It occurs to me that these events represent something significant in our culture. Since about 1980 or so we’ve been in one of our periodic “childrens is the most preciousest things in the whole wide world” phases. (For more on the generational cycles that produce this dynamic, see Generations, 13th Gen and Millennials Rising by William Howe and Neil Strauss, two men whose work I have referenced a number of times in the past.) In the previous generation (Gen X), children were an afterthought for most parents, who had been socialized in far more self-centric times.

But around the time of the Reagan ascension we began to see signs that something was changing. Perhaps nothing better signified the new age than “cocooning” Baby Boomers driving boxy Volvo wagons with “Baby on Board” stickers in the window. Since then we’ve seen the institutionalization of the “mommy van,” mandatory helmets and kneepads for all bike-related activities, zero-tolerance school discipline policies, organized play dates and the advent of the over-involved “helicopter parent.” The same forces have driven the scourge of standardized testing (not a bad thing, in moderation, but a horrific thing taken to extremes).

Much has been written about the children of this era. On the one hand they’re very pro-social and are excellent collaborators. On the other hand, being raised at the center of the universe, where you get a gold star for showing up and you’re told that you’re precious every day of your life, regardless of whether you’ve actually done anything that day, well, that has a certain predictable impact.

Now, there’s certainly nothing wrong with an involved parent caring about his or her kids. But the point here is that these things run in cycles, and as is so often the case, generations tend to react to (and rebel against) the trends of previous generations.

Since we’ve seen these dynamics before, students of generational history have been able to predict the future a bit. And in the last three or four years, in particular, we’ve begun to see some of these prophecies coming to fruition. The reason is that we’re seeing the next generation entering school. Depending on where you draw the line, the front edge of whatever we’re going to call the generation after the Millennials is now in third or fourth grade. Which means it’s time to start looking for the backlash against the excesses of Millennial child-rearing – a reaction that should be evident first in the cultural narrative and subsequently in policy.

Two particular (closely related) Millennial narratives of interest can be summed up thusly: children come first and children must be protected at all costs. If you know parents of children aged (roughly) 9-29 – or if you are such a parent – then you probably recognize the philosophy being described here. Those of us watching from the outside might be more keenly aware of some of the curiouser elements of the Millennial family (since it seems more natural and normal to those on the inside), but I suspect we all know someone who believes (whether they’d say it out loud or not) some version of the following: “My children come before my spouse.”

One observer – a minister, no less – calls this the Curse of the Child-Centered Family.

When a child becomes the central focus of the family, it interferes with the natural weaning process essential to the child’s healthy development. In fact, the child can come to bear the symptoms of the parents’ marital problems. Today I see more kids acting out, and more parents medicating them. But medication only treats the symptoms, not the cause — parents who keep the peace in their marriage by drifting apart.

Most parents would never dream that putting their children before their marriage could be wrong. They believe they just don’t have the time for their spouse. But the truth is, they often feel more love for their kids than for their spouse. Parents convince themselves that putting their kids first is child-friendly, but in doing so they make two mistakes.

First, when a child is the center of the family, it becomes harder for parents to establish and enforce the boundaries the child needs to shape his character. So he simply badgers his parents until he gets his way. Future bosses and spouses, however, will not be as patient with this behavior.

Second, the children face tremendous pressure to fulfill the parents’ emotional needs, which may lead the kids to act out. What had been a molehill then quickly becomes a mountain, as the anxious parents seek a diagnosis from physicians who are increasingly likely to medicate children. These steps can cripple a child’s development and, when played out in families nationwide, they threaten the future of our citizenry.

If you’ve been paying attention, you may have noticed others echoing these sentiments (like this, from TheLaborOfLove.com, which is rather explicit in advising that the marriage should come before the children).

Putting your marriage first insures that your needs are being met. When you are on an airplane, the airline attendants always tell you to put the oxygen mask on yourself before putting it on your children, so that you are stable enough to help them. It is the same way with marriage. By keeping your marriage strong, you keep yourself strong and much better able to care for your children.

A couple of years ago one of the morning shows did a feature on a new book, written by two women (if memory serves correctly), that went into a good bit of detail making the same case. I can’t recall the name of the book or the authors, unfortunately, but when I saw the piece I noted that the tail-end of the Millennial generation was now off to school and that this narrative had arrived right on schedule.

Also right on schedule, the “Dangerous Book for Boys” and the “Daring Book for Girls,” each preaching an anti-helicopter parent message to let kids be kids.

(Jon + New Woman) – Kate + 8 = The Next Generation

So, what do the Gosselins have to do with any of this? In a nutshell, they are the most visible repudiation to date of the Child-Centric Curse. Here you have two parents, both late Xers, who have very publicly rejected the ideology of “kids first, come what may.” After drifting apart in full televised view of whomever happened to be bored enough to be watching TLC – and drifting rather painfully, it should be noted – Jon and Kate did the unthinkable: they decided that their personal relationship took precedence over what millions of appalled viewers must have seen as the “right thing to do.” They decided that they would not stay together for the children.

There weren’t a lot of shows like this on television ten years ago at the peak of the Millennial family era, and when I think about the parents of Mills that I know personally, I cannot imagine them divorcing. And honestly, I know some who probably should, because they are not happy together.

There’s no vast network conspiracy at play here, but the timing of the Gosselin split isn’t a complete accident, either. Societies evolve, trends rise and fall, one generation rebels against the values of the one before it, and as these macro-dynamics play out it’s natural that our large public stories should also shift to reflect the underlying realities. If you’d like to think about it Darwinian terms (or free market terms – same thing, pretty much), realize that at any given moment a zillion writers and producers are trying to get their shows on the air (or books published, or movies made, etc.) and this multiplicity of stories represents a broad array of thinking about the society at the particular moment. They can’t all get produced, though. On average, the ones that are going to be successful are the ones that strike a nerve with the audience. The most successful are the ones that resonate most strongly with the broadest set of viewers.

Jon and Kate started out as an interesting little show, but its audience grew, I think, as a result of the obvious tension between the couple. I don’t know how other viewers read the relationship, but every time I caught a snippet of the show (not often, I admit) I walked away wondering how in the hell those two were together. As the unraveling became more pronounced and rumors began hitting the tabloids, I wondered how Jon could possibly leave eight kids, no matter how badly he might grow to hate his wife.

But that was last-generational thinking on my part. We’re now entering an era where adults are going to be more unapologetic about asserting the importance of their own happiness and fulfillment. Get used to the message offered by the authors quoted above – children do not benefit when parents who don’t love each other stay together.

If you’d like to argue that it’s a sad thing when the harbinger of such an important cultural shift comes in the form of a reality television show (one that tells the story of a family that appalls me in more ways than I can quickly ennumerate), go ahead. But our popular culture is what it is, for better or worse, and cultural historians will be discussing the 2009 season of Jon & Kate Plus Eight for many years to come.

After eighteen years, I finally got around to reading Douglas Coupland’s Generation X—the novel that literally defined my generation.

In a way, that makes Generation X sort of like the Moby Dick for Gen X-ers—one of those novels that one should read because it’s a Classic-with-a-capital-C. It’s Important. It’s defining. It’s about me.

Right?

Published in 1991, Generation X tells the story of three unfulfilled, uninspired twenty-somethings who float through life, tell stories to each other, and experience a nagging sense of being adrift in their own lives despite their best efforts to ground themselves. You can almost hear U2 belting out “I Still Haven’t Found What I’m Looking For” in the background.

Being young means getting old, and middle class means boredom. “You see, when you’re middle class, you have to live with the fact that history will ignore you,” Coupland writes. “It is the price that is paid for day-to-day comfort and silence. And because of this price, all happinesses are sterile….”

Because the characters are so unfulfilled, the story itself felt unfulfilling. It left me wondering “What’s the point”—although that, in itself, is the point. Twentysomethings in the early nineties were wondering what the point was to their own existences even as they felt both smug and dissatisfied in their own hipness. They wanted less in life yet they wanted more out of it, too. (I wonder if twentysomethings today feel the same way.)

“What’s the point?” sounds like something straight out of Beckett, but Coupland doesn’t seem to think life’s absurd. He’s not asking a rhetorical or unanswerable question. He characters really do want to know what the point is. They don’t like feeling as unmoored as they do.

The book managed to tap into that zeitgeist, which I partially identified with, but there was much more to the book that I could not identify with. The characters felt too disenfranchised, too resentful of the baby-boomers, too intellectually superior. I thought the book did a better job of labeling my generation rather defining.

Or, perhaps the book really just defines the older half of the Gen X generation. In 1991, cubicle farms and corporate America and disposable marriages meant nothing to me. I didn’t feel resentment toward baby boomers who’d suddenly turned into The Man whom they’d railed against in the sixties. I didn’t feel angst about my own unrealized potential or disconnected from my own dysfunctional family. I’d not made my way in the world long enough or far enough to have those struggles. Hell, back then I was even a die-hard Conservative.

All that aside, Coupland is a helluva of a writer. He turns a phrase and captures a sentiment as well as any of the best writers of his (my) generation. The book was endlessly quotable, and Coupland packed it with plenty of worthwhile ideas to chew on (in my mind, always the hallmark of a good book). The epilogue was as beautiful a thing as I’ve read in a long, long time.

But after years of listening to the hype about Generation X, I felt a little underwhelmed. That’s my fault, I guess, for expecting a mirror instead of a book.

What have others seen when they’ve read it?

Despite lukewarm reviews and a running time that nearly hits three hours, the movie still managed to pull in a hefty $55.7 million dollars. While that’s apparently at the low end of industry expectations, the movie exceeded my fanboy expectations.

What I didn’t expect, though, was the spectacular time capsule-on-a-movie screen that Watchmen turned out to be.

As ground-breaking as Watchmen was as a comic book back in 1986-87, it was also very much a product of its time, infused with Cold War sensibility and anxiety, set in a crime-and-slime-ridden Times Square atmosphere writ large upon the world. As a topper, America’s Conservative government runs amok. (What’s the only thing worse than two terms of Ronald Regan, the book posits? Five terms of Nixon.) The story itself is grim, and it embodies a pessimistic view of human nature. The graphic novel manages to evoke sick-to-your-stomachness with its examinations of society’s self-degradation and man’s personal darkness.

Film director Zach Snyder chose to keep the movie set in the same time period of the original comic. He resisted attempts to update the script to reflect the war on terror and clung loyally to the Cold War zeitgeist. That choice, to stick with the graphic novel’s original setting, makes the movie feel a little like a wax museum on performance-enhancing steroids.

For most young people, the Cold War means little or nothing, so the movie carries little or no Cold War dread for them. I’m probably too hopeful to think that the film might inspire Millennial moviegoers to learn more about the Cold War (the way that films like Gettysburg or Glory inspired people to visit battlefields and learn more about the Civil War or the book and film versions of John Adams inspired people to learn more about the most overlooked Founder). Of course, that’s not the movie’s job. Watchmen is meant as entertainment—and thus far, all the Millenials I’ve talked to who’ve seen the movie have raved about it. And many have been inspired to read the book, which is pretty cool in and of itself.

For people my age or older—Gen X-ers or Boomers—the Cold War evokes pretty specific anxieties about annihilation, but the alternative world of the Watchmen keeps those anxieties at an observable but unengageable distance. Snyder is almost Brechtian in his insistence at keeping his audience disengaged from the political context of the story—which, in turn, keeps audiences from engaging in the story emotionally. I always felt like I was watching the story rather than really connecting with it. (The overall spectacle of the movie, though, certainly provided lots of cool stuff to watch.)

Theses will be written about the relationship between the movie and the book—what armchair movieviewer or fanboy doesn’t enjoy the ol’ fashioned compare-and-contrast?—but ultimately,Watchmen, the film, really has little to do with the book itself. Some moveigoers have no relationship with the graphic novel at all and can just enjoy the cinematic spectacle. Others, like me, have so much baggage and so many fanboy expectations that it’s nearly impossible to walk into the theater and enjoy the movie as a movie. And so, like any art, the movie’s meaning is largely drawn from the personal experiences of those who see it.

For me, that relates to one of the criteria of great art: How does art make us engage in discussion with ourselves? How does it force us to critically challenge our ideas and assumptions (and decades-old anxieties)? How does it help us see the world?

In that regard, I’ll argue that the movie serves as a more relevant form of art than the graphic novel (at least for the moment). I always found Dave Gibbons’ artwork to be underwhelming and uninspired; Snyder’s onscreen extravaganza, on the other hands, seems highly inspired—even if that inspiration comes from the graphic novel itself. Writer Alan Moore claimed his graphic novel was unfilmable, but Snyder did a damn fine job of proving Moore wrong.

Even if the movie doesn’t capture the bygone zeitgeist of a world that never existed, it captures something. It’s of-the-moment—a stylized, Hollywoodized moment—in the same kind of way the graphic novel was of its own gritty moment in the mid-80s. Whether it’s great art or not, Watchmen makes a fascinating time capsule and a great spectacle in the best ways movies can be.

Don Tapscott has some radical new ideas about education.

