The dearly departed decade

You might have thought 2011 was a culturally rich year..Nooooope, it was just Chuck Testa.

Andrew Terefenko

Opinions Editor

They called the 2000s the dead decade, dead because over the period of ten years we were embraced by a rapid succession of vapid trends and fleeting revolutions.

It was a decade devoid of a consistent culture, and not as easy to label as the ones that preceded it. We had the Swinging Sixties, the Psychedelic Seventies, the New Wave Eighties and the sometimes-regrettable Boy Band Nineties. With a month left in the first two years since this deceased decade, are we going to be coming out of the same supposed rut in 2020?

This year has been defined by Eastern revolutions and dead dictators, but the same historical enthusiasm has not quite been applied to our cultural sectors. We instead are plagued by our Biebers, Gagas and interrupting Wests. While some cling to their work like personal bibles, those of us left sane after the ‘00s see the many undeserving self-deserved famous as leeches on the leg of culture. For the life of me I still cannot determine why Kim Kardashian has her own show.

Instead, this year has been enveloped by Internet memes and privacy scares. I am not able to tell you what gems of cinema came out this year, but I can whistle the keyboard cat’s tune within a single note’s margin of error. I can thus probably look forward to another eight years of time-wasting trollisms if this is a sign of things to come.

This isn’t a call for a cultural revolution, nor is it a cry for change. I am merely observing the state of things and predicting what we can expect from the rest of the twenty-tens. I don’t mean to undermine the insurmountable odds that underprivileged people have overcome to change their way of life as of late, but it would be difficult to make the case that we are on the verge of a decade-defining cultural trend.

It would not seem as disparaging an omen if so many cultural icons have not passed away in the past year. Huge influences such as Randy “Macho Man” Savage, self-slandering stand-up Patrice O’Neal and even freakin’ Peter Falk, who kept our grandparents busy when he pretended to be Columbo on television. They were names that seemed so eternal that they would follow us to our own graves, but not as much in the cold, bitter reality.

There is reason to believe otherwise, of course. There are artists and producers who try to reinvent themselves on a daily basis, and some who succeed. Memes may dominate our social spheres, but they are not the death of them.

We may not be doomed to be remembered by future generations for being glued to our handheld windows on the idiot-pandering Internet.

Then again, even if you think you’ve encountered the creative gold mine that may salvage our generation’s reputation, it’s probably just Chuck Testa.