Americans live (or try to live) the American Dream. But do not forget, it is a dream. A quick history of twentieth century culture: With equal parts optimism and cynicism, our forefathers,* Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Wyndham Lewis (to blame four at random) set out to found a new movement for a new century. This movement came to be known as Modernism and soon pervaded all forms of so-called art: fiction, poetry, painting, sculpture, music, dance, photography, etc. Though variations abounded, a theme underlay all Modern art forms, which Eliot summed up in his dictum for all poets: "Make it new" (that is, take what had been done before and do it in a way no one had thought of). Modernism was a bit frightening and confusing to the average American who would rather sit at home and read the Saturday Evening Post, and by the time the masses started to catch on and appreciate Jackson Pollack, it was over.

At this time, along came what I will call our midfathers** (the most notable of which were dubbed the Beatniks) and said "Hey, man, this is all Greek to me (for much of it was Greek, or Hindi, or Irish Gaelic); Let's go listen to some jazz." (This is not strictly true. Alan Ginsberg was an admirer of Ezra Pound, but by this time Pound was doing 12 years in the mental ward of St. Elizabeth's, handing out cards that said "Forgive me if I do not speak; I have already said too much"). The Beatniks took Modernism into the second half of the twentieth century kicking and screaming.

World War II had scarred the psyche of America and in its recovery America tried a new brand of optimism, trumpeted by a device called television. They began shooting things into space. Everyone (with the exception of the Beatniks and their ilk) felt that an age of everlasting prosperity was imminent. Marilyn Monroe. Hugh Heffener. Elvis Presley. The 1950's. Hubris hung heavy in the air. But like rats gnawing at the wiring, the Beatniks continued their ranting, prophets ostracized in their own homes. William Burroughs wrote an instantly banned classic called "The Naked Lunch" (a literary equivalent of the surrealist paintings of Salvador Dali), which he described as a myth for the "Space Age." Burroughs and his cronies looked down at their plates and saw their naked lunches where the majority of America saw a buffet dinner with cocktails.

And, yea, the Beatniks begat the Hippies, who lacking the vision and moral outrage of their predecessors, substituted instead copious quantities of marijuana and LSD. In the sixties, poets were replaced by rock stars, establishing a pattern of paradox that would continue for the rest of the millennium: these rock star poets ridiculed a society that paid them for their labors.* Similarly, Andy Warhol pronounced art to be dead and did strange things to the corpse.

(* Three interesting results of this paradox are
1) The self parody U2 have become.
2) The suicide of Kurt Cobain.
3) The career of Marilyn Manson.)

Hubris was replaced with irony; optimism, with sarcasm; progress, with paradox. Some clever bugger, pondering the riddle "What comes after Modernism," coined the term Post-Modernism and American Culture came to a dead end.

At least, this is my attempt to explain the apathy and cultural idiocy that are associated with the last generation of the 20th century, the so-called Generation X. A generation that has been given not culture, but television, advertisements, commercialism, consumerism, a piss poor education system, and McDonald's. "X" is the last letter of the alphabet; "Y" and "Z" are mere graphological hallucinations.

In an age when television has made surrealism redundant and deadened the human ability to feel, is art dead or is it just resting its eyes? Can an artist maintain integrity as a part of the American Money Machine without starving to death, or worse, remaining unknown? With the second millennium drawing to a close, American culture has the feel of an all-night party as the sun begins to rise and illuminate the aftermath of the night before. Do we try to clean up the mess or take a nap and wait for night to fall again? I'm for a shower and a shave, a cup of coffee and a pitchfork. Jim's Dictionary of Redefined Words calls art "any attempt to make people see things differently." This is what the following pages strive to be.

* This was when men were still in charge of things
** Men were still in charge of things at this point, but were rapidly losing ground.