• “…the age of learning through the memorization of facts and figures is coming to an end. Instead, students should be taught to think creatively and better understand the knowledge that’s available online.”
• “…Google, Wikipedia, and other online libraries means that rote memorization is no longer a necessary part of education.”
• “Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the internet is…”
• “Kids should learn about history to understand the world and why things are the way they are. But they don’t need to know all the dates. It is enough that they know about the Battle of Hastings, without having to memorize that it was in 1066. They can look that up and position it in history with a click on Google.”

(These last two are quotes directly from Tapscott, by the way, and I need to go pick up this book. It seems awfully interesting – but for now the RWW report will have to do.)

That one item – “Teachers are no longer the fountain of knowledge; the internet is…” – is among the most terrifying concepts I’ve ever run across, by the way. I don’t know exactly how he intends us to understand the pronouncement, but the Internet is not a fountain of knowledge, at least not in the absence of strong thinking skills. It’s a firehose of data, to be sure, but as I’ve noted before, data isn’t quite information, information isn’t knowledge, and knowledge isn’t wisdom. More on this later.

Way, way back in 1989 my fellow scrogue, Dr. Jim Booth, and I did a series of seminars where we actually argued that these kinds of changes were already happening (the essay linked here was updated slightly in the mid-’90s to account for the emergence of the early Internet). At that point we weren’t talking about the Net so much, of course, but were mostly focused on how the socializing process of television was altering the function and utility of the human brain.

Thanks to television and instantaneous global communications, thanks to the electronic data base, to the video game system, word processor, hand-held calculator, digital synthesizer, computer billboard and infonet – thanks to a boggling array of modern and post-modern amusements and conveniences, humans have evolved, perhaps more rapidly and more dramatically than at any time in our history.

…

From a traditional perspective, we simply don’t know all the things we’re supposed to know. A number of writers and researchers have argued, quite persuasively, that American students are impoverished in basic geography, history, literature, and math skills.

However, while Jane can’t perform long division, she is pretty handy with a calculator. Maybe Johnny can’t spell, but his word processor, like mine, has a built-in spell-checker. And while Danny is probably beyond hope, Jimmy knows exactly where to go to find out all he needs to know about Mexico – especially if his computer is on-line with an interactive infonet like The Source or CompuServe.

We went so far as to argue that the moment we were in – or more accurately are in – represented a critical leap ahead in human evolution.

A cursory glance at the Geologic Timetable in Webster’s Dictionary reveals that major evolutionary and anthropological events often parallel significant geological shifts. The first evidence of humanity, for example, roughly coincides with the onset of the Quaternary Period some two million years ago. A Wake Forest University Anthropology professor we consulted recently pointed out certain major changes in human living patterns at the beginning of the Holocene Epoch – the “recent,” or post-glacial period.

…

It isn’t at all unreasonable to wonder whether we are in the midst of what geologists 10,000 years from now might see as the transition from Holocene to whatever comes next. The difference between the dawn of this epoch and all others before it, though, is that this time it will be engineered. The environmental changes which loom now are the exclusive product of human technology.

For the heck of it, we termed this transition from human to posthuman the “cyberlithic.”

There’s no question, as Tapscott believes, that our brains are being re-wired – Jim and I made that point in these seminars, too – but I wonder how hellish the cost may prove to be. As RWW notes:

Today’s students are growing up in a world where multi-tasking has them completely immersed in digital experiences. They text and surf the net while listening to music and updating their Facebook page. This “continuous partial attention” and its impacts on our brains is a much-discussed topic these days in educational circles. Are we driving distracted or have our brains adapted to the incoming stimuli?

I know that much has been made of the digital generation’s ability to multi-task, for instance, but I have yet to see any evidence that doesn’t make clear how doing several things at once reduces overall efficiency.

Dr. Gary Small, a researcher at UCLA, is also examining how daily use of digital tech re-wires the brain. His particular concern has to do with the erosion of social skills.

When the brain spends more time on technology-related tasks and less time exposed to other people, it drifts away from fundamental social skills like reading facial expressions during conversation, Small asserts.

So brain circuits involved in face-to-face contact can become weaker, he suggests. That may lead to social awkwardness, an inability to interpret nonverbal messages, isolation and less interest in traditional classroom learning.

Small says the effect is strongest in so-called digital natives — people in their teens and 20s who have been “digitally hard-wired since toddlerhood.” He thinks it’s important to help the digital natives improve their social skills and older people — digital immigrants — improve their technology skills.

(Of course, Small’s brainiac theories are thoroughly refuted by “at least one 19-year-old Internet enthusiast” who “lives near Pasadena” and “spends six to 12 hours online a day.” This, though, is probably something that should wait until my next missive on the sorry state of science reporting in America.)

The “brain as computer” model that Jim and I discuss only works if education does a good job of developing the processing and search functions. Yes, all the data is online, or soon will be. So maybe it’s not critical that we have it all memorized. But, are we capable of finding what we need quickly and efficiently? Are we adept at sorting information from disinformation? And most importantly, are we able to think critically about the data we retrieve?

All the evidence I see around me says we’re failing on all fronts. A former colleague, an incredibly accomplished man who these days teaches undergrads for a living, once observed something to the effect that “once they get past downloading music, IMing their friends and surfing porn, these kids are helpless with computers.” Maybe he exaggerates a little for emphasis, but my experience (and volumes of research supporting it) say that the techspertise of “today’s youth” is overrated. Their lives are dominated by electronic technology, to be sure, and they can become fluid end-users, but you have to be careful about using the word “savvy.”

On top of this, the Millennial Generation has been trained to be very good at short-term tasks with readily identifiable objectives. This has come at the expense of teaching them abstraction, critical evaluation and problem solving skills. They’re far better in teams than my generation (which is nearly feral in its individualistic approach), and this mitigates the problem significantly when they’re allowed to work in groups, but still, the premise that the ubiquitous availability of every scrap of information in the world somehow renders obsolete old ways of knowing and learning is … suspect. At best.

In some ways it’s nice to reflect, after being so wrong about so many things in my life, on something that I was part of getting right a long time ago. Still, seeing the early emergence of an important (and perhaps obvious) trend is hardly the same thing as having a robust solution for all the problems that will result. The fact is that we do, absolutely, have new tools at our disposal that can enable us to dramatically improve the sum total of what is known. The Net can help us generate new data, and as I suggested above, with the proper kind of education we can develop that data into information, and from there transform information into knowledge and eventually sift wisdom from the knowledge.

But the machines won’t do it by themselves. It’s up to us to craft the policies and processes that turn the machinery to the uses we want and need, and we have barely taken the first step down that road…

Further, some have erroneously interpreted my critiques as somehow suggesting that my generation – X – was without flaw. Which, of course, is ridiculous. Every generation has its relative strengths and weaknesses, and X has been a trainwreck in some respects.

All of which leads me to the other morning, when fellow scrogue Brian Angliss forwarded along the link to a Washington Post column from Neil Howe, the man who co-authored, along with William Strauss, the finest series of works on America’s generations I’ve ever encountered.

The thesis under discussion this fine day? “Early Xers” are the dumbest living generation.

Not exactly the sort of thing you like reading about yourself, to be sure. But this is Neil Howe talking, so step one is shut up, set aside your attitude and emotions and read what he has to say. My conclusion? Howe’s take is interesting and credible on a number of levels. There are problems with the argument as set forth in the article, but it’s certainly worth thinking about.

The most disturbing part for me was this:

And today, as midlife parents, they have become ultra-protective of their own teenage kids and ultra-demanding of their kids’ schools, as if to make double-certain it won’t happen again.

Boomers were, by and large, the parents of early Millennials (born from around 1980-2000), but the back end of the parenting problem I’ve talked about … well, I don’t want to name names, but I’m probably like you in that I know some of the Xers he’s talking about. I know some who defy the type, too, but on the whole I think he comes closer to describing the rule than the exception.

This is not something I’m proud of, even though I’m not a parent.

I’m also intrigued by Howe’s use of the “Generation Jones” frame. Intrigued and a bit troubled, to be honest. GJ has always struck me as little more than marketing hook for the creator’s consulting business. I met the guy at a conference in 2000 and he talked my damned ear off trying to convince me of the legitimacy of his theory; however, nothing he had to say really put a dent in the more comprehensively articulated frame that Howe and Strauss had laid out in Generations and expanded on in 13th Gen, and as a result I found nothing about it that required me to alter my thinking significantly.

So to see so much of this analysis hinging on Generation Jones-style demography got me to looking a little more deeply. I’m not 100% happy with what I found.

I’ll begin by admitting, on behalf of “early Xers” everywhere, that we’re guilty of much of what is charged here. We may be guiltier than alleged, even. While I don’t plunge to quite the cynical, self-loathing depths that we see in, for instance, Todd Snider’s hysterical, auto-flogging “My Generation, part 2,” I do understand where he’s coming from. So whatever I may say on behalf of Generation X, I’d be delusional to try asserting that we represent a model to live by.

However, this doesn’t excuse Howe’s sloppiness.

For starters, Howe and Strauss were pretty clear about where the Boom ended and X began: the Boomer included birth years 1943-1960 and Generation X was 1961-1980. I don’t want to fetishize a moment in time – 12:01 AM, January 1, 1961- nor make sacred dogma out of an artificial and somewhat abstract way of dividing people, especially those on the cusp. At the very least, there’s tremendous value in examining the contexts surrounding macro-cultural transitions, so a serious researcher who wants to look at the period on either side of 1960-1961 is engaged in a perfectly valid course of study.

But, let’s be specific in how we categorize, especially if we’re the people responsible for establishing the definitions in the first place. Generation Jones encompasses a 12-year period: birth years 1954 through 1965. In Howe and Strauss’s model – articulated in Generations and reiterated in several subsequent books – this span includes the seven last years of the Baby Boom and the first five years of X. Which makes this particular line especially curious:

Whatever you call them (I’ll just call them early Xers), the numbers are clear…

Ummm, no. If you have 500 Germans in a room and 300 Swedes, you will not “just call them” a roomful of Swedes.

I respect the hell out of Howe’s work, as I’ve made abundantly clear on numerous cases, and this bit is out of step with his customary clarity of thinking and writing. If I didn’t know him to be an analyst of intelligence and integrity, I might wonder if I were smelling an agenda on the part of a parent who’s had enough of hearing his kids trashed. (Well, okay, maybe I am wondering that. Not accusing, but wondering.) Howe has Millennial children and thinks incredibly highly of them and their contemporaries (this is his point, directly paraphrased from Millennials Rising, not mine). Certainly the verve with which he goes after Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation (the jumping-off point for his column) suggests that he’s had enough Mill-bashing. To be fair, I can’t say that I blame him. If I had Millennial children, as do some of my friends and relatives, I’d feel the same way, and it’s not like there isn’t substantial data he can call on to make his point about Mills and Xers – something that becomes quite clear as the article progresses.

All this said, a good bit of the data he uses to whack these “early Xers,” does specifically reference actual early Xers, and with that I have no quibble. As I said earlier, guilty as charged. I might argue that, as useful as the measures he’s examining are (standardized test scores, for instance), I’d defend Xers a little because our outstanding critical faculties – which I think account for a good deal of our non-dumb moments – are hard to measure. But I’ll admit to being biased on that front. All that said, Howe is a man who’s capable of tremendous detail and specificity – something he’s proven time and again – and as a result I find myself baffled at why he’d clutter up his examination with one group by pointlessly conflating it with another.

So, Neil – who’s the dumbest generation, X or Jones? If it’s Jones, why are you laying the trip on X instead of both the Xers and Boomers, and if it’s X, then … why are we even mentioning Jones, exactly?

I don’t really stand to gain or lose anything regardless of the answer, since I’m part of both demographic groups. I’d just like to have a cleaner sense of what we’re really talking about here.

In any case, this is not a pretty picture of my generational cohort, and in truth, I don’t find anything about his relevant points that seem necessarily inaccurate. In college I was routinely appalled by what the people around me were up to, although at that point in time, before I had really studied generational dynamics (or, for that matter, really imagined what generation I was a part of – remember, I graduated from college seven years before Coupland’s Generation X popularized the term) I thought of this more in terms of a crisis in values than I did basic dumbness.

But maybe I was wrong. I can look back now and see how so much of what 13th Gen had to say explains my contemporaries, and while I might nitpick one methodology or another around evaluating test scores, the bottom line is that Howe is, at the very least, making a defensible argument about the deficiencies of a demographic group. Fair enough.

I think Howe’s explanations as to why we underperformed (then, and perhaps now, as well) gets at something important, and it echoes what he and Strauss talked about at length in 13th Gen:

Yet sheer numbers aren’t the whole story. The early Xers’ location in history also plays a large role. Quite simply, they were children at a uniquely unfavorable moment — a time when the divorce rate accelerated, when the media image of children turned demonic and when the “latch-key” lesson for kids stressed self-reliance rather than trust in others. By the time they entered middle and high school, classrooms were opened, standards were lowered, and supervision had disappeared. Compared with earlier- or later-born students at the same age, these kids were assigned less homework, watched more TV and took more drugs.

Most early Xers know the score. Graduating (or not) from school in the early 1980s, they saw themselves billboarded as a bad example by blue-ribbon commissions eager to reform the system for the next generation, the Millennials. Angling for promotions in the early 1990s, they got busy with self-help guides (yes, those “For Dummies” books) to learn all the subjects they were never taught the first time around.

Yup.

