Liberties There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence

We knew we were already too late. Too late to be modernists, too late to be reds, too late to turn against Stalin, too late to fight the Nazis, too late to be red-baited, too late to join the anti-communist left, too late to take money from the CIA for our magazines. We were too late to be Cold Warriors and too late to bother trying to ban the bomb — the situation was in hand, we were told. We were too late for cheap rent. We came after Stonewall and, most of us, after the worst of the AIDS crisis. The famous zones of bohemian social life were expired: we never stepped foot in the real Cedar Tavern, or the Factory, or the Bunker, or Max’s Kansas City, or the Mudd Club, or Studio 54. We weren’t too late for the Downtown Art Scene Gold Rush, which seems to be permanent, if permanently tainted, because money has to come from somewhere. We weren’t too late to go to CBGB’s, but we were too late to see Television there; we instead saw bands that sounded like Television because the first thing we learned about when we were children was recycling. We were all recyclers. A term available for recycling at the time of our arrival was hipster, so that’s what they called us and what some of us called each other or even ourselves, especially when we were bemoaning our artistic or intellectual bankruptcy, which is not exactly the subject of this essay. We were hipsters but we weren’t “White Negroes,” which is not a phrase we would use, no matter how many of us were reading Norman Mailer. We were deracinated. We Were postcolonial. We were “diverse,” or so it was said. Most of us, it should be admitted, went to Fancy Colleges. If you went to a Fancy College in the late 1990s, you might have been handed something that looked like a magazine called Diversity & Distinction. It was the institution’s propaganda for us, about us. It wasn’t untrue, but we distrusted advertisements, even advertisements for ourselves. It was called Meritocracy and you had to believe in it a little bit because otherwise you wouldn’t be there. Otherwise there was no way you belonged, unless it was the wrong kind of belonging, the old kind, the kind you could just pay for. We might have been diverse but we were all good at filling in the right little circles with our pencils, and we loved studying, whatever love means in this context. Maybe we loved reading or maybe winning was what we loved. The campus experience for undergraduates of the late 1990s was a quiet one. The culture wars of the late 1980s and early 1990s had subsided and were spoken of in the past tense by survivors. Political correctness was dormant. There were hardly any drugs. We had irony and hip hop. We were moving from grunge to twee. If you spent early mornings chalking the pavements of the Fancy College Yard against the bombings in the Balkans it was a lonely operation — there might be two of you. And maybe the Kosovars did need us to save them. Maybe your grandmother was Albanian. Chalk is easily washed away by rain. A strange thing that happened at the end of Fancy College was that many of us signed up to be recruited by investment banks and were hired by them at what were rumored to be very high salaries. Was this always the point? Didn’t they write their theses about Habermas? Is that why they cut their hair last year? It didn’t matter to us—we would forget them — because we wanted to be Writers and Intellectuals. The summer after we graduated there appeared a double issue of The City Dweller Magazine with the slogan THE FUTURE OF AMERICAN FICTION, along with the first lines of twenty short stories, emblazoned across the sky on its cover. The sky was part of a cartoon drawing of a hunched man in tattered clothes looking out at the horizon from the sands of an alluring and otherwise vacant beach. (The sky writing was apparently this coastal hobo’s beach read.) Within the issue were the stories — one of them a classic — but, more important, there were photographs of the writers, all of whom were not yet over the age of forty (let’s not press this issue). They were pictured as if socializing together against glamorous backdrops — in Brooklyn across the East River (or was it Jersey and the Hudson?) from a blurry Manhattan skyline; on the back of a flatbed truck speeding past some trees perhaps to the Hamptons, or past the vista of a bridge perhaps to the Catskills — and they seemed happy. They seemed to be friends. It might have been a reunion of extras from the pilot of Friends, a show we never watched. Literary life was convivial. Some of these figures of the Future we already knew from author photos on the jackets of books we would bring with us to the City. There was Our Hero, and there was Our Hero’s Best Friend. (Our Hero would later kill himself and His Best Friend would appear on Oprah after grumbling about it.) There was the Dystopian Buddhist. There was The Guy Who Wrote the Novel the Movie The Ice Storm Was Based On, as well as The Guy Whose Novels Were Too Weird to Ever Adapt for the Screen, The Guy Who Loved Comic Books, and The Guy Who Wrote the Novel Narrated in the Second Person Plural. (Collectively, these guys were later dubbed The New White Guys by The Mean Gay White Guy.) There was The Guy Who Also Wrote Young Adult Fiction and The Lady Who Would Later Move to Italy. There was The Guy Who Loved Video Games and The Lady from the Tragic Island. There was The Graphomaniac Who Wrote about Sleeping with Prostitutes and Was Sometimes