Woody Allen, Millenials and the Same Vapid Culture

Woody Allen must answer those who now accuse him of immoral behavior. His generation grew up in a kind of social and political moral vacuum. In  Woody’s youth in the 1950s, we had three clear and loud moral commands: hate Communists, shut up about everything else and use the educational and economic system to make money. James Jones wrote a novel published then, “From Here to Eternity”, in which the hero declares you’re nothing if you don’t go your own way. We either went the way of a morally inept and vapid society or our own way. Woody refused the public-school educational system which taught him nothing culturally except drivel and refused the dead-beat culture taught in colleges which was mainly European culture, by then a dead culture strangled to death by the Second World War. What to do? Something, anything other than what we were supposed to do. Woody almost became a criminel and saved himself by becoming a comic. Then he succeeded in enlivening the tedious and dumb conformity of the period in movies with the interesting and unusual personalities of actors who floated before us for a few minutes as though real persons even though clearly they belonged to no society of any moral authenticity.  The insipidity of our American culture will tirelessly turn all of us into work-a-day slobs unless we find the courage to express ourselves with real freedom and real words free of media blather and oversimplified talking points. We need also some brave and free political acts that may end our moral vapidity by actually creating goodness. But nothing has changed much since Woody’s time. We have terrorists instead of communists and the educational paths to success are still dead-beat with most humanistic studies gone. The millenials have the same vapid culture. Their technological bells and whistles don’t make it as lively as they think. But there is one difference. They don’t feel any necessity to go their own way. That’s big. The vapidity is still real. They accept it wholeheartedly and intend to enjoy it as best they can until their generation or a new one decides it is immoral to live without the freedom and creativity of the bold.

Daniel McNeill

Read 42 arguments for changing the United States of America to the United States of the World at: usoftheworld.com