With regards to the career side, I’ve written over at Black Dog about Xers and the macro-succession crisis (in this article, particularly). We’re a small generation (~50M) following a very large one (~75M), and there simply weren’t as many leadership opportunities available because, well, the Boomers in those jobs have no real obligation to retire and get out of our way, do they? So on that front we Xers found ourselves on the wrong end of an unbalanced math equation. Still do, in fact.

In the coming five years or so a massive number of Boomers are going to retire (the earliest Boomers hit retirement age this year, in fact) and early Xers are going to have to step in and step up. (For a lot of reasons, I don’t expect this transition to be a terribly pretty one.) The most prominent symbol of Gen X taking the reins right now is Barack Obama, who will soon become the first Xer president. Unless you’ve been off planet for a few years, you realize the massiveness and unfathomable complexity of the challenge he faces, and for better or worse it’s now time for my generation to step up and lead. You may think Xers are slackers and “the dumbest generation,” or you may prefer the Howe and Strauss narrative from 13th Gen, which credits us with a good deal of street smarts and a collective ingenuity born of necessity. Ultimately, though, it doesn’t matter. The time is now, and we’ll either get it done or we won’t.

Whatever failings we’ve been guilty of in the past, I’m hopeful we can make up for them in the next couple of decades.

After The Cure’s 1989 platinum-selling breakthrough Disintegration, the band chose to get even moodier with their 1992 follow-up, Wish. Had they chosen to get a little poppier, instead, they very well might have created 4:13 Dream.

Following the restrictive Bloodflowers (2000) and the unmemorable hodge-podge that was their self-titled album, The Cure (2004), 4:12 Dream features a lineup of tunes that feels like a direct descendent to the songs of the band’s heyday.

Take, for instance, the long, slow, moody opener, “Underneath the Stars,” which comes complete with chimes and keyboard. Can anyone say “Pictures of You”?

“The Only One” comes from the same family of Cure-styled pop songs that spawned “Friday I’m in Love” and “Just Like Heaven.” The unapologetically herky-jerky “Freakshow” jams with new-wave funk—much like “Hot! Hot! Hot!”—underpinned by some crazy guitar noodling.

Even though much of the music sounds so darn upbeat, it wouldn’t be a Cure album without misery lurking in the lyrics, and indeed, Smith offers plenty of angst, anguish, and tortured self-loathing. “You know how it is with these promises/Made in the heat of the moment/They’re made before right becomes wrong/Whenever you’ve got what I want./And you’ve got what I want…” Smith sings in “The Real Snow White.” “It’s only for the night/And I will give it back tomorrow./I swear.”

The band long ago cemented its reputation as the gloomiest of the gloomers, and Smith happily proves once again that he can make unhappiness the highest of artforms. “I won’t try to bring you down about my suicide,” Smith sings with a snappy growl in “The Reasons Why.” “I am falling through the stars,” he says.

But as the old saying goes, you can never go home again. The Cure doesn’t try to, even if they do get out the old slide projector and show you pictures, which is just enough to evoke memories of Cure-gone-by without forcing listeners to return to the old neighborhood only to find it run down.

Some of the memories flash back quite a way, too. The unrelenting guitar in “Switch” makes the song the more mature brother of “Hanging Garden,” from the band’s 1982 Pornography. “Sleep When I’m Dead” also conjures that same spirit, although the new songs have a modern cacophonic busyness that would’ve made them out of place among those stripped-down underproduced songs of the early 80’s.

Smith also shows an occasional optimism that would’ve been out of place in those early days of dismal dreariness. In “The Perfect Boy,” for instance, things don’t work out so well for the song’s protagonist, but she doesn’t surrender. “And her heart may be broken a hundred times,” Smith sings, “But the hurt will never destroy her hope.”

The album isn’t a complete triumph. “The Scream” might’ve worked better as a moody downer, but Smith seems determined to create the definitive rock-and-roll scream. The resulting primal scream therapy-as-music lasts about three and a half minutes too long (the song runs a hypnotic 4:37). The following song, “It’s Over,” could’ve been something from a Van Hagar album if it wasn’t for Smith’s heady high-register wailing.

4:13 Dream is Cure-ish enough to satisfy fans and fresh enough to attract new listeners. The Cure’s rock icon status aside, new wave is old hat, and it’s much to Smith’s credit that he keeps pushing The Cure to remain relevant. 4:13 Dream is a dream worth having.

In that piece, I looked at the song version of “Hegemony,” which I penned for Fiction 8’s most recent CD, Project Phoenix. “Hegemony” was adapted for music from an existing poem, which I wrote for my most recent book, Chained to the Gates of Heaven (a book that is in search of a publisher, by the way – so if you know somebody….)

In this installment, I want to walk through the poem version, and in doing so, I can hopefully illustrate the distinctions between the two forms – both in terms of the writing process and the finished product.

Part 2: Examining “Hegemony,” the Poem

First, here’s the poem. Forgive the inelegant font treatment, but by using preformat tagging I can preserve the spacing and line breaks.

Hegemony

His face
a tattoo of stars:
Mr. Black Sky is in the house.
Pump the blue lights, sister. 

Scarecrow, stovepipe
diamonds in his teeth,
pocketfuls of insurgency... 

	there’s music behind the moon, children,
	and rhythm in those cobalt suns

	touch me, touch me now
says Aphrodite, her divine instrumental,
her junta of House,

	her Olympus of lasers like
	a drill through the ears...

Call us partisans, I guess,
scene of the seen
cell of our selves
too self-conscious by half
slamming in prisons of syntax

	touch me, she said,
	Apollo will be home soon...

Then René said
Ma vie est une emplacement-spécifique non-documenté
art d’exécution – ummm, how you say,
performance art?
			And we all laughed:
René
	works at Gap
	reads Derrida
	takes courses at Phoenix
	dances all night at exCathedra

dangles between abyss and verge,
his culture a curvature,
an apotheosis of grind.

Professor Metropolitaine says I’m losing the battle of signification:

	you have a universe of vocabularies to
	flush from your head

But my therapist says it’s okay to embrace my rage
so now I can’t decide between 

	cleanse and purge
	evaluate and judge
	strobe or coruscate
	lover or confessor
	destiny or fate or
	syzygy

Deus in machina:
this is our jungle, our Monet
painting a bridge through
cataracts – 

this is the bargain we’ve struck with the world.
One tribe, one throb, a
frequency of dust.

Quickly, she says:
the Sun King ripens in me.

This version of the same core work is obviously quite different from the lyric. Structurally there’s none of the symmetry demanded by the musical form, which means longer lines, stunted breaks, a more relaxed pacing (or pacing that accelerates and decelerates according to its own logic), and so on. As a writer, what this means is that the words are marching to my beat, whereas in a lyric (or, for that matter, in formal poetry styles) I’m less free to unwind.

There’s another source of variation at work, as well. Not to put too fine a point on it, but in a poem the writer is encouraged to be more “literary” – duh – and cliché is the kiss of death. Poetry is one of the least “popular” of art forms – that is, it cares the least about connecting with a wider audience, even less than the most obscure forms of literary fiction – which means it’s driven by precisely the opposite dynamics of popular music. While they don’t expect to be in the Top 40 anytime soon, I imagine Mike and Mardi would love it if Project Phoenix sold a few copies, so there’s a pronounced desire to connect with an audience. For this reason, I can’t really indulge the full-blown literary impetus – I have to engage the listener and don’t have a lot of time to do it.

This doesn’t mean I approach the lyric looking to embrace any and all clichés, but when dealing with a popular (vs. academic or high/elite) audience, some shortcutting is not only necessarily, it’s often desirable.

So let’s dive into the actual text.

His face
a tattoo of stars:
Mr. Black Sky is in the house.
Pump the blue lights, sister.

The open is largely the same as the song, although without the regular meter. The last line here – the call to party time, which borders on religious invocation given that the speaker is Baron Samedi – didn’t find a home in the song because the form didn’t really accommodate it the way I wanted. I like the energy it infuses, but with the song, the music was already establishing the energy for me.

Since a lot of my poetry plays with popular tropes in some way or another, I frequently find myself employing tactics that help signal the context that words can’t fully replicate. You see an example in the next section, with the indented fourth and fifth lines. Here I inject some meter in order to make it sound more musical. Ironically, the lines had to be altered so that they would actually work with the real music in the Fiction 8 tune.

Scarecrow, stovepipe
diamonds in his teeth,
pocketfuls of insurgency... 

	there’s music behind the moon, children,
	and rhythm in those cobalt suns

	touch me, touch me now
says Aphrodite, her divine instrumental,
her junta of House,

	her Olympus of lasers like
	a drill through the ears...

A lot of the images in this passage occur in the song, although they’re more spread out there. In the poetic iteration Samedi/Mr. Black Sky appears in closer proximity to the drug imagery, the political undertone, and Aphrodite herself – who is named much sooner here than in the song. The result is that the players, their relationships and the context are established more quickly and overtly than in the song. Put another way, the formal demands of the song altered the story by forcing some of the core elements apart – there simply not being enough room for them within the confines of the first verse – so early on we begin to see that the poem and the song are leading the reader/listener in different directions.

One specific example: the male protagonist who appears throughout the song really doesn’t exist in the poem. He was developed as for continuity, and also as a projection of Mike Smith, the singer who’d be performing the song. In the original, Samedi assumes more of the subject role instead of being more of a background character.

Call us partisans, I guess,
scene of the seen
cell of our selves
too self-conscious by half
slamming in prisons of syntax

The nature of the song – the form and the audience consideration taken together – forced the exclusion of this last line, which I actually like a lot because of all that’s going on. “Slamming” is both a dance and a spoken word signifier, and “prisons of syntax” is, I fear, a slightly self-conscious foreshadowing of what’s going to happen when I start adapting this for music (the poem came first in this case, although I write the other way around on occasion, as well). In any case, language is a restricting force for those in the culture here, and you’re free to decide for yourself whether the problem is the inherent limitations of language (and form) or instead has to do with a particular inarticulateness on the part of the players.

	touch me, she said,
	Apollo will be home soon...

My poetry tends to be a little unruly at times, to the point where it drives some readers (and at least one former committee chair) crazy. While I may be worse than most on this score, I suspect the same would be true for our great lyricists were they to abandon the lucrative world of rock stardom in favor of the slightly less glamorous life of a poet. Open forms invite all kinds of exploration, and without the structural demands of the song they might find their own writing and thinking wandering.

The opposite happens when you move from poetry to lyric: I feel like the form of the song version compels some order on my thinking and expression, and we see a snippet of why here. There are multiple voices throughout, and like one of my heroes, TS Eliot, I don’t feel any real compulsion toward linearity. In the original poetry, you have voices entering and exiting, banging into each other blindly, and so on, but in the song they’re more coherently arrayed – mainly because I felt like they had to be.

Next, we meet a character who doesn’t appear at all in the song.

Then René said
Ma vie est une emplacement-spécifique non-documenté
art d’exécution – ummm, how you say,
performance art?
			And we all laughed:
René
	works at Gap
	reads Derrida
	takes courses at Phoenix
	dances all night at exCathedra

dangles between abyss and verge,
his culture a curvature,
an apotheosis of grind.

René – the would-be intellectual working a dead-end job and attending an online college that isn’t likely to help him attain any sort of credible degree toward a social theory career – offers up an all-too-familiar does of ironic, double-reverse Gen Xer self-deprecation. He sees the futility of his path, hides behind sarcasm and embraces the nihilism of the never-ending nightlife because it seems at least as valid as anything else within his grasp.

René’s frustrations are echoed by the collective – the Chorus – in the song, but the open form of the poem allows him to appear and make his own case in ways that wouldn’t quite have worked in the song form. For starters, it would be a trick to take these words and bend them to the meter and rhyme scheme. Additionally, it’s hard to imagine making René’s story interesting for a rock song audience, even an intelligent one that shares some of his challenges (which is certainly true of Fiction 8’s audience).

Then we meet yet another character who doesn’t appear in the song.

Professor Metropolitaine says I’m losing the battle of signification:

	you have a universe of vocabularies to
	flush from your head

But my therapist says it’s okay to embrace my rage
so now I can’t decide between 

	cleanse and purge
	evaluate and judge
	strobe or coruscate
	lover or confessor
	destiny or fate or
	syzygy

This character, based on a woman I once, ummm, crossed paths with, has found some sort of bizarre liberation in the decontextualized words of a very Eliotean scholar character. She’s clearly confused – his words have, in her mind, provided her with justification for an incoherent, unfocused rage, but that perceived validation hasn’t led her to any kind of resolution.

Look at the language, though, then go back and find the words that also appear in the lyric. In both cases we see an ill-fated attempt to find something that works – anything that works – but in the open form I was able to let the madness run free. In the lyric we wind up with something neater, more cleanly articulated. The woman here is enraged, while the woman in the song is more deliberate.

Put directly, not only are the voices tonally different, these are different characters entirely.

Deus in machina:
this is our jungle, our Monet
painting a bridge through
cataracts – 

this is the bargain we’ve struck with the world.
One tribe, one throb, a
frequency of dust.

The Chorus works through an iterative series of potential resolutions in the lyric, and the reason was pretty transparent: the song needed a chorus, and that demanded a measure of repetition. So I pulled the concluding sequence here and parsed it out for the song, but in doing so, added and built in a progression.

