Won't Somebody Do Something Silly?

By Barbara Ehrenreich

For a moment last year we seemed to be on the verge of a major new trend, the theme of which was angels. People were snapping up angel pins and wearing them on their shoulders, where normally the chip is carried. Soon, the trend spotters hoped, there would be a rage for choir music, angel food cake and Marshmallow Fluff. Huge feathery wings would sprout out from trench coats and parkas. But, alas, angels sputtered and stalled and never quite got off the ground.

Possibly related is the failure of the great altruism trend to appear on schedule. As predicted by Arthur Schlesinger Jr. and others, the '80s were supposed to be followed by something closely resembling the '60s: concern for the underdog, lower standards of personal hygiene, giving all for the cause. Perhaps it just seemed too overwhelming -- considering that to balance the greed of the '80s, commuters would have had to strip the very coats from their backs and donate them to unwashed vagrants, along with the keys to their country homes. So the altruism trend, along with the angels, remains a gleam in a trend watcher's eye.

Once America was the great exporter of trends -- not just fads, like multiple earrings and cholesterol anxiety, but whole new life-styles involving characteristic garments and substances of choice. In 1967, for example, the first hippies were detected in San Francisco, and within a year the historic fountains of Europe were crowded with pot-smoking young people clad only in feathers. In 1984 America produced the first yuppies, who have since moved on to infest London and Frankfurt. Why, the very concept of life-style is an American invention, implying that there is more than one choice.

But there hasn't been a serious life-style trend since the couch potato was sighted, in about '86, on one of its rare forays to the video store. Cocooning remains a significant mass enterprise, encouraged by the availability of 500 new cable channels and microwavable popcorn. But if you want an outdoor trend, one that demands emulation and is inspired by zest rather than a fear of human interaction and bizarre weather events, then there is nothing at all. The only trend worth mentioning is trendlessness.

This is hard on journalists, who are trained to spot trendlets in their infancy and hype them into vast cultural sea changes. Not too long ago, for instance, this magazine announced a "new-simplicity" trend involving antimaterialism and wood-burning stoves -- and then the new simplicity turned out to be only the old recession. Or there was CBS News's pitiful attempt a few weeks ago to claim alternative healing as a newsworthy trend. Healing with crystals and chamomile may have been trendy and exciting in '74. Today, among the 37 million uninsured, chamomile has long since replaced penicillin, and going to an internist is considered a form of "alternative healing."

All right, there were a few certifiable trendlets in '92 -- inflatable bikinis, Virgin Mary sightings, potato-spelling jokes -- but most were too sickly and feeble to grow. Divorcing one's parents looked big for a week or so, sparking hopes of a real estate boom as 10-year-olds sought their own condos. Menopause mania proved to be a flash, so to speak, in the pan, and "smart drugs" couldn't compete with the far more numerous dumb ones.

Obviously there are still deep underlying trends, indicative of seismic- scale cultural drift. Assisted suicide, for example. Abandoning the elderly in their wheelchairs. Intergenerational downward mobility. But these are not the kind of things one would want to see spread around the world like Hula Hoops, stamped MADE IN THE U.S.A. The same goes for the cannibalism trend as promoted by Anthony Hopkins, not to mention Studs-like game shows, in which attractive young people make witty remarks about body parts.

There hasn't even been a political trend worth mentioning -- the election signifying less a leftward trend than a rejection of the rightward trend, which has been slithering around for two decades now. As a result, we've been forced to import trends, like karaoke, or revive fossil trends like troll dolls, who first showed their wizened little rubber faces almost 30 years ago.

In the realm of dessert, the only happening thing is tiramisu, which comes to us from Italy via a brief craze in Japan. Even our gossip has to be imported, since we lack homegrown equivalents of the topless, toe-sucking, dysfunctional royals.

Perhaps we should welcome the posttrend era. We no longer rush off, herdlike, to become Jesus freaks or Valley Girls at the first hint from the national media. It takes maturity to see a fetching new image -- say Madonna in gold tooth and riding crop -- without thinking, "Hey, wow, that could be me!"

But there's something sad too about the decline of the American trend industry. Trendsetting requires innovation, ebullience and a level of defiant frivolity such as has not been seen in these parts for years. Maybe we've had too many Presidents with brown-tinted hair and programs distilled from focus groups. Or perhaps cocooning was by its nature the ultimate and final trend, after which no more are biologically possible: like the dodo snuggling into its nest, we have found our evolutionary niche, which turns out to be the couch in the den.

Patriotism demands at least one more world-shaking, American-made trend. Surely the nation that invented goldfish swallowing and the leisure suit is not willing to exit the millennium watching reruns on Nick at Nite. Arise, ye pallid twentysomethings, and do something deeply silly!