Cross-posted at The Smoking Room
How did I miss the bourgeois backlash against the prom? I didn’t go to mine – fitting the stereotype of a nerd with low self-esteem and parents barely cracking middle-class – but I had no idea there was a confluence of Catholic moralists and ex-hippie parents spouting anti-materialist shtick to keep their kids out of limos and fully dressed:
In September, the president and principal of Kellenberg Memorial High School, a Catholic school in Uniondale, sent a letter to a parent who complained after noticing the absence of a prom on the school calendar. The letter was circulated to all the parents and surfaced last week on the Chicago Tribune op-ed page. “You are correct,” Father Philip K. Eichner and Brother Kenneth M. Hoagland peremptorily begin. “The school calendar does not indicate the date for a senior prom. KMHS is no longer sponsoring a senior prom. As your own letter suggests, if parents and/or seniors want a senior prom, they will have a prom, no matter what the administration says or does. In fact, that is precisely the reason why we are no longer sponsoring a senior prom—it is so much beyond our control that it is mere tokenism to put our name on it.”
The memo is notable for its anti-parent animus—it boldly deploys a Dr. Phil-style rhetoric—but even more for its anti-materialist message. “It is not primarily the sex/booze/drugs that surround this event, as problematic as they might be,” that inspired the prom’s cancellation, Eichner and Hoagland explain. “It is rather the flaunting of affluence, assuming exaggerated expenses, a pursuit of vanity for vanity’s sake—in a word, financial decadence.” Surprisingly, KMHS parents and students haven’t kicked up much of a fuss. Maybe that’s because they recognize the diatribe has useful lessons for cowed parents eager to regain the moral high ground with their debauched adolescents. And perhaps those coddled kids might like to rebel for real rather than barf in limos on the way to beach houses supplied by parents for after-prom fun.
Maybe I’m just too nonconformist, but I’m doubtful teens will be impressed by their parents’ secular preaching and reminiscences about the ’60s. Kids still love the prom for the same reason we love “Saved by the Bell” and “The OC” – it provides us the rigid social structure we long for as children of England, that last great bastion of social stratification in the democratic world.
Showing off your dress and tux, living it up in the limo, penthouse and pool, while all those poor nerds roll their six-sided die and watch “Monty Python” in the basement…it’s the last chance the preppies have to live up their exalted status before the radical egalitarianism and protest ethic of college robs them of their social privilege. Why would they trade in their last hurrah to prematurely enter the nothingness fondly regurgitated by their enlightened parents?
I’m a tech journalist who’s making a TV show about a college newspaper.