Of course, this fundamentally changes the piece. Here, we have the degenerative “frequency of dust,” and are never taunted by the ascending variations that occur in the song.

Quickly, she says:
the Sun King ripens in me.

The song ends with something that may feel like an anthemic exaltation – the “frequency of free” – although the invocation of hegemony (especially in its neo-Marxian sense) undercuts it.

Here, though, my natural tendency as a poet kicks in. Instead of tying things up neatly, I conclude the poem by kicking the doors open. The final gasp of “Hegemony,” the poem, is an indefinite, open-ended sequence where Aphrodite embraces her divine infidelity, intertwining the decadent and the generative: she’s pregnant with the pagan Sun King and who knows who the father might be?

This conclusion, of course, has damned near nothing to do with what transpires in the song.

In Conclusion…

Obviously I can’t speak to the writing process employed by The Matrix (although listening to their songs makes me suspect they don’t over-intellectualize quite as badly as I do). As such, I’d never assert that what I describe above and in the earlier post is somehow representative of other writers.

Ultimately, it’s hard to say of what value this analysis will be to you. Not everyone who writes lyrics is a poet or vice versa, and nothing I say is going to deter people from statements like “Dylan was one of the greatest poets of his generation.” All I can do is note how the two things are, well, two things. Writing lyrics is not writing poetry, and as a guy who does both I can speak with at least a little authority on the subject.

More specifically, “Hegemony” lets me illustrate my case in a unique way, and that perhaps will cause some of my readers (all eight of you) to revisit the songs they’ve always thought of as poetry.

In the end, I hope you listen to more music and read more poetry. They’re different art forms, but they’re wonderful art forms, and these days we take our inspiration where we find  it….

Reach out and touch me now
Aphrodite said
You aren’t the only one
with armies in your head

We’re fond of calling our great rock stars poets. Dylan is a poet. Springsteen is a poet. John Lennon was a poet. Jim Morrison (*gag*) was a poet. And so on. Certainly the first three (have) produced some marvelous words, but as a poet – forgive me if I call myself a “real” poet here – I’ve never quite been willing to accord their work the status of poetry. This isn’t necessarily a slam – their work isn’t architecture, either.

Of all the great songwriters I’ve encountered, precious few wrote songs that work as poetry – that is, they work as words on their own. Most great rock poetry sounds pretty silly once you take away the music. Mark Knopfler had a couple moments early on, and Fish is probably the best at crafting lyrics that stand in their own right.

None of this means that what your favorite rock poet is doing isn’t wonderful. It’s just something else, and needs to be evaluated on its own terms.

So why I am I carping on this subject? In a recent TunesDay I offered a strong recommendation for the new Fiction 8 CD, Project Phoenix. In that piece I noted that my favorite track was cut 10, “Hegemony,” and I promised to explain why I’m so partial to it in an upcoming WordsDay. This is that WordsDay, and the reason I like “Hegemony” is because I co-wrote it. Specifically, I did the lyrics (frequent S&R commenter Mike Smith, aka fikshun, wrote the music). Hey, I never promised you that my reason would be noble.

The reason I’m writing about “Hegemony” is because it exists in two different forms. It’s a song lyric, and it’s also a poem although these are two different versions. The poem simply would not have worked as a lyric, and the lyric can’t stand on its own as poetry. This isn’t the only time where I’ve had a poem become a lyric or vice versa, either, and the release of this CD has had me thinking on the relationship between the two versions and how the very different demands of poetry and songcraft can lead us from a common starting point to a very different destination.

I thought, then, that I’d take this opportunity to do something that writers are best off avoiding. I’d like to analyze my own work – not for the sake of the work itself, but to illustrate something I think is instructive about the difference between lyrics and poetry.

So first, here are the lyrics to the song version, and you can listen along if you like. In fact, that’s probably the best way to do it, because lyrics are inherently bounded and contextualized by the music.

Part 1: Examining “Hegemony,” the Song Lyric

Hegemony

v1
Tattoo of stars
skull underneath
he’s got his scarecrow on
and diamonds in his teeth

He’s partisan
scene of the seen
he packs a pocketful
of rocket trampoline

Reach out and touch me now
I’m feeling your abuse
I smell him on your breath
Mr. Black Sky’s in the house

CHORUS 1
One tribe, one throb, one voice
a frequency of rust,
there’s only dust

v2
Quickly she said
embrace your rage
Apollo’s coming home
Must disengage

Cell of our selves
insurgency
We’ve got our blue lights on
but the red lights disagree

There’s music in the moon
and rhythm in the suns
Our cult of curvature
our digital beyond

CHORUS 2
One tribe, one throb, one voice
a frequency of mud,
there’s always blood

v3
You like to preach
about destiny
Say love is doom and fate
and sacred syzygy

I’ve heard enough
of your poetry
about kings and queens and knights
and social theory

Reach out and touch me now
Aphrodite said
You aren’t the only one
with armies in your head

CHORUS 3
One tribe, one throb, one voice
the frequency of free,
hegemony

Hegemony….

I know that all the good critics since the onset of the Modern era tell us that things means whatever the audience think they mean, and that’s certainly going to be the case here. The imagery is bound to conjure all kinds of interpretations, especially in conjunction with the music, which I think communicates pretty strongly in and of itself. For the sake of argument, though, let’s be old school and pretend that the author had some thoughts of his own as he was developing these words. What I meant to say doesn’t dismiss the validity of what you hear any more than your interpretations dismiss my artistic impulses. Think of it not as an either/or, but as a both/and.

This said, here’s a brief blow-by-blow of what was intended by these lyrics. This matters, because what I say and how I say it will change when we get to the poem version in section two.

Tattoo of stars
skull underneath
he’s got his scarecrow on
and diamonds in his teeth

He’s partisan
scene of the seen
he packs a pocketful
of rocket trampoline

With luck, the listener recognizes a stylized description of Baron Samedi, the Voudoun Loa of Graveyards who, in addition to death, also signifies sex. I don’t quote Wikipedia often, but this isn’t bad:

Baron Samedi stands at the crossroads, where the souls of dead humans pass on their way to Guinee. As well as being the all-knowing loa of death, he is a sexual loa, frequently represented by phallic symbols and noted for disruption, obscenity, debauchery, and having a particular fondness for tobacco and rum. Additionally, he is the loa of sex and resurrection, and in the latter capacity he is often called upon for healing by those near or approaching death, as it is only Baron who can accept an individual into the realm of the dead. He is considered a wise judge, and a powerful magician.

So in him is intertwined both death and the generative force – a powerful contradiction bound up in one handy party-’til-we-die kind of signifier, huh? Of course, the sex here is not bounded by love, but by club life – the “scene of the seen” – and if you perceive the “rocket in his pocket/trampoline” image as being on the degenerate and juvenile side, then give yourself a bonus point.

I wanted to establish the bacchanalia in the song early on, because what I’m trying to do is depict a condition – those who know me won’t be the least bit surprised to hear that I’m writing about Gen X here – and all the ways we try and make our peace with it. So in Samedi destruction looms, but he also embodies some of the things we use to attempt our escape. Since “my generation” is a construct, there’s an inherent element of mythologizing in the story I’m going to tell. I acknowledge this and use it as best I can by building much of the “narrative” around supernatural and mythological characters throughout.

Reach out and touch me now
I’m feeling your abuse
I smell him on your breath
Mr. Black Sky’s in the house

Here there’s a voice change, and the new speaker is consumed by angst and hopelessness. At best he takes twisted pleasure in betrayal by his lover, and at worst he takes the cuckolding because he really doesn’t see much choice. Mr. Black Sky is Samedi.

One tribe, one throb, one voice
a frequency of rust,
there’s only dust

Here’s though, the chorus (or The Chorus, if you prefer) chimes in with the first of three possible outcomes. Line one asserts the myth of the collective experience, and the fate of the collective is entropy – rusting away to dust.

Verse two begins with another sexual vignette.

Quickly she said
embrace your rage
Apollo’s coming home
Must disengage

Again, it’s a scene of infidelity, and again, the context is explicitly mythical.

Cell of our selves
insurgency

Very briefly, these lines note the insularity of the culture and its battle footing with respect to the world at large. The use of “cell” connotes the structures by which terrorist networks organize themselves, and I imagine “insurgency” doesn’t need a lot of explanation. In the next lines we have an expression of the artificial red vs. blue political divide that divides us against ourselves. As bad as this internecine warfare is for the culture as a whole, it’s hellishly bad for a small generation that has little sense of itself as a whole to start with.

We’ve got our blue lights on
but the red lights disagree

In the next four lines we get another snapshot of the escapist impulse.

There’s music in the moon
and rhythm in the suns
Our cult of curvature
our digital beyond

The first two lines are drug references: ecstasy pills come in a lot of designs, including sun and moon. Overlay this with the mystical symbolism sun and moon can represent and you have sort of a deification of pharmacalogical withdrawal from reality. (Yes, this one is pretty obscure, and no, I didn’t expect most people to get the reference. I’m impressed if you did, though.)

The next two lines come from something Mike got from a poem I write a few years ago. I had a reference to “digital belles,” which he interpreted in audio technological terms – the curvature of sounds in their digital representations. So curvature, in this sense, fuses music with the surrounding club culture, and in the process hopefully intimates something about the soft, malleable edges of the compartments in which some of us segregate our lives.

One tribe, one throb, one voice
a frequency of mud,
there’s always blood

In the second iteration of the chorus, the images of decay are replaced by mud and blood. Blood, on the one hand, is life, although it here emerges from mud – which signifies a lack of clarity, an amalgamation of elements. This can be read a couple of ways, of course – the intermixture of elements can be a source of tremendous energy and vitality. In any case, the dryness of rust and dust has been infused with moisture, and in that sense we’re moving in the direction of life, not death.

Verse three stages the confrontation that’s been building since the beginning. The voice from the “Mr. Black Sky” and sun/moon sequences above is back, and this time he’s fed up with all of his lover’s strategies for rationalizing the collective condition.

You like to preach
about destiny
Say love is doom and fate
and sacred syzygyI’ve heard enough
of your poetry
about kings and queens and knights
and social theory

Religion (preach/sacred), superstition (destiny/doom/fate), metaphysics (syzygy), art (poetry), mythology (kings/queens/knights), and of course, intellectualism (social theory), are all implicated and rejected. She has dabbled with each (meaning he’s been in close proximity to the systemic denial behind it all) and he desperately wants an honest showdown with the possibilities that actually exist for him in life.

At this point the female voice from the illicit tryst above reappears, and we now realize that it’s Aphrodite, goddess of love and beauty, who’s cheating on Apollo (appropriately enough, the god of music and poetry).

Reach out and touch me now
Aphrodite said
You aren’t the only one
with armies in your head

Aphrodite seems to have stepped well beyond her domain – physical perfection – and into the realm of wisdom, as she consoles her backdoor consort with the knowledge that he isn’t alone. Whatever the rules may be, she intimates, there’s comfort in human contact – especially contact with the divinity inherent in love.

The final appearance of the Chorus sets the stage for the resolution – is there really redemption or only betrayal?

One tribe, one throb, one voice
the frequency of free,
hegemonyHegemony….

For those who don’t know the word “hegemony,” it has a couple of relevant meanings for this song. The common definition, from Merriam-Webster:

1 : preponderant influence or authority over others : domination
2 : the social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group

It’s use in Marxist social theory is more useful, though. Rather than focusing on the condition of pure domination, Gramsci employs it to describe the process by which the subjugated come to accept and legitimize their own subjugation.

Gramsci used the term hegemony to denote the predominance of one social class over others (e.g. bourgeois hegemony). This represents not only political and economic control, but also the ability of the dominant class to project its own way of seeing the world so that those who are subordinated by it accept it as ‘common sense’ and ‘natural’. Commentators stress that this involves willing and active consent. Common sense, suggests Geoffrey Nowell-Smith, is ‘the way a subordinate class lives its subordination’ (cited in Alvarado & Boyd-Barrett 1992: 51).

In the end, then, the tribe/throb/voice tunes into the frequency of “free,” a freedom that we hopefully, by this point, can see for the sham it is. Instead of actual freedom, it’s an imitation freedom-like product that’s the ideological equivalent of Cheez-Whiz. We’ve come to an understanding whereby we all decide to agree that we’re free, despite manifest evidence to the contrary. We do so because the alternative is more than we could bear.

In this collective social, economic and political reality – and yes, I know that “reality” is a construct here – this group of people turns inward and seeks validation through personal intimacy (or the fleeting approximation thereof), drugs, trance, and in the worst cases, self-indulgent angst and alienation.

If you’re thinking that the guy who write the lyrics imagines a lot more going on in “Hegemony” than you did, that’s fine. The form of the song, especially one as symmetrically composed as this one, I believe leads us to assume a certain boundedness – how much deep meaning can you really cram into 4:51, after all? The form of the poem, on the other hand, suggests more open-endedness (especially if it’s free verse than avoids visual formality on the page).

Check back for part two, where I’ll walk through the poem version of “Hegemony” and illustrate some of the ways in which the process of writing a poem differs from the craft of lyric writing. With luck, we’ll all come away with a better understanding of the two genres.

