“Let’s Not Shit Ourselves (To Love or To Be Loved)” – Bright Eyes
(Words/music: Conor Oberst, available on Lifted Or The Story Is In The Soil, Keep Your Ear To The Ground, Saddle Creek 2002)

As news of author J. D. Salinger’s passing spread this afternoon, I found myself thinking about the New York Times article “Get a Life, Holden Caulfield” from this past June.  In it, Jennifer Schuessler culls anecdotes from teachers who say that Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, no longer resonates with modern teenagers.  “Shut up and take your Prozac” quips one student at the end of the article, and from having taught the book the past few springs, this reaction isn’t unique.    I even think back to my first introduction to the book when I read it a dozen or so years ago.  I remember going home and asking my dad (an English teacher himself, and a teenager when the book became popular) what made the book so controversial (“you never read ‘crap’ in a book back then” is how I remember it).  Anyway, I remember finding all of the contradictions amusing and could empathize with the way Holden seethed with righteous anger.  It was only returning to the book later that I found his story as a series of cries for help, seeing Holden less as a snotty, self-righteous curmudgeon as a confused and damaged soul - one who desperately wanted to connect yet didn’t quite grasp the idea of meeting someone halfway. 

A few minutes later, my mind jumped to “Let’s Not Shit Ourselves.”  I’ll stop short of equating Conor Oberst’s persona with Holden Caulfield (for a variety of reasons, the primary being that things rarely equate themselves that cleanly), but my own personal relationship with these protagonists changed in similar ways.  I fell hard for Lifted when it came out in part because Oberst’s persona exhibited a lot of the same qualities I wanted to see in myself - he was angry at the world and could frame his anger and heartbreak with the eye of a poet.  I remember nodding my head along with the way he went through the different manifestations of bullshit in the song.  And like this narrator (and Holden too), I was blind to the bullshit in my own life.  Rather than take a deep look inward and risk finding something infuriating in myself, I focused my anger on the hypocrisy in the rest of the world.  Like Holden, this narrator wants something real and detests anything getting in the way.  However, neither looks in the right places.  Whether it’s Holden’s different personas or Oberst’s grades as false talismans of learning, both build their own reputations on the same phony foundations they seek to destroy. 

Eventually, Holden and Oberst’s narrator both have breakdowns.  While it’s unclear whether Holden learns his lesson after hitting rock bottom (or, to be fair, whether Oberst’s narrator genuinely believes what he says from his hospital bed), both needed to fall.  While my own epiphany thankfully wasn’t through a nervous breakdown, it changed how I looked at these characters.  Gone was the question whether they were heroic or pathetic, replaced with the thought that it was part of the cycle of coming to terms with one’s vulnerability.  What makes them both so powerful is that they speak equally to those on both sides of the divide.  The young adult, fueled by teenage invulnerability, may look at these characters as the embodiment of things thought yet never said.  At a healthy distance from that time in my life, I’m now seeing these barbs less as signs of strength and more as the moves of a wounded animal raging against a world that’s starting to crack through the surface. 

Of course, maybe I’m projecting too much of myself onto this, but I suppose that’s why these things dig in so deep.  Seeing ourselves in characters like these gives us the opportunity to look study ourselves from the outside.  When we’re lucky, it changes how we think from the inside as well.

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