There is a holiday tradition in my family (and many others)
that takes place at Christmas time. We all gather around an open hearth to
enjoy hot chocolate, laughter with loved ones, and a tirade from anyone over 63
entitled, “The Problem with Your Generation.” This tirade will usually begin
with a short anecdote about some atrocity recently witnessed in a public place,
such as a young child using an iPhone or a teenaged clerk demonstrating a
blatant dislike of his or her minimum wage position, and digress into a
complete list of grievances with Today’s Youth. In writing Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Jeff Kinney creates a caricature of the “American
Brat” – the type of kid that fuels the speech of my incensed family members, rolling
every accusation leveled at today’s youth into the character of middle schooler
Greg Heffley.
The premise of Diary
of a Wimpy Kid is simple: life through the eyes of an average American kid attempting
to navigate the trials and tribulations of adolescence. He is the middle child
of a middle-class family with two married parents and two bothersome brothers.
His averageness is typified by his self-ranked popularity at school, which he estimates
to be “around 52nd or 53rd most popular” (7). Every
aspect of Greg’s life is a carefully controlled normal. However, in creating
this portrait of an “Every-kid” character, Kinney weaves in several fairly
unflattering characteristics.
Greg is greedy, selfish, and lazy. He wants an expensive
video game for Christmas and fails to recognize the good that may come from the
mix-up that resulted in an underprivileged child getting the game instead. He
regularly mocks and is embarrassed by his “best friend,” who he describes to be
relatively slow, unpopular, and undeserving of the regular vacations taken by
his family. He shirks responsibility and is guilty of bullying as often as he
is bullied himself. A “smart kid who doesn’t apply himself” (according to his
mother), Greg regularly looks to cut corners to achieve his self-serving goals.
In short, Greg is a personification of the supposed
corruptive influences of contemporary American society. Technology has made us
lazy, consumerism has made us selfish, and modern media has destroyed our moral
compass. Thus, grumpy Baby Boomers and their seniors would likely miss the
inherent humor in Greg’s many mishaps, imagining instead a workforce one day filled
with former “wimpy kids.”
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