The painting at the head of the page is “Temenos #8: The Poet,” by Gregory Eanes.

As I was walking down the 16th Street Mall this afternoon, I passed a woman wearing a button that said “Ask Me How Many Houses I Own.” It’s amazing how quickly a creative entrepreneur can turn something into a marketable opportunity, even a political gaffe.

McCain’s deeply regrettable admission has been the subject of many a comment, criticism and joke here around the DNC this week, to no one’s surprise. But what has surprised me was another McCain gaffe that’s gotten far less press, yet which also provides major evidence for how far removed he is from the daily world of the people he seeks to govern. I’m speaking of his admission a few weeks ago that he does not use the Internet and had never sent an e-mail.

I’ve heard apologists argue that it’s a generational thing; he’s 72. My mom is 69, and she’s never sent an e-mail either. But she’s not running for president. Others have countered that he’s got staffers for that, to handle his research and correspondence, so he can spend his time on more important elements of the political process.

I remain incredulous. Not even so much that McCain is not online, but that he admitted it. That he doesn’t realize the significance of admitting it. Just like the house thing.

I think it’s critically significant in two key ways: one, it indicates a complete lack of curiosity and engagement with contemporary culture; and two, it speaks volumes about his (in)ability to connect with millions of younger voters — basically anyone under 40, and a big share of folks past that mark who have made a point to overcome their higher learning curve and engage the world in its emerging lingua franca.

While Obama’s plan to reveal his VP pick in a text message to supporters was foiled by party insiders who leaked it first, it was still a clever tack. Some critics called it a PR gimmick, and it had shades of that. But more importantly, it demonstrated the Obama campaign’s awareness of how a major share of a key demographic communicates. It showed, without having to explain anything, that Obama is up to speed, he is culturally relevant, and he seeks to engage his supporters on their own terms.

Barack Obama turned 47 earlier this month. He’s just beyond the age –45–which some polls have identified as the dividing point between a younger voter majority likely to support him, and an older set that leans toward McCain, according to a journalist guest (whose name is momentarily eluding my own 46-year-old mind) on PBS’s Washington Week, which I was in the audience for during a Denver taping Aug. 22.

Obama is on that cusp – but he’s clearly embraced the absolute centrality of a world leader’s need to be conversant in digital culture, while demonstrating that he knows how to reach those who are his chronological juniors. His number of Facebook friends is approaching one and a half million. Time will tell if he can manage to find the means to do the same with his elders, whom polls indicate remain lukewarm. My mother, however, is an exception. She is a white, non-computer-owning senior citizen who’s all about Obama for November, but like John McCain, has no idea what an anomaly she is.

That bodes poorly for both the survival of the print press and the level of political knowledge of the electorate the print press decreasingly serves.

Jacques Steinberg of The New York Times reports that 650 journalists parachuted into Cleveland, Ohio, in February to cover the debate between Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. “But,” Mr. Steinberg writes, “early the next morning, as the two candidates set off for engagements across Ohio and Texas, representatives of only two dozen or so news organizations tagged along.” [emphasis added].

Newspaper managers say they have reasons for pulling the boys off the bus.

Covering a presidential campaign is pricey. If candidates are flying hither and yon each day, the cost per day for a newspaper to put a reporter on that plane can teach $2,000. Multiply that by several days a week, per month, per election season. This political season has been interminably long and therefore uncommonly expensive for the press to cover. Newsweek, to its credit, is shelling out $30,000 a month to have a person ride full time on the Clinton and Obama campaigns.

Newspaper owners claim they are increasingly unable to write checks that big. Ad revenues are down. Circulations are declining. Profits are shored up by reducing costs — especially in “human resources” — by cutting editorial jobs, all for the benefit of institutional investors concerned only with short-term gains. So newspapers don’t have oversea bureaus any more, and many are closing bureaus within the United States as well. And they’re shedding coverage of presidential politics as well.

According to Mr. Steinberg, among the boys and girls no longer on the bus are those from USA Today, the nation’s largest paper; The Boston Globe, The Dallas Morning News, The Houston Chronicle, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Baltimore Sun, The Miami Herald and The Philadelphia Inquirer. (My newspaper, The Buffalo News, is owned by one of the richest men in the world, Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway, and even it doesn’t have a boy on the bus.) The only newspapers covering the campaigns full time are The Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, Wall Street Journal and The Times.

Mr. Steinberg quotes Lee Horwich, a senior editor at USA Today who oversees political coverage:

We’d all like to be able to be out there. Given the reality of the costs and various priorities, not just political priorities but across the rest of the newspaper, it just isn’t realistic for us. [emphasis added]

Well, so what? So what if there are fewer reporters daily following the candidates? After all, some observers think it’s a good idea to cut back. Says S. Robert Lichter, director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University:

I’m not sure too much is lost. There used to be a self-defined cadre of campaign reporters. Now the news comes from everywhere — from bloggers, maybe some guy with a video camera. Anyone can generate news and everyone can generate news. What’s the advantage of being the 50th guy on the bus?

According to Mr. Steinberg, this is who provides your regular, daily mainstream press campaign coverage:

For firsthand, daily dispatches from the campaign trail, most of the [newspapers no longer on the bus] have relied heavily on reports from the wire services, including The Associated Press, Bloomberg and Reuters; a handful of Web sites; and video captured by camera-toting producers from the television networks and cable news channels.

I suppose that’s good enough for the health of American democracy. Why invest more in coverage of a campaign to place in office a man or woman who will become the most powerful person in the world?

Who needs reporters to daily follow the candidates to catch conflicts in statements or positions, reveal pandering to special interests, track down inconsistencies in a candidate’s background, learn who has the candidate’s ear and could become a Cabinet member … and so on. Newspapers, whose profit margins average 15 percent, have placed financial considerations over the obligation given them in exchange for First Amendment protection against government interference: hold government and those who campaign to govern accountable.

Yes, the current coverage might be sufficient for that. But suppose a Buffalo News reporter (if Mr. Buffett would cough up 30 large per month) got on the bus and the plane and covered all the above but focused on how candidates’ words and acts might affect Buffalo and western New York state? Ditto the Des Moines Register, the Seattle Times, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, The Times-Picayune of New Orleans, the Houston Chronicle … You get the idea. Homogenized campaign coverage does too little to serve regional issues and concerns.

When a candidate is elected, I certainly hope newspapers not now on the bus will rush correspondents to the White House to cover the president for the next four (eight?) years. But how well trained will those newly minted White House correspondents be? Reports Mr. Steinberg:

Deep and thoughtful reporting is also being produced by journalists off the trail. And some news organizations that can afford it are doing both. But the absence of some newspapers on the trail suggests not only that readers are being exposed to fewer perspectives drawn from shoe-leather reporting, but also that fewer reporters will arrive at the White House in January with the experience that editors have typically required to cover a president on Day 1. [emphasis added]

There’s another cost to major regional newspapers’ shortsighted shirking of daily campaign coverage.

Newspapers say they’re losing younger readers (and older readers, too: We tend to die). So they’ve added style and flash in special sections to attract those young readers. But campaigns this year, particularly that of Sen. Barack Obama, have been fueled by youthful interest and vitality. They like politics, they take it seriously, and they want substance from their newspapers, not wire copy.

Defecting from the daily grind of presidential campaign coverage shows these younger readers that newspapers do not mirror young people’s commitment to the political process. These cutbacks show newspapers surrendering an informational and therefore competitive advantage with other forms of news gathering and dissemination — particularly blogging — in terms of connecting regional and local issues to national campaigns.

Maybe newspapers have already lost this round. According to The Times‘ Brian Stelter:

[Y]ounger voters tend to be not just consumers of news and current events but conduits as well — sending out e-mailed links and videos to friends and their social networks. And in turn, they rely on friends and online connections for news to come to them. In essence, they are replacing the professional filter — reading The Washington Post, clicking on CNN.com — with a social one. [emphasis added]

Regarded solely as demographic targets for circulation boosts by mainstream newspapers and other media, these young people whom traditional media do not serve well have created their own social networks for obtaining and sharing political news about the presidential campaigns.

In one sense, this social filter is simply a technological version of the oldest tool in politics: word of mouth. Jane Buckingham, the founder of the Intelligence Group, a market research company, said the “social media generation” was comfortable being in constant communication with others, so recommendations from friends or text messages from a campaign — information that is shared, but not sought — were perceived as natural.

The town crier is old and yet new again. This is what newspapers used to be — a voice of and for all the people. But the press’s disheartening cutbacks in this presidential campaign has only hastened its departure from remaining meaningful to all the electorate.

photo credit: Jim Bourg, Reuters

What’s the difference between a skeptic and a cynic?

A skeptic is someone who, when told something, doesn’t immediately believe it to be true and looks deeper into the issue before making their decision.

A cynic is someone who, when told something, automatically assumes it to be false, and doesn’t bother looking any further, because it’s just got to be bullshit.

It’s essential, especially in these times of fear and paranoia, that we maintain a healthy skepticism about what we are told. It was lack of skepticism that mired us in the endless hell of the Iraq war, after all. But I fear that genuine skepticism has been swamped by the all-consuming cynical passivity that says, “This is all bullshit, so why should I care or do anything about it? None of it matters.”

But it does matter. And watching the meteoric rise of Barack Obama has reminded me of how much it can all matter, for those who’re willing to believe.

As has been noted in the press and on the Net, Obama’s campaign has transcended a typical political stump and is becoming a flat-out movement for change. His team has tapped into the restless sleeping giant that is the Millenial Generation, appealing to them with the latest social networking tools and paeans to togetherness, unity, and an end to divisiveness–and they’ve responded in incredible numbers. Every primary is the same–youth turnout is off the charts, and they’re breaking for Obama in a large way.

But it’s not just the young–Obama’s “can-do” spirit is inspiring the old, the apathetic, the never-voted-before. Even those who aren’t sure about him or don’t believe in him are giving him a look:

“Obama is by no means my choice, and I will not go for him just because he’s black,” says Tinia Bland, a 43-year-old registered Republican who says she is leaning toward voting for Clinton. “He will have to show me that he can lead a nation and that my concerns will be met.” Still, she arrived five hours early for Obama’s rally in Jersey City, her 8-year-old son Elijah in tow. “I want him to see there is a man who looks like him, and that he is capable of making phenomenal decisions, and that this is an opportunity that he can aspire to,” she says. “I really see him as a uniter. There doesn’t have to be a white America and a black America anymore, and I like that.”

In my lifetime, I can’t remember any politician being able to inspire and evoke passion and hope–the willingness to believe and put in the work to bridge belief and reality–that Obama does. My Republican friends would probably invoke Reagan, but I’m too young to say for sure if that’s a legitimate comparison (on any level). This is one of those moments that simply hasn’t come around in the political cycle for a good long time.

Tom Hayden, who knows a thing or two about earthshaking generational and political movements, has the best take on this I’ve read yet:

I have been devastated by too many tragedies and betrayals over the past 40 years to ever again deposit so much hope in any single individual, no matter how charismatic or brilliant. But today I see across the generational divide the spirit, excitement, energy and creativity of a new generation bidding to displace the old ways. Obama’s moment is their moment, and I pray that they succeed without the sufferings and betrayals my generation went through…If history is any guide, the new “best and brightest” of the Obama generation will unleash a new cycle of activism, reform and fresh thinking before they follow pragmatism to its dead end.

It is the nature of all things in history to pass away and be cast aside so that the new can usurp the old. We shouldn’t forget what has come before, but nor should we be slave to it. I think this is another reason Edwards (who was my guy first and foremost) never caught fire–he underestimated, as did I, the symbolic change value of a black man or a woman leading the most powerful nation on Earth. Edwards recognized this in his farewell address, and I see it again and again in conversations with friends of mine who aren’t obsessive political junkies like myself.

But this isn’t enough–you need substance in this day and age. You need real policy positions on real issues of importance, and on this Obama is far from perfect. I’m skeptical of Obama’s almost pathological need to be all things to all people. I worry about his health care policies, some of which are dangerously to the right of Clinton. I worry about his dalliances with anti-gay pastors like Donnie McClurkin. I worry that his sharper, more populist stances only came because Edwards was stealing the show with them.

Yet, on balance, there is more good than bad in the meat of Obama’s record. Obama’s technology proposals are the most audacious and forward-looking of all the candidates, only beginning with his support for net neutrality. He is against the endless wars we are currently fighting. He was against the bankruptcy bill and supports mortgage law reform. Even on what seems like a clear-cut issue–banning cluster bombs in civilian areas–where Clinton took the convenient path, Obama took the right path. Hell, he’s even gotten his mind right on fully funding our grievously undermanned consumer protection agencies and policing imported toys for lead content. He has made numerous mistakes–and will probably make more–but he’s also evinced an instinct for coming correct on the biggest issues, and for emphasizing why both big and small issues matter. This strikes me as a man who will learn from his mistakes, not stubbornly dig in his heels and compound errors with even more grievous retrenchments, as the Decider has done.

Obama is not the new JFK. He wasn’t my first choice for candidate. And both of those things are fine. This is not the ’60s, nor is it the ’90s. My time for a movement has passed, if it was ever really here. This is a movement for a new generation, for a new age of people who are excited and passionate about politics like never before. And that gives me hope in my own right.

