School Is in Session

Me, Madonna and the kids who finally went outside

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Earlier this year a judge in India compared the country's unemployed young people to cockroaches. Somebody made a parody account out of the insult, the account turned into a movement calling itself the Cockroach Janta Party, and by the middle of July it had pulled millions of followers, frightened its own founders with the speed of the thing, and put a national government on the back foot over an examination system that had been quietly failing an entire generation for years.

They could have named themselves anything at all, and what they chose to keep was the insult. They printed it, wore it as a mask, and walked it into the capital, because a cockroach is the organism that survives what kills everything else, and I don't believe for a second that was lost on any of them.

Anshuka Ruth Das spent two days getting ready, and when she left Gurugram early on a Monday morning she hid the placards inside a paper bag. She is eighteen, and she and her friends were headed for Jantar Mantar in the middle of Delhi, and when a reporter asked her why she had come she said she was there for the kids who died.

The test at the center of all this is the one that decides who gets into India's public medical colleges. Two million young people sit it every year for a fixed number of seats, and this year the papers leaked and the whole apparatus turned out to have been rotten before any of them opened a booklet. Twelve students have taken their own lives since. The ones still standing, who had spent months preparing, who had eaten and slept and dreamt inside that preparation, were told to come back and sit it again, as though a year of a person's life were a file you restore from backup.

The state answered the way states answer, with metro stations closed and roads barricaded and the internet throttled, and then with batons and tear gas and protesters dragged into vans, some of them pushing their heads out through the windows so the cameras could see their faces bleeding. A twenty-six-year-old management graduate from Bihar named Mohammad Anis said the gas took his breath away for a moment and his arm was hurt in the crush, and then said that staying quiet in the face of injustice is precisely how injustice continues. Sonam Wangchuk, fifty-nine, went twenty days into a hunger strike before police carried him out of the protest site and into a hospital.

Then, on a Saturday in late July, the education minister resigned. The core demands were met, the nationwide protests were called off, and a government not remotely in the habit of conceding conceded in a matter of weeks to something that had started as a joke about vermin.

I have spent the better part of two decades writing about attention and how it converts into value, so I want to be precise about what happened there, because it is not quite what the coverage is calling it. This was not the internet winning, given that the internet had been furious about that examination system for years and had changed exactly nothing. What changed is that a generation raised to believe posting is participation went and stood in a street and let itself be hit, and everything that followed, followed from the bodies.

I watched all of it from a room in New York, on a phone, refreshing.

Now hold that up against the thing people my age and older cannot stop saying about people that age, which is that they're soft, that they don't want to work, that somewhere between the last recession and the front-facing camera something went out of them, some appetite for hardship that we supposedly had and they supposedly lack.

Twelve of them are dead because they worked too hard for a test that had already been sold.

The accusation was never really about work, it was about the performance of work. My generation and the one above it built an entire moral system on visible exhaustion, on the sixty-hour week worn like a decoration, on answering email at midnight so that somebody would see the timestamp, and we mistook the theater for the labor so completely that we can no longer tell them apart. So when a twenty-four-year-old declines to perform the theater, what we hear is a refusal to work.

They will suffer, they are suffering, and they are simply no longer willing to do it for a rigged exam, or for a software job that evaporated in a quarterly restructuring, or for a ladder whose bottom three rungs were automated while they were still in school. What Delhi demonstrated, for anyone my age who cared to look, was a generation fighting for the right to compete inside a system that actually functions, which is not the absence of a work ethic but the most demanding version of one I have seen in years, and it cost twelve lives before it produced a resignation.

Which is where this gets strange, because I need to tell you about a dance floor.

The same summer those kids were being tear-gassed over the right to a fair examination, a sixty-seven-year-old woman released a song called "School."

​It opens with her talking instead of singing, and what she says, roughly, is that the only thing she likes more than sharing what she knows is being taught something she doesn't. She is sixty-seven years old, four decades into being the most photographed, most litigated, most exhaustively documented woman in popular music, and she begins a song called "School" by asking to be a student.

I'm nearly twenty years younger and I haven't read a truer sentence all year.

