Clovers In The Atmosphere

when I was wee, I considered the appeal of "the west wing" (back in the Sorkin years before it became ER for politics) to my college classmates to be something akin to power porn; they projected themselves into these glamorous roles. I was watching sex and the city on Bravo (first season when Carrie has red hair and talks to the camara) and I started to wonder if that show acted as performative literature for an generation of power elite females. I am not talking about people identifying with the underlying personality catagories, I am talking about people turnign this fiction into a reality for lack of a better superstructure. What other role models do they have? And if this is the case, how does one combat the performative aspects of all television on the impressionable. Now I'm not Tipper Gore here, but I am curious about how we learn to act like adults. The novel "holds a mirror up to western society so as to teach it how to behave." that's a paraphrase of I'm not sure. But given the rise of chick-lit, that is hardly solace. we tend to read what we like now that we have slipped the shackles of assignments. Are we bound to reinfornce our own worst stereotypes? I guess Philip Roth taught me to hate women. Or let me feel ok about it. The devil may wear Prada, and Patrick Dempsey is hard to resist (I'm branching out from literature, I know), but how do a subset of young people who have been told in no uncertain terms by society that what they set their mind to will be theirs, that the realities of humanity are not so simple a transaction?

GO SKINS!