I’m a confirmed skeptic, but at my core, I’m not a cynic. I still believe our government can protect us and make our lives better if we do the job right. I believe that people working together can make a difference, and one man can change the world if they’re the right man. I believe that humans are essentially decent, good people who sometimes take the wrong path, and that America has the power to inspire the world to new levels of greatness if it holds to the moral truths and principles it was founded on.

And Barack Obama inspires me to continue that belief, just like he’s inspired his movement to propel him to becoming not only our first black president, but the first leader in a long time who can truly lead, as opposed to rule, govern, bully, or terrorize. That’s why I am for him as President–he doesn’t just inspire me to hope, he inspires me to believe that we can make the world better.

I’m a skeptic, but I’m also a believer. Does that mean I believe Obama and his movement can take the White House? To coin a phrase, “Yes. We. Can.”

Korzybski is not only the father of general semantics, but a god high in the pantheon of such fields as cybernetics, neuro-linguistics, consistency theory, and the like.  He deserves to be.  He was the first to examine human behavior in terms of what people can know, and how they act on that knowledge (Descartes may have provided a foundation, but Korzybski built the palace).  He said that there are really only two means of knowing:  (1) through the structure and capabilities of the nervous system, and (2) through the structure of language and how we use it. 

Korzybski divided all  human experience into levels.  The first level is the event itself.  The second is our verbal, symbolic description of this event, internal or external, and our description is subdivided into three levels of abstraction:  (1) the descriptive, (2) the inferential, and (3) the judgmental.  Improper use of the judgmental can kill you.  For instance:

Descriptive:  That automobile has its right turn-signal on.

Inferential:  That automobile is going to turn right.

Judgmental:  It’s safe to pull out in front of that automobile.

We probably all know at least one person who is stuck at one of these levels of abstraction.  Talk to a person stuck at the descriptive level, and you may get a story that goes on forever with “and then he said, and then she said,” without ever arriving at a point.  Talk to a judgmental person, and you may get, “I hate women drivers, ” or “He wouldn’t have been accused if he weren’t guilty.”

Korzybski pointed out that the very structure of language tends to push us towards the judgmental.  Most languages have very few intermediate words between polar opposites.  For instance, find the single, intermediate word between such English pairs as “honest/dishonest,” “relevant/irrelevant,” “learned/ignorant,” etc.  To be sure, there are some intermediate words in English (for instance, a range or words between “beautiful” and “repulsive”), and taken in context, the word “average” can be very useful.  But in most cases, we are forced to use modifying words like “very,” “somewhat,” “most,” “many,” etc. if we want to move our language from the judgmental level to the descriptive.  Another weakness of language is the verb “to be.”  It implies that people are a certain thing, which is  leap to judgment.  “Joe is lazy” is a greater order of abstraction than, “Joe didn’t get the work done.”

There is debate about whether the symbology of language drives cognitively driven behavior, or whether language is the ultimate result of hard-wired behavioral tendencies.  I tend to believe the latter, while recognizing that there is a reinforcing loop.  For instance, if we are biologically predisposed to order our world into broad categories to simplify our thinking and reactions (and I believe we are), then we would structure our language into exactly the judgmental, bipolar words and ways of expressing states of being that we currently possess.  Having said that, the language itself makes it difficult to break out of the judgmental level of abstraction.  One must consciously make an effort to use, say, the word “many” in the phrase, “Many elderly people are poor drivers.”  It appears to be our natural inclination to simplify, saying simply “Elderly people are poor drivers.”

Even our writing classes tend to force people from the descriptive or inferential into the judgmental.  I once had a journalism professor tell me that the way I worded something told him that I was guessing.  I replied that guessing was exactly what I was doing, that a guess was all that the data warranted, and that not using modifying words in this case would imply that I was more certain than anyone should be.  Still, there is this push among writing teachers to use transitive verbs (except among political writers where “mistakes were made” has become ubiquitous) as if there is something virtuous in certainty when certainty is impossible.

The upshot of all this is that jumping to levels of abstraction, like judgment, before we have enough information is a human thinking trap that has caused us much grief over human history.  For instance, we categorize others by race, as if race has any real meaning, and then apply a structure of judgment to that race that carries over to individuals in that racial group.  We categorize others by when they were born, calling them a “generation,” and deciding that all individuals of that generation must share the same characteristics.

Understand that it’s not necessary to say something like, “All millennials feel entitled.”  It’s enough to say, “Millenials feel entitled.”  In the English language, the “all” is implied unless a modifier is used, in the same way one can say “Water is wet,” without having to say “All water is wet.” 

It’s a human thinking trap, and the way to avoid it is to pay closer attention to the way you write and think.  If you start to use modifying words, I think you will find that you begin to modify your thoughts, as well.  And uncertainty, painful as it can be, is a very useful thing, indeed.  It helps us avoid bad decisions.

 It may help you decide not to pull out in front of the wrong car, someday.

(Note:  JS O’Brien will have very limited access to the Internet in the next week.  Please do not take any failure to respond personally.)

This is a great loss. Strauss and his colleague Neil Howe were responsible for some of the most insightful and important analyses ever done into American generations. Thanks to them we now have a heightened ability to understand the cyclical nature of generations, affording us a tremendous capability to anticipate coming trends.

13th Gen: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail, their examination of Generation X, literally changed my life. Up until I discovered it in th early ’90s I had no idea about the broad economic and social factors shaping what I thought was my own personal little hell. It seemed to me that there was a rulebook for professional success and that everybody had a copy except me. 13th Gen made clear that it wasn’t just me – I was at the very front edge of a cohort full of people facing the same struggles for the same reasons.

Howe and Strauss’ work (especially Millennials Rising) has since become the cornerstone for a lot of my professional activities, as so much of what I do has major generational implications. Put simply, I could never repay the debt I owe to Bill Strauss, even if I dedicated the rest of my life to trying.

He’ll be missed.

By the way, those unfamiliar with Strauss’ writing may know him as the co-founder of the Capitol Steps, the wildly successful political satire troupe.

As if picking out the 500 greatest songs, 500 greatest albums, and 100 greatest artists weren’t argument fodder enough, now the magazine whose masthead motto used to be (cue laugh track) “All the news that fits” and whose motto for the last 25 years has been “All the money we can gets” has created another list to foment bar stool scholarly discussion:

25 Greatest live albums….

I’m not here to argue (hell, I’m not here at S&R nearly enough these days, but that’s another story). What I propose is this: I’m going to offer a sort of Obama solution – my choices for favorite live album that I associate with each generation: Boomers, Xers, Millenials. I don’t ask that you agree. I suggest that you propose your own choices if they differ from mine.

So here are my picks:

Boomer – The Who: Live at Leeds – The Who was the best live act of the British invasion. This album shows why.

Xer – U2: Rattle and Hum – Even when it borders on sentimental, it’s always sincere – and authentic.

Millenial – Nirvana: Unplugged in New York - There’s only one word that always works when you think about Nirvana – compelling. That comes through even with the amps off.

Given all the deep crises the world faces, I think it’s incumbent on us to fritter away at least a modicum of time on something this important….

And so it is that this week we get no fewer than four distinct flocks flying around this week, each one presenting a very different directional tilt on the topic of whether or not Barack Obama is a candidate for “Generation X,” the “Millenial” generation, both, neither, or something totally different.

First we have Andrew Sullivan’s “Goodbye To All That,” which paints Obama as a post-Baby Boomer messiah that can deliver the country from the Boomer struggles that are still being fought today through proxies. Iraq isn’t about Iraq, Sullivan argues, but about Vietnam and the continuing inability of many members of the ‘Nam generation to accept the loss. Sullivan’s thesis is that the divisiveness engendered by the conflicts of the ’60s and ’70s are being fought today still, and Obama represents the chance to move on to truly new ground. “The war today matters enormously,” Sullivan argues. “The war of the last generation? Not so much. If you are an American who yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the Boomer generation and face today’s actual problems, Obama may be your man.” It’s a compelling argument, and one I’d be more keen to buy if the guy making the argument wasn’t infamous for engaging in his own proxied battles of personal destruction against Bill and Hillary Clinton. I may not be old enough to remember Vietnam, but I definitely AM old enough to remember Sullivan’s frothing hatred for the Clintons as a prime example of the coarsening of the discourse, and it’s bizarre to see him write about the vicious smear campaigning as if he had no part in it.

Next up there’s Lakshmi Chaudhry’s take on the matter, wherein she argues that though Obama is chiefly appealing to Millenials (18-30 year olds) in his stump and vision, the real appeal–and real support–for Obama lies in the Gen X crowd, whose all-encompassing cynicism and distaste for established models led it to reinvent political action via the Internet and espouse new frameworks of activism. I can believe this too–looking at the institutions forged by the likes of Markos Moulitsas and Jerome Armstrong, which emphasize infrastructure and victory over ideology, and using compromise Democrats to build platforms that more progressive Democrats can stand on, I can see this as an expression of Gen X rejection of the “old way of doing things.” Obama’s message of pragmatism, bipartisanship, and results is very appealing, but does “practivism” actually mean anything if the means to achieve results are compromised by selling out the ideals you claim to stand for?

Michael Currie Schaffer’s “Hard To Say Goodbye” casts a cynical look at generational politics, noting that succeeding generations are often all too willing and eager to pick up the flaws and foibles of their forebears, and that it’s impossible to paint individual actions with a broad generational brush–and that Obama’s strength will come from his own individual ability to forge his path. I tend to hew to this argument the most–I know many right-wing friends of mine who parrot the “Democrats tax and spend” line as if they hadn’t lived through eight years of Bush’s gargantuan deficit spending, so strong is the cultural meme in their mind. But I also know just as many people who make these arguments–or reject them–based on individual empirical exploration. Obama’s weakness in his campaign has been his wide stance–trying to be all things to all people without building a coherent framework to pull these disparate beliefs together. It’s an individual action of his that makes him strong when he does pull it together (as he did here), and it’s individual actions of the voters that will make them support or oppose Obama, fueled by factors a lot more complex than labels like “Gen X” or “Millenial.”

Finally, Paul Waldman argues that whether Obama is a Boomer, Gen X’er, or some amorphous fusion of the two, it’s right for him to court the youth vote–not only is under-25 voting on the rise, but those that are voting are doing so as a generation who sees the culture war as over. Gay marriage, equal rights, and interracial dating are no longer issues to this generation, and someone like Obama represents a truly transformational phase for them, a way to remind our country and the world that we’re not all a bunch of redneck Arab-hating bigots, despite the best efforts of PNAC, AIPAC, and the Bush junta. I’m skeptical about this too, especially in light of events ranging from the ongoing saga of the Jena 6 and young voters who might sell their vote for an iPod Touch, just as I’m skeptical about the “change value” of a candidate simply for their skin color or gender. I criticized Garance Franke-Ruta about this line of thinking back in July–it does a terrible disservice to Obama and Clinton by assigning them change potential simply because they showed up to the dance and happened to be black and/or a woman. If Clinton votes with the Reich Wing on practically every issue of national security and economic mobility, does that make her–or Obama, or Edwards, or anyone–a change candidate? I think not.

In the end, that’s what I take away from these many essays about generational dynamics…people are looking at Obama and assigning to him the values they want him to represent, be they generational, cultural, political, and social. This is both something that can work in Obama’s favor, as he strives to be all things to all people, but it’s also a weakness–for when you are painted as the avatar of a generation’s values, what do you do if you don’t live up to them?

That’s why, in the end, I will vote (or not vote) for a candidate based on what they stand for and how they live up to it. Not because a generational dynamic tells me to, or a self-projecting pundit believes I should, or because they happen to fulfill a token demographic. But because they can prove to me that they are deserving based on their own merit. As a guy who comes in on the tail end of Gen X, I’m old enough to be cynical of what people tell me, but young enough to still want to believe in it. I think that’s a fair compromise, and putting aside generational prognostications and cultural assignations to focus on what matters most–the issues–is equally fair in my view.

Taibbi: They’ve done some good things. In the 109th and the other Republican Congresses the two-day work week was standard, and even those two days were often half-days. This Congress has brought back the five-day week. They’ve eliminated for the most part the “vampire congress” late-night sessions and phased out the holding open of votes to intimidate recalcitrant members and that sort of thing. But on the other hand… the Democrats came in amid much fanfare and announced that they were reforming the system, eliminating earmarks, etc. After the first Continuing Resolution they passed (I think it was on January 31), Rahm Emanuel was bragging about how it was an “earmark-free bill.” But there are all sorts of earmarks in it. A guy I know named Winslow Wheeler, a former Senate aide, found many millions worth of earmarks (including a cancer-research handout on page 30 of the bill) within minutes. Same with the Iraq Supplemental — it had all sorts of military handouts in it, despite the fact that they were claiming otherwise. It even says that in the Supplemental: “Pursuant to clause 9 of rule XXI of the Rules of the House of Representatives, this conference report contains no congressional earmarks…” But if you look in the report, there is, among other things, $192 million earmarked for new FA-18 airplanes in there, just wedged in quietly, probably by Murtha’s people.

Along with the Congress’s failure to do anything substantive in terms of ending the war — despite the fact that they’d been elected to do so — this sort of purely cosmetic reform is very disappointing. On the other hand… the difference between a “business as usual” congress and the Belarus-style rubber stamp that Tom DeLay had put together is pretty stark.

