reach for.
And that, too, was a self-perpetuating, self-justifying, closed system. The hidden purpose of 'cool' was to get the kids to smile while we denied them their freedom. But we would settle, in the absence of smiles, for keeping the little fuckers quiet.