The song is not about pedagogy, because school is in session, in her hands, is a line about sexual instruction, and the track runs on her own memories of the New York club years that made her. Its pivotal move is a refusal, because she declines the maternal role the culture reserves for women her age and claims the role of lover instead, and she does it in a single line that makes the substitution sound obvious rather than defiant. Which is, when you sit with it, the argument of everything that follows in this essay, made by somebody nineteen years ahead of me and on the other side of the gender line.

She has spent this summer doing something nobody her age is supposed to be able to do, which is fill rooms with people who were not alive for any of it. Confessions II landed in July with Stuart Price back at the board, and before that she had turned up at Coachella beside Sabrina Carpenter, four decades between them, first on the same stage and then on the same credit. Meanwhile there is a Madonna night every Friday at a club in Hollywood and it sells out. It isn't a nostalgia night, and it isn't an eighties night where she gets filed between Wham! and Cyndi Lauper, it's a Madonna night, four decades of one catalogue, and the room is full of people in their twenties.

They are not nostalgic and they cannot be, because nostalgia requires having been there and none of them were. What they're responding to is the only genuinely scarce commodity left, which is duration. Forty years of visible change, all of it on the record, every era time-stamped, including the ones that failed. You can follow the entire arc and watch a person move through time.

That is not what the culture currently supplies, which is an infinite quantity of surface with nothing underneath it, a feed that refreshes and forgets, artists with eighteen months of catalogue and a marketing plan. Set against that, a forty-year discography isn't old, it's deep, and it is the difference between a puddle and a well, and a generation that has been drowning in puddles its entire life has gone looking for a well.

And the people who cannot stand this are the ones who built her.

I wrote an essay a while back called The Dead Get Nostalgia, and the argument was that death cleans the record. We forgive the dead everything, because they can no longer complicate the story we've settled on, and so Michael and Prince and George and Whitney are fixed now, finished, safe to love. Madonna's actual crime, the one nobody will say out loud, is that she is still here, still changing, still refusing to hold the pose we assigned her in 1990.

I want to extend that now, because a year of watching this play out has shown me the part I missed.

The generation that made her has spent thirty years surgically deleting its own timeline. The same people who bought Like a Prayer, who lost their minds over the Sex book, who built a global institution around a woman whose entire method was transformation, decided somewhere around their fortieth birthdays that transformation had become a crime, and so they froze, and filled and lifted and tightened and resurfaced until they arrived at a face that is smooth and ageless and completely unreadable, and from behind that face they now scrutinize hers and pronounce it grotesque.

It isn't hypocrisy, or not only, it's projection with a scalpel. They are punishing in her the passage of time they paid a great deal of money to conceal in themselves, and in the process they destroyed the exact thing the young are now hunting for. They preserved the surface and deleted the story, and there is nothing left to read on those faces, no arc, no evidence, no record of having been anywhere at all. They optimized themselves into illegibility and then wondered why nobody under thirty finds them interesting.

The dead get nostalgia. The living get scrutiny. The smoothed get skipped.

Which brings me to the part of this I have been circling for months without knowing how to say it, because there is no version that doesn't risk sounding like a man congratulating himself.

I am forty-eight, and somewhere in the last two or three years, without any change in my circumstances that I can identify, I started getting approached by people in their twenties and early thirties, men and women both. Not politely and not ambiguously, but propositioned, flirted with, pursued with a directness I did not encounter once at twenty-five and would have given a great deal for. It isn't occasional, it is the current condition of my life, and I have found it disorienting enough to spend real time trying to understand it rather than simply enjoying it.

Let me put the obvious objections on the table first, because they're mine too. I am in young rooms, I have taught, I move through the entertainment world, I live out of a suitcase by choice and spend my days in art houses and cafes and small shops in cities where I know nobody, which are precisely the places young people are. I also have no mortgage and no children, which means I hold a quantity of free time and free attention that most men my age simply do not, and a man with two teenagers and a job he cannot walk away from has considerably less room to be interesting than I have. Some of this is circumstance and I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

Except that it doesn't finish the job, because there are unattached men my age in every one of those rooms who are more accomplished, better connected and considerably better funded, and this is not happening to them. So here is what I have landed on.

I'm still curious.