S&R: Some big-name progressive bloggers are pissed at what they perceive as the betrayal of newly elected “moderate” Democrats who tend to vote with the Republicans. Is their outrage justified?

Taibbi: A lot of people were upset with the Blue Dog coalition — the “moderate” Democrats who advocate mainly for fiscal conservatism in congressional spending — for defecting from the party to pass a temporary fix of the FISA law that continued to allow warrantless searches. But I don’t know… there were a lot of Blue Dogs and other moderates who won districts that had voted for Bush in ‘04, and who have really outraged Republicans for passing what they call a “tax hike” (actually a budget that envisions the end of the Bush tax cuts) this year, as well as some ambiguous votes on embryonic research, Iraq, and so on. You can look at these moderates as traitors to the Democratic side or you could say that the Democrats are lucky they ran as Democrats at all. I think the country is still a lot more conservative than is reflected in the Congressional makeup.

S&R: You said of the debate over blogs versus newspapers, “As long as men keep shitting on Sunday mornings, the print newspaper will thrive.” Should print media care about the rise of mobile communication such as texting, or are trees still screwed?

Taibbi: Sure print media has to worry. Especially financially. Things like Craigslist have basically put the alternative newspaper out of business. I believe people will always want to read actual paper, but the issue is what paper media can offer than electronic media can’t, from a revenue perspective. And that’s not much. The net offers so much more in terms of multimedia and click-throughs and links to shopping sites and so on that, from an advertiser’s perspective, it’s just a much safer bet. It’s also much more quantifiable in terms of finding out exactly how many readers there are and how many respond to the ads. So this is all bad for print media. The only papers that are going to survive are going to be the ones that are actually sold at newsstands, i.e., don’t rely on advertising for all their revenue. And I think some will. Just like HBO, people are going to find that the quality increases if they pay for their media product directly.

S&R: Steve Rosenbaum wrote recently in The Huffington Post that Jon Stewart “isn’t funny anymore,” meaning that the joke of the Bush years is on us and Democrats can’t and won’t do jack to change things. Your recent RS piece ‘The War Party‘ blasted the GOP presidential candidates as “fourth-rate buffoons.” Is this a good time for a major third party to formulate?

Taibbi: There’s never been a better time. Both mainstream parties are looking likely to nominate deeply flawed candidates. If the race comes down to Hillary and Giuliani, the Green Party could nominate Big Bird and win 28% of the vote. And a third party is definitely needed, since the Democrats have become captives of the money wing of their party.

S&R: It seems like every day Reps. Waxman, Conyers, et al. are conducting hearings on the malfeasance of the Bush administration, yet impeachment remains officially “off the table.” Are there practical reasons for the pushback on impeachment?

Taibbi: I’m on the fence on that one. Ironically, the reason impeachment might not be a good idea is that we had such a recent experience with it under Clinton. It would be a terrible, destabilizing thing if opposition political parties began to regularly appeal to the impeachment process as a weapon against sitting presidents, and I think this is part of Waxman’s thinking there. That said, Bush certainly qualifies for impeachment — there’s no question he’s committed “high crimes and misdemeanors,” and that he would be vulnerable to such a prosecution, especially in the area of lying to Congress. But I don’t think anyone wants to go there, after the Ken Starr debacle.

S&R: You wrote in ‘Spanking the Donkey‘ that the ‘04 race for the White House was “one of the greatest and most prolonged insults to human dignity the world has ever seen.” Yet you’re subjecting yourself again to the mind-numbing tedium of another campaign in your new RS blog, ‘Year of the Rat.’ How do you keep the horror from getting to you?

Taibbi: I don’t. The horror gets to me. What worries me is that I have this sneaking suspicion that I deserve this assignment somehow, like I’m paying some kind of large karmic bill by going out there again. I can’t say why I feel that way, but I do. But I certainly hate it. I’ve reached the point now where when I interview “men on the street” and they give me the same crazy answers over and over again (like “We have to fight them over there so they won’t come over here”). I really have to struggle to keep from grabbing them by the neck, screaming “What the fuck!!!”, etc.

S&R: Are you going to volunteer for any campaigns this election cycle, like you did for Bush in ‘04?

Taibbi: Um, there’s going to be something along those lines, but I can’t say exactly what, for obvious reasons. I have a book coming out next year called ‘The Great Derangement‘ that includes a pretty lengthy undercover job, but I can’t say exactly what it was yet.

S&R: Why do you think the traditional political press has avoided discussion of the Constitution and rule of law in presidential debates and discourse? Do they presume that Americans don’t care about the Constitution?

Taibbi: Well, they certainly do care. I’ve run into more Ron Paul supporters this year than I have supporters of any other candidate, and by and large they support Paul because they believe the Constitution is being misinterpreted/ignored by modern politicians. People are upset that presidents can declare war without Congressional approval, they’re upset by things like FISA, they’re upset by certain varieties of taxes… The press and the candidates have mostly ignored these issues, but I believe these questions of “process” are going to move front and center in the near future, because people are more and more concerned not with specific issues like abortion but with wider questions of how our government works now, how money influences lawmaking, and how unaccountable elected leaders are, etc.

S&R: You expressed pity for Cindy Sheehan, who seemed overwhelmed by the anti-war movement she triggered in ‘05. After quitting activism earlier this year in disgust, she’s come back, saying she’ll run for Pelosi’s seat. Is she still a force?

Taibbi: I don’t know. Cindy Sheehan lost me when she started backing the 9/11 Truth Movement. I liked her personally when I met her — I guess more than anything I felt sorry for her — but my sense of her is that she is cracking a little under the stress of having to play the role of a grassroots leader, that this is maybe a little too much responsibility for her.

S&R: Under what circumstances would you ever run for office?

Taibbi: Jesus. Me? I could never run for office. I once wrote an article called “God Can Suck My Dick.” I once threw a pie made of horse sperm at a New York Times reporter. I’m an unmarried drug addict with bad teeth. I think these things pretty much disqualify me. There are times when I wish I could work for someone like Bernie Sanders, but I’d probably want to go back to writing pretty fast.

S&R: ‘Smells Like Dead Elephants‘ is your latest compilation of writings, and the much-anticipated ‘Great Derangement,’ a non-fiction political narrative, will be out next year. You have a few books under your belt but whither the novel you always dreamed of writing? Do you still think your fiction sucks?

Taibbi: Yes, my fiction indeed sucks. While in Russia I wrote a sort of parody of a Sherlock Holmes novel called ‘The Great Popkin’ that actually wasn’t bad, but I lost it at some point during a breakup three years ago. Masha, if you find it on your computer, please send it to me. But I don’t think fiction’s really my thing and the great thing about that novel I always wanted to write is that I don’t want to write it anymore. I’d like to try to write a good non-fiction book first.

S&R: Scuttlebutt is that your first book, ‘The eXile,’ which details your time at that paper, will be turned into a movie. Any details on that?

Taibbi: I haven’t heard that. We optioned it years ago and it never got made. There were some close calls, but thankfully it’s retired for good, or at least that’s the last I heard. The script was horrifying. They turned me into the earnest, goody-two-shoes reporter opposite Mark Ames’s oversexed bad-boy character. I hated both of us in the script and I’m sure audiences would have, too.

S&R: Hunter Thompson once wrote that the Book of Revelation was his biggest literary inspiration. Does the Bible do anything for you?

Taibbi: I’ve had to read the Bible a lot lately, for reasons that will become clear when ‘The Great Derangement’ comes out. I find it to mostly be hilarious horseshit. I was laughing so hard reading the Old Testament last year that I started writing a sort of CliffsNotes version of it for fun. I love the part where the two angels come to Sodom and the Sodomites start banging on Lot’s door, because they want to bone the angels so badly, and Lot, being a good Dad, starts offering the men his two virgin daughters, so as to spare the angels… I think if someone were to write a truly deadpan version of these stories, it would be the greatest comedy ever printed.

S&R: You’re often compared to Thompson, but you make no secret of your admiration of H.L. Mencken, who was eerily prescient when he wrote in 1920, “On some great and glorious day the plain folks of the land will reach their heart’s desire and the White House will be adorned by a downright moron.” Ben Franklin also warned that the nation would eventually devolve into despotism, and the subtitle of your forthcoming book calls this the “twilight of the American Empire.” Have we really reached our nadir at last?

Taibbi: America is a very strong country still, but there are elements of corruption in our system of government that run so deep now that we have to really be concerned, I think. The thievery that we saw in Iraq during this war by our contracting community is something that even the Russians would be hard-pressed to match. Right now we have a government that lacks even enough civic instinct to take care of pressing emergencies like Katrina and Iraq. When the level of public confidence in the government begins to correspond to the reality of its low performance, we’re going to be in trouble.

There’s also the matter of our economy. Right now America’s international strength is based almost entirely on its military power. Our manufacturing base is disappearing daily. It’s tough to maintain a world empire with a service-based economy.

S&R: You spent your formative years in Russia; what insight can you bring to the whole Litvinenko poisoning fiasco? Do Russians enjoy political intrigue as much as Americans seem to?

Taibbi: I’ve heard varying interpretations of the Litvinenko scandal, but none that really make sense to me. It seems to me that it had something to do with the issue of the succession and Putin’s upcoming decision about whether or not to step down, with Litvinenko and the information he reportedly had on Putin presenting itself as a kind of wild card here. I know Litvinenko was very outspoken about the Putin-and-little-boys thing, an issue that I heard rumors about as far back as 2001. I remember the Russian reporters I used to hang out with talking about these rumors that Putin was “in pocket” because of some shameful sexual thing in his past. But who knows. There are so many angles here that it’s almost impossible to decipher. Trying to decipher the meaning of the parade of hits in Russia is certainly challenging. I think Russians would be more entertained by it if it didn’t have such grave consequences for their daily existence.

S&R: Related to that, what do you make of presidential brother Neil Bush’s tight relationship with Boris Berezovsky?

Taibbi: Berezovsky is hilarious. In political terms, he’ll fuck anything that moves. I almost admire him. As for Neil… I wrote an article about Neil Bush once and was bowled over by his assertion that it was normal for women to show up at his hotel room and simply propose sex with him (this happened overseas; apparently he was being compensated by certain employers wanting to curry favor with the Bush family). I keep waiting for his ex to go public with the more explosive material everyone says she has on the family.

S&R: You’ve said you were having a “lot more fun in Russia” and might head back overseas somewhere. Still feel that way, is that still in the cards?

Taibbi: I was also doing a lot more drugs back then. I may go back sometime, but it depends on some personal factors. Nine months of winter and eleven time zones of bad food is a tough sell to a lot of women, let’s put it that way.

S&R: Any fond memories of Uzbekistan?

Taibbi: I was thrown out of the country there, and there is a very funny story about that. One of the funniest of my life. I had just written something for the AP about the Uzbek independence day and mentioned something about Karimov suppressing political parties. So naturally the next day agents of the former KGB (I think was the NSS; I’m not sure what it is now) came to my apartment. They were actually already inside when I came back from baseball practice (I was playing with the national baseball team). There was one middle-aged blonde woman who was interrogating me and two goons who were turning all my stuff over. The woman is asking me questions and suddenly one of the goons comes over, carrying my laptop. “What’s this?” he says. “A computer,” I say. “What do you use it for?” he asks. Now, I was there on a student visa — illegally — so I had to make something up. “I’m a student,” I say. “I write all sorts of things.” He looks at it and says, “Do you write poetry?” I shrug and say, “Well, sure, sometimes.” He frowns. “Do you have any talent?” he asks. I looked at him kind of sadly and said, “No, I don’t have any talent.” That’s when he handed the computer back to me. “Well, then,” he said. “You shouldn’t write poetry.” Five minutes later they were handing me a train ticket and telling me to get the fuck out of Uzbekistan. I thought that was beautiful, that they did it with real class. One side note: on the way out of the country, I tried to send a telegram to my mother. The note said, “KGB KICKING ME OUT EVERYTHING OK MATT.” But the note she got read “KGB KICKING ME GUT EVERYTHING O MATT.” She nearly had a heart attack. It wasn’t until I reached Moscow three days later that she found out I was okay.

S&R: Does Pope Benedict give you the same warm fuzzy that John Paul did?

Taibbi: I’m going to decline comment on Popes for a while. That last effort didn’t work out too well for me.

S&R: On to something you probably enjoy talking about more than politics: sports. Did Michael Vick get the shaft? Does Barry Bonds deserve to be asterisked? Bill Belichick – shameless fraud, misunderstood genius, lucky bastard?

Taibbi: Vick: an idiot. Being a sports star is like being in a murder conspiracy. If you think anything you do is going to remain a secret, you’re a moron. All this guy had to do was not commit major felonies on his property and he was going to be rich for the rest of his life. Now he’s going to end up doing celebrity boxing with the Fridge and Star Jones and stuff like that to pay off his reclaimed signing bonus. I will say, however, that it blows my mind that he can be banned from the NFL while Leonard Little gets to play, even after killing an actual human being.

Bonds: I’m less interested in seeing Bonds punished than I am in seeing McGwire reduced to the Bonds level of public disgrace. Bonds at least stands up and takes the heat publicly. McGwire has been hiding like a little bitch. He always grossed me out the way he used to shake his head and talk about how even he is amazed by how great he is, yada yada.

