I have to remember when I listen to songs by my favorite group, The Who, that they are my parents' age. My parents were children of the 50s and 60s, but not of the decades that have been mythologized in pop culture. It was easy for me to identify with Who lyrics because the generation gap between me and my parents was more situational that temporal. My parents never rebelled like rock n' roll instructs us to do. I heard the lyrics to "My Generation" - '...Hope I die before I get old', and I knew I could relate more than they. This seemed like fluffy filler for what I really wanted to say, but I'm finding some connection to the concept and term "authenticity". How authentic is my music collection when it's headlined by a band that grew up in a different time, let alone a different country? How can I relate to rock music more than my parents who grew up during its formative years? Authenticity becomes a term that is highly problematic for me. I think context is very useful in understanding how people or groups situate themselves. Context can even clue us in to why they argue for their own authenticity. But the term is truly in the eye of the beholder, it's just that some periods of time, more beholders agree on one context being more genuine.
Nutrition has been my focus for about six months when I decided to truly do something about my weight (Having uncontrolled Type 2 Diabetes and a three-year-old son doers wonders for motivation!). I started reading and mostly agreeing with practitioners of low-carb eating. One of the writers, journalist Gary Taubes, wrote a book called Good Calories, Bad Calories. In it, he shows how the medical community has been stuck in a paradigm of "heart-healthy" that promoted carbs and demonized fat for the last fifty years. With some trepidation and much hope, I shed carbs and replaced them with fat and protein. Voila!, the pounds melted away and my diabetes numbers have never been better. Why did the medical establishment eschew some science to keep one particular theory alive? Why is anything considered authentic and any deviation its own brand of quackery? (I don't know if this is any kind of apt comparison, but blah blah blah...and, yes, I monitor my lipid panels carefully for those who worry.)
The term "authentic has been used to mean looking for our true selves. I find this interesting to think about. Drawing back the curtain is not a new practice, apparently. Among other wizards, the Catholic church was found to be wanting in the search for a true self. Although filled with immovable power structures, methinks that some Protestants were sore they were not the ones in charge. What's fascinating to me here is that the search for an authentic, unalienated self led to what many believed later to be the antithesis of freedom and democracy- communism. Was not Karl Marx looking for authenticity? We are so bound to words and definitions that we can't see the forest. Creating democracy invokes the word and contentious concept of individual freedom while paying lip-service to the masses lifting off the yokes of oppression- group freedom if you will. Communism uses the same concepts, it just emphasizes the second part. Do either get us to where their founders wanted us to be?
Without beginning another lecture on great moments in history, I will quote my "authentic" favorite band again with a lyric that is eloquent, energetic and fully depressing: "Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss."
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