That sounds like nothing, and I have come to think it is close to everything, because it turns out to be the one thing almost nobody keeps. I want to be accurate here, because what I said about Madonna's generation does not describe the men I actually know. Nobody has had himself sanded down, they are tired, and they are carrying money and ageing parents and children and bodies that have started sending them notices, and worrying about what they will leave behind and about how little of their own time belongs to them at all. Nothing was surgically removed from those men, it was spent.

I'm not going to pretend I got here by being well, either. I look healthy, and I am one wrong medication away from carrying fifteen extra kilos and one dip in immunity away from a month of constant pain. My health is a yo-yo and I stopped hiding the string a long time ago. I wear the scars, I talk about the bad stretches, and in none of it have I ever found a reason to stop wanting things.

That's the part that reads, and it isn't the mileage on my face, which I promise you nobody is examining, but the fact that I am still interested. I still ask questions I could comfortably pretend to know the answers to. I have arrived at the age where a man is expected to convert his experience into wisdom and begin dispensing it, and I have no appetite whatsoever for the job. I don't share the wisdom of why. I still embrace the why nots.

Twenty-somethings clock that immediately, because it is their own default condition and they almost never see it in someone my age. It isn't that I remind them of being young, it's that I haven't yet done the thing adults do, which is to decide that the questions are closed. They have no shortage of polish and no shortage of surfaces, and what they're short of is evidence that a person can get this far and still be glad to be here.

And here is where the arithmetic stops being flattering, because I know exactly where the curiosity came from and it was not character. I was told twice that I might not get a long horizon, and a man without a long horizon cannot defer anything, so I stopped deferring. Everything my peers postponed until the mortgage cleared or the children grew, I took immediately, because I had been given excellent reasons not to wait. The appetite that reads as vitality is a side effect of having been made to understand that there might not be a later.

I wouldn't undo it, and I want to be clear about that, because the second life is the only one I would choose. But I'd be lying if I said the arithmetic sits easily, and there is something genuinely bleak in discovering that the most attractive thing about you was installed by the worst thing that ever happened to you.

Something else is shifting too, and I don't think my generation has noticed. The labels we used to police this with are losing their grip, because daddy and cougar were only ever containment devices, ways of taking desire that crossed an age line and filing it under comedy or pathology so that nobody had to sit with it. You were permitted to want, but only from inside the category, and the category arrived with a laugh track. The people approaching me don't reach for those words and don't appear to need them, so the attraction comes unlabeled, which means it comes as attraction, and I had genuinely forgotten that was available.

Which is, in the end, what those kids in Delhi were saying, in a register that costs a great deal more.

​They had a screen, they had the internet's entire arsenal of outrage, they had been deploying it for years, and it had produced nothing but engagement. So they got up and walked into a street and let themselves be hit, because at some point a generation worked out that the digital version of a life is not a life but a rendering, and a rendering cannot be tear-gassed, which means it also cannot win.

The dance floor is the same instinct with better lighting, and so is who they want to sleep with. Every one of these is a body deciding to be somewhere, insisting on being real inside a culture that has quietly made it optional.

The generation that made her kept the face and lost the appetite, and still cannot work out why the young walked past.

So what have they taught me. I'm still working that out and I expect I always will be, which I suspect is the entire point of a woman with forty years of catalogue opening a song by asking somebody to tell her something she doesn't already know. You don't graduate, staying enrolled is the whole thing.

But there is one piece I can name, which is that I had quietly decided I was done, not dramatically, not in any way I would have admitted out loud, but somewhere in the years of scans and second opinions and learning to plan my life in six-month increments I filed love under things that had happened to a previous version of me. It wasn't grief, it was administration. I took everything else immediately and quietly wrote that one off.

And then people started looking at me with curiosity in their faces, not pity and not politeness and not the careful warmth that gets reserved for the formerly ill, but curiosity and depth and wanting. It's flattering and I won't pretend otherwise, but the flattery isn't what got me. What got me is that it reopened a question I had closed, and I hadn't understood until it swung back open how much it had cost me to shut it.

School is in session, and I'm the one taking notes.

​Perhaps, maybe, I could be your lover, lover, lover, lover.