Belichick: I’m a Patriots fan, so I’m biased. But I thought the whole scandal was idiotic. I mean, all the coaches in the league send out dummy signals. Why? Because everyone knows someone on the other team is trying to read their signals. I’m glad it happened, though, because the Pats seem like they’re pissed enough about it that they want to stomp the brains and teeth out of every team they play. So thanks a lot, Eric Mangini. How’d that move turn out for you, by the way?

S&R: If you were Jesus, would you use your divine powers to meddle in the outcome of sporting events, as teams like the Rockies believe he does?

Taibbi: If and when I ever get to be Interior Minister, one of my first acts is going to be the putting to death of anyone who thinks God interferes in the outcome of things like sporting events and elections. I’d want to have a giant shark tank built expressly for this purpose. Just throw them in there and then dump a couple of barrels of cow blood in the water.

S&R: You smeared a reporter’s face with horse-spunk pie, you dropped acid and wore a Viking helmet to a campaign interview, you followed John Kerry around in a gorilla suit… Is there anything left on the to-do list?

Taibbi: The punchline answer would be “Grow up,” I guess. Beyond that, I’m not going to explain what the circumstances would be exactly, but I will say that I have a recurring fantasy about chainsawing a certain person’s desk in half on live television. But I’m getting a little old for all of that stuff, unfortunately. ∞

(Special props to Beth Jacobson and Matt Browner-Hamlin.)

I’m a latecomer to Max’s readership, but his work has inspired me to be a better, stronger writer and blogger. Max told it like it was, never gave an inch, yet was always willing to listen and debate. He put centrist Democrats and the netroots both on notice that being DINOs (Democrats In Name Only) was unacceptable, that simply electing anyone who called themselves a Democrat wasn’t enough, and that progressives had a right to demand more of the so-called “liberal” party than Blue Dogs and slavish adherents to free trade.

When I grow up, I want to be an irascible, cranky, uncompromising, brilliant, eloquent, and still passionate proponent of real progressive change–with a ponytail from New Jersey, just like Max. I’ve got the ponytail and the origins right, but I don’t think I’ll ever match Max’s wit, wisdom, and style.

No one can, really, but Max himself. Come back soon, man.

Yet we’ll remain, even if we’re not sure where we’re going, or what the point of it all is. GenX’s distinct apathy has its deepest roots in the 1970’s, when parents dealt with the long hangover from the previous decade by drowning themselves in the hair of the dog. “Broken homes” became the norm. Harsh music (punk, techno, metal, gangsta rap, industrial, grunge), harsh film (’Alien,’ ‘Blade Runner,’ ‘Brazil,’ ‘Terminator’) and harsh literature (slam poetry, freestyling, zines, underground comics, graphic novels)–not to mention the rise of violent video games–served more to sever GenX’ers at last from their resented roots than shore up any sense of identity. Hence our moniker.

Yet beauty and light abounds in our dark generational ether, like a diffuse universe of souls. Philip K. Dick, Douglas Coupland, Kurt Cobain, Chris Rock, Robert Smith, Anne Rice, Chuck D, Bill Hicks, Björk, Tim Burton, Madonna: these are among our heroes and inspirations, for better or for worse. Our distinct electromagnetic aesthetic, our biochemical zeitgeist, is not for everyone… and may not be the kind of art that lasts, should humanity’s hope survive the retrogressive morasse it finds itself languishing in. But I dig it.

As for GenX poetry, the pickings are slim if you’re looking for classic form or meter. Much of the best work of the last 2-3 decades is free verse, freestyle, prose poetry… typically shapeless, impulsive and impressionistic, not unlike our generation’s aloof perception of things. Then there are myriad song lyrics, the last avenue of expression that still adheres stubbornly to the dictum of rhyme. In fact, I’ll start off with a lyric (for “Static Acts” from the album ‘Perfect Symmetry’) written by composer/guitarist Jim Matheos of prog metal pioneers Fates Warning.

Air currents grind, monotony.

Image defined, static scene.

Adherents bent opinionless

following scent of commonness.

Fit the latest rage,

whatever stains the page.

Then fears allayed

of lonely shade.

Wheels, they grind… industry.

Insipid finds, out of key.

Opinions bent toward standard waves,

bleaching out divergent shades.

Mock integrity.

Veiled hypocrisy.

Ironic finds,

when selves decried.

Ban expressiveness.

Bold repressiveness

dictated by minds closed tight

and walls that shut out light,

and so we have static acts.

This is my own piece, “Subconscious Flotsam,” which I wrote over a decade ago.

I labor for a fish flake

kiss a replay of your face

watch a minute’s worth of world

eat from a chemical cornucopia

drink a broken thermometer

read copyrights and trademarks

sleep under alarm

breathe in borrowed time

taste pus and punctures

have sex in separation

seek love in desperation

kiss a replay of your face…

© 1996 MAS

The last piece is a prose monologue (”A Modern Man”) by the one and only George Carlin, which he performed on his most recent stand-up special, ‘Life Is Worth Losing.’ Although Carlin, still relevant and caustic at 70, was born and raised in a decidedly different era than many of his fans, he clearly rues the excesses of the Boomers and through his dark comedy (of late) he has tried to warn subsequent generations not to fall into the same traps. Here he goes off on a whimsical, satirical diatribe that’s essentially his first crack at Generation Y, who are not only falling into the very same traps, they’re doing it at 100mph on snowboards and skateboards and motocross bikes with smiles on their lips, piercings on their faces, and tats on their asses.

I’m a modern man
digital and smoke free;
a man for the millenium.

A diversified, multi-cultural,
post-modern deconstructionist;
politically, anatomically and ecologically incorrect.

I’ve been uplinked and downloaded,
I’ve been inputted and outsourced.
I know the upside of downsizing,
I know the downside of upgrading.

I’m a high-tech low-life.
A cutting-edge, state-of-the-art,
bi-coastal multi-tasker,
and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond.

I’m new-wave, but I’m old-school;
and my inner child is outward-bound.

I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking,
warm-hearted cool customer;
voice-activated and bio-degradable.

I interface with my database;
my database is in cyberspace;
so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive,
and from time to time I’m radioactive.

Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve,
ridin’ the wave, dodgin’ the bullet,
pushin’ the envelope.

I’m on point, on task, on message,
and off drugs.

I’ve got no need for coke and speed;
I’ve got no urge to binge and purge.

I’m in the moment, on the edge,
over the top, but under the radar.

A high-concept, low-profile,
medium-range ballistic missionary.

A street-wise smart bomb.
A top-gun bottom-feeder.

I wear power ties, I tell power lies,
I take power naps, I run victory laps.

I’m a totally ongoing, big-foot, slam-dunk
rainmaker with a pro-active outreach.

A raging workaholic, a working rageaholic;
out of rehab and in denial.

I’ve got a personal trainer,
a personal shopper,
a personal assistant,
and a personal agenda.

You can’t shut me up;
you can’t dumb me down.

‘Cause I’m tireless, and I’m wireless.
I’m an alpha-male on beta-blockers.

I’m a non-believer,
I’m an over-achiever;
Laid-back and fashion-forward.
Up-front, down-home;
low-rent, high-maintenance.

I’m super-sized, long lasting,
high-definition, fast-acting,
over-ready and built to last.

A hands-on, foot-loose, knee-jerk head case;
prematurely post-traumatic,
and I have a love child who sends me hate-mail.

But I’m feeling, I’m caring,
I’m healing, I’m sharing.
A supportive, bonding, nurturing
primary-care giver.

My output is down, but my income is up.
I take a short position on the long bond,
and my revenue stream has its own cash flow.

I read junk mail, I eat junk food,
I buy junk bonds, I watch trash sports.

I’m gender-specific, capital-intensive,
user-friendly and lactose-intolerant.

I like rough sex; I like tough love.
I use the f-word in my e-mail.
And the software on my hard drive
is hard core–no soft porn.

I bought a microwave at a mini-mall.
I bought a mini-van at a mega-store.
I eat fast food in the slow lane.

I’m toll free, bite-size, ready-to-wear,
and I come in all sizes.

A fully equipped, factory-authorized,
hospital-tested, clinically-proven,
scientifically formulated medical miracle.

I’ve been pre-washed, pre-cooked, pre-heated,
pre-screened, pre-approved, pre-packaged,
post-dated, freeze-dried, double-wrapped
and vacuum-packed.

And … I have unlimited broadband capacity.

I’m a rude dude, but I’m the real deal.
Lean and mean.
Cocked, locked and ready to rock;
rough, tough, and hard to bluff.

I take it slow, I go with the flow;
I ride with the tide, I’ve got glide in my stride.

Drivin’ and movin’, sailin’ and spinnin’;
jivin’ and groovin’, wailin’ and winnin’.

I don’t snooze, so I don’t lose.
I keep the pedal to the metal
and the rubber on the road.
I party hearty, and lunchtime is crunch time.

I’m hangin’ in, there ain’t no doubt;
and I’m hangin’ tough.
Over and out.

But if you’re a different kind of company – say an entrepreneurial outfit started and run by front-edge Xers (people now in their early to mid-40s) – you’re in good shape, right? You aren’t facing a retirement wave. You aren’t facing the need for a painful adjustment from Boomer-style leadership to the far different style of Xer execs. And this means there’s going to be no leadership vacuum at the top sucking everybody higher in the organization and creating trainwrecks at the Xer-to-Millennial lower management level, either. Life is good

Except that you’re wrong – the macro-succession crisis is coming for you, too. A hypothetical case study illustrates how.

Say OldDog, Inc. is a Fortune 500 manufacturer of widgets. They dominate the market, and as is always the case with these kinds of companies, they have extensive relationships with a wide variety of vendors. One of these vendors is NewTricks, Inc., a smaller (less than 100 employees), agile “new economy” thingamajob firm that relies on virtual offices and remote teaming. As you know, thingamajobs are critical to the manufacture of widgets, and NewTricks’ greatest value to OldDog is their innovation, agility and responsiveness.

An OldDog project leader will call his contact at NewTricks and say “hey, can you guys do X?” The NewTricks guy, without even flinching, says “sure – we can do that.” Of course, NewTricks doesn’t do X and hasn’t done X because X is a brand new idea and nobody has done it. But they put their heads together and send their brightest folks off to figure it out. A month later NewTricks puts a prototype in OldDog’s hands.

The founders and senior execs of NewTricks are all in the 40-45 range right now and aside from a sales guy or two their employees range from about 25-45. In other words, they are in almost every way the archetypal new economy company. And they’re in great shape.

Except that a Boomer retires every 11 seconds and the senior brass at OldDog hits 65 in January. Over the next few years OldDog is going to see massive retirement, as described in my macro-succession post. Their next generation is probably not quite ready to step in, and even if they do there aren’t enough of them to fill all the seats of departing Boomers. Worse, those Xers have really different ideas about management.

What does OldDog do? Well, obviously, they have to get aggressive about recruiting external candidates. They need people who know the industry (or at least, they’re likely to think they do, and we can expect their search to begin in the widget sector). They’re going to be really interested in proven commodities and if there are people out there that they know, those folks are going to get a look.

Slowly, the large, drowsy eye of OldDog (think Sauron without all the flame) comes to rest on one of its smartest and most trusted partners – NewTricks, Inc. People at NewTricks are happy, but OldDog has vast resources. Maybe some NewTricksters want better money. Maybe they see the legacy company as a more secure alternative at a time in their lives when they’re starting to think differently than they did 10-20 years ago. And there are bound to be some who saw the big company as an obvious goal when they were young, but for reasons described in the macro-succession crisis piece they couldn’t get in the door – or if they did, they found that a phalanx of Boomers blocked their way to the top. So they entered the entrepreneurial world not because they necessarily wanted to, but because they had to. Deep down perhaps they’ve never stopped seeing OldDog as the holy grail. Perhaps it represents something as simple and obvious as security, and perhaps it represents something deeper, something like personal validation.

All of a sudden OldDog begins sucking talent – leadership, technical, sales, marketing, you name it – out of their vendor base. It’s an adjustment for OldDog, to be sure, but they can afford the best and after a transition period they’re now ready for the future. At the same time, NewTricks is in crisis. Much of the top talent is gone and now they’re the ones trying to secure the best people from a generation that’s already thin (remember, X is only about 2/3 the size of the Baby Boom – 50M to 75M). If they can find talent they have to pay more, which has predictable implications for their operations and the cost structure they have to pass along to their customers.

Or worse, they have to hand over responsibility to younger Millennials, who simply aren’t ready.

There’s no place to hide – even if NewTricks survives the onslaught, it’s going to be a hell of a battle – and like the legacies, they aren’t prepared for it. If they were, they could be doing things right now to insulate themselves a bit. And maybe some are. But this is going to be a massive upheaval across all of our economies.

Is your company thinking about it?

post Black Dog Strategic:

If you’d like a glimpse of the stress the Millennials are already exerting on organizations, you’ll want to read a new analysis from the Wall Street Journal’s CareerJournal.com site. In it, Jeffrey Zaslow chronicles how businesses are addressing the Mills’ excessive need for praise: (More at Black Dog Strategic…)