Christopher Hitchens may be my favorite writer. His latest piece is no exception. He points out something that I should have found apparent years ago… but that I have for some reason or other… overlooked. It becomes immediately clear that the pronoun “YOU” has become the defining concept of this decade… “we report, you decide”…. “call YOUR doctor and ask about some drug” … …”youtube”… ” I hope you are getting the basic idea.
A room-service menu, for example, now almost always offers “your choice” of oatmeal versus cornflakes or fruit juice as opposed to vegetable juice. Well, who else’s choice could it be? Except perhaps that of the people who decide that this is the range of what the menu will feature. Fox TV famously and fatuously claims, “We report. You decide.” Decide on what? On what Fox reports? Online polls promise to register what “you” think about the pressing issues of the moment, whereas what’s being presented is an operation whereby someone says, “Let’s give them the idea that they are a part of the decision-making process.”
So, whatever happened to the Me Decade? The answer is that nothing happened to it. It mutated quite easily and smoothly into a decade centered on another narcissistic pronoun. Which pronoun is that? You be the judge.