The more I watch Tim the Tool Man Taylor, the more I find myself more annoyed than entertained. The window into the boomer child bearing years psyche is incredibly intriguing, especially since it’s also a window into the mid to late 90s- a period in time that is now as nostalgically revered to the american populace as the swinging 50’s were in the 1980s- but it reminds me of things, culturally systemic things, that we often lose in the pink nostalgic fog. Darker things.
In the episode I just watched, Randy and Brad write a fake letter to their youngest brother Mark, pretending to be Mark’s favorite basket ball player, saying that he got all his fan letters and would be coming by for dinner on saturday. Just to disappoint him, and then make fun of him in his grief/shock/self loathing for falling for it. After Mark goes running off Randy and Brad high five, and Randy remarks “Oh, we are TOO good....”
Maybe kids are this mean still. Maybe they’re worse. I couldn’t say. But they were this mean in the 90s, and it was encouraged by the culture- by the Boomers. Mean was their sense of humor, and their kids took it to extremes. I was mean too. I thought it was just being cool. Everyone else did it. Everyone laughed in agreement. Sometimes you were the butt, most of the times it was someone else. Some people had an uneven share of being the butt, but even the butt had his day. I remember the kid everyone picked on the most. This boy named Jamie. But most of my memories of him are in celebration poses for various victories, in sports or academic or just lucky draw situations. Fist pumping the air, people high fiving him.
Tim is just as mean as Randy, to Al- the true King of the show. I can’t believe I never noticed. I remember once in 7th grade, a kid who would go on to be one of my best friends set himself up for a really mean barb, and I delivered it in front of the table to raucous laughter. He turned bright read and slugged me in the shoulder, but I could see in his eyes how hurt he was and it came back at me like a dagger to the throat. He never played the mean games, and was one of the nicest kids I had met- though we didn’t know each other for long at that point. I realized how unfair and uncalled for it was afterwards, and have been haunted by the gesture ever since.
And I’ll offer some unsolicited advice, while we aren’t on the subject- don’t ever let an institution tell you what to care about. In the 90s we had these commercials of starving children and kennel puppies with a weepy voice and a phone number to call and give vampires your resources on the backs of your healthy human sympathy. You can’t trust systems, even if the cause seems just.
What you can trust is yourself. You can trust yourself to change the world around you for the better. You can trust yourself to engage with your neighbors and give them surplus time and resources you might have to give. If you make yourself into a net positive to your immediate environment, if you trust your own feelings on who to care about and what, and what you can do to make the world around you even a slightly better place in a real tangible way, you don’t ever have to feel shame, morally- especially from systems designed to prey on the good will of others for the system’s gain.
Don’t call the 1-800 number.
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