Surrounded by jerks

I'm going to have to reach back a bit because I finished Catcher a little while ago and all the details are a little fuzzy.
Generally I liked it. Salinger seems to have a way to make the lives of wealthy people seem mundane; a trick Bret Easton Ellis would use in his books Less Than Zero, and (especially) The Rules of Attraction.
But there must be some truth to it all... These kids who get stuck in rich boarding schools and colleges across the country, grasping for some meaning for their lives. I think it's a theme that resonates today just as strongly, if not stronger.

Something happened around the turn of the century, pretty much after the industrial revolution really took off - people that once were not rich started becoming rich. Previously if your were the child of someone poor you stayed poor, and if you were the child of someone rich you too would become rich and would stay that way unless you blew the fortune away somehow - there's stories about that too.
But then the revolution happened and people started making money in the trades. This created a new middle-class - those that had grown up poor, but now were able to afford a few luxury items. Things like education for your children was now available for those people.

The point I'm getting at is this - the values of the parent and the values of the child are rarely in-sync with one another. The children of those who gained wealth and brought themselves up from a state of poverty cannot appreciate the struggle of their parents and won't understand or value things like education or a nice home.

Enter Holden Caulfield - hopelessly bored and unmotivated to succeed. He, like many of his generation and subsequent others, was born into a life without significant strife or suffering. Without anything to fight against or for, he drifts - clinging to the idea that one day he may light upon something that stirs a passion within him and allows him to commit his life to the pursuit of that goal.
I mentioned before in my other blog that I thought Holden was a little snot. Maybe that was too harsh - but I don't like him. He reminds me of me too much.
I mean, the me before I figured out what I wanted to do with my life. He reminds me of all the high school kids I see on the bus, sneering and bobbing their heads to audible bass drums from their headphones.
Stop me when I start to sound old...

I don't blame those kids, or Holden, for being lost. We're a generation born into a padded world, an invisible bubble, where consumer safety groups, PTA's, and endless "mom blogs" create a sense of paranoia and panic about everything. Just today I heard about people worried about the levels of mercury in those energy efficient bulbs - you know, the ones that we all feel better about buying because they use less wattage and will save the Earth? Apparently they're slowly killing us...
Examine anything long enough and you'll find an insidious danger. Even people trying to do the right thing are lost amid the labyrinth of advisory warnings. No wonder people are constantly looking for ways to change their lives; we're just running from a constant, unseen enemy.

Things weren't that different in 1945 when Catcher was first published (he says, as if he'd been there), it's just accelerated now. How fitting for our keeping-up-with-the-Joneses zeitgeist that the carousel should be the final symbol of the novel, when Holden finally realizes the futility of straining for happiness in a world created for him by his parents that doesn't appeal to his interests.
We're all still on a carousel grasping for the golden ring - only the horses are atomic, it spins exponentially faster, and the golden ring is a perfect Facebook status or a clever "tweet".

What bothered me most about Holden is how he constantly accused everyone of being "phony" when he was no better.
But how interesting that this character has captured the interests of school children when they were forced to read Catcher in high school. He was the rebellious youth, who gets kicked out of school, wanders New York, trying to get drunk and laid, and thinks he's special and unique and different than the rest of the world.
The true mark of maturity is realizing that you are not as special as you always believed or were told, but then trying to make yourself so anyway; creating meaning for yourself so life is not monotonous and dry.
He foreshadows this at the beginning by saying you don't want to hear about "all that David Copperfield kind of crap", he figures it out. You are not your name or your hometown. You're not your parents.

"You're not your fuckin' khakis"