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Pushing the envelope on BS

Whenever someone tells me there’s a radical paradigm shift a’comin’, there is only one thing of which I am certain. T’ain’t necessarily so.
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Whenever someone tells me there’s a radical paradigm shift a’comin’, there is only one thing of which I am certain. T’ain’t necessarily so. It’s not simply because paradigms — organizing principles, patterns of behaviour and thought — are inherently difficult to shift, requiring something as fundamental as, say, the development of personal computers, which so fundamentally changed the entertainment paradigm that video arcades virtually vanished from suburban shopping malls and moved to large-screened suburban dens. It’s because the language chosen to express the possibility of such change is, well, bullshit.

Anyone who peppers their language with phrases like shifting the paradigm, thinking outside the box or pushing the envelope is, linguistically, spanking the metaphorical — and quite possibly literal — monkey. You can be relatively certain their paradigm doesn’t have any gears to shift, their thoughts have rarely even traveled to the edges of the box and they have an endless supply of infinitely large envelopes.

Borrowed from the sociology of science, a spatial concept exercise and test flight, respectively, these turns of phrase have been co-opted by that lowest of life forms, management consultants, because (a) they sound cool and (b) are devoid of any real meaning. Kind of like the word proactive. But being cool and meaningless, they’re like catnip to a fat tabby and you’d be hard-pressed to wade all the way through a consultant’s report or any business management strategy without rubbing up against them.

My BS radar swung into high gear when Globe and Mail writer, Lawrence Martin wrote Monday about the “results” of a poll conducted by Frank Graves of Ekos Research on the generational divide between Canadians over 40 years old and under that arbitrary number. Big as life, there it was. Suggesting Canada will be in for a significant shakedown when the reins of power are finally pried from the boomers’ aging, arthritic fingers, he wrote, “…the ingredients are there for a radical paradigm shift." Loosely translated, this clearly means less will change than even we could imagine.

How disappointing.

Had Mr. Graves — a pollster which is subvariant of consultant — used some meaningful term to describe the coming change, I might have been tempted to search beyond the synopsis offered by the Globe and Googled however much of his poll results are publicly available. That’s because I agree with his unstated premise: Boomers have pretty much made a mess of things, governancewise.

Whether in politics, business, mass culture, cuisine, social equality or environmental stewardship, the overarching achievement of my ge-ge-generation has been one of elevating sybaritic excess to greater and greater heights while simultaneously losing sight of whatever goals we came into the game with. Not to worry though; we’ve lowered expectations even further than the definition of success in Iraq, lowered them sufficiently to believe we’ve succeeded. We’re Number One… and don’t you forget it.

Still, I’m not convinced, as is Mr. Graves, that things are going to get better when the next generation takes over. Without amplification, he’s convinced there will be no continuation of boomer biases, whatever those are, cigars and stringy ponytails coming immediately to mind. He finds the upcoming cohort of leaders more ethnically diverse, cosmopolitan, internationalist and anti-war as well as being less paranoid about terrorism and less ideological.

I’m still looking for the optimism in that description.

That’s because — time-traveling here — it could have been used a couple of decades ago to describe my generation. Some of my best friends’ best friends were black, Hispanic, oriental and native-American First Nations. We were moving off the farms and into the cities in droves. We traveled abroad and, hey, we wrote the book on anti-war in a way no snivelling generation who never faced the draft ever will. We didn’t know what terrorism was, albeit we lived with at least the subliminal understanding we could all be vaporized in an instant if the old white guys in the Kremlin or White House went off their nut after a particularly ugly round of golf. And, when we weren’t heightening our senses with street drugs or boinking our brains out, we were all about ideology… whatever that is.

Look what happened to us.

And let’s not lose sight of the fact we actually wanted to move out of our parents’ houses as soon as humanly possible.

By the time the boomers had reached the age of Mr. Graves’s Generation of Hope, we’d ended a war, started an environmental movement, laid the groundwork for greater equality of the sexes and races, made some good music and stopped eating spaghetti out of a can.

By contrast, the generation of new Phoenicians, as Mr. Graves refers to them, have evolved a shorthand language suitable to a text-messaging lifestyle, raised tattoos to an art form, made ordering coffee an all-morning affair and pioneered the cybernetic future by virtually implanting cell phones into their bodies.

While all these are noteworthy achievements, none of them give me a warm, fuzzy feeling about the next generation of leaders making much more meaningful headway towards a utopian or even remotely sustainable — you didn’t really expect me to make it through 1,100 words without using it once, did you? — society.

I’m personally pinning my hopes for the future on environmental disaster. But it’s a thin gruel with not much in the way of nourishment, a variation perhaps on the 1950s sci-fi staple of an invading alien army forcing the disparate peoples of Earth to set aside their petty differences and come together. And, in more lucid moments, I don’t really imagine seeing the world’s great coastal cities slowly submerged will accomplish anything more than stoking the nationalistic fires of expansion and conquest which, in a proliferating nuclear future, will once again raise the spectre of biggest damn fireworks display none of us will live to brag about.

But hey, if Russia can go all 17 th -century on us and start planting flags in the Arctic in a greedy, land-rush claim to the supposed riches locked away in the melting ice, I’m more than willing to support any movement that pushes Stephen Harper, Vladimir Putin, George Bush — especially George Bush — and the leaders of the rest of the Arctic countries — Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden — aside. I say let the new Phoenicians duke it out with their counterparts in those countries to see if there really is any cause for optimism.

I just hope their results are published in something other than IM language.