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.

For those not consigned to the generational hell that is Baby Boomerdom, on this day 50 years ago a small plane carrying three important rock stars of their time – Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson – crashed in a snow storm.

All three men died, as did the pilot, a 21 year old with, evidently, about 30 minutes of flying experience.

There has been much weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth over the years due to this event. Most of this has been over Holly, considered still one of the greatest talents rock music has ever produced and an enormously influential figure among what became “the next big thing” in rock – the British Invasion that began just over five years later with The Beatles’ appearance on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Over a decade after that snowy February rock and roll tragedy, singer/songwriter Don McLean had a gigantic hit with his song “American Pie” which prominently referenced the crash – and singled out Holly with the following lines:”I can’t remember if I cried/When I read about his widowed bride/But something touched me deep inside/The Day the Music Died….”

But What Does It Mean?

A lot of ink is being spilled today about this anniversary (here’s a typical example) – and about whether February 3, 1959, truly is “the day the music died” – or, as the above article argues, one of those reminders of the fragility of human life, something even “the power of rock” cannot triumph over. Reference September 18, 1970, April 5, 1994, or, most famously, December 8, 1980. (Apologies in advance if the date of death of your favorite rock star is not listed here.)

But there’s another question I haven’t noticed anyone (including me) ask about this or any other, measured by “pre-media culture” standards, sad anniversary.

Why do we care?

As I have heard no less a personage than Michael Caine observe, “Nobody really goes away anymore.” Caine was referencing Turner Classic Movies, a channel that feeds viewers a constant diet of films starring long dead movie stars, but his observation is easily applied to VH-1 Classic’s treatment of  dead rock stars, the History Channel’s treatment of dead politicians, or any of our myriad of outlets that constantly give us that experience that McLuhan famously (if politically incorrectly) termed “Orientalizing” – that sense that neither JFK, John Lennon, or John Wayne has gone anywhere – we constantly live with them even if it is “virtual.”

So why should I be sad? I have almost the entire Buddy Holly catalog that I can listen to at will. Buddy plays for me whenever I want him to. I have both Valens’ major tunes and somewhere I even have “Chantilly Lace.” (Hello, Baby….”)

So it’s all good…right?

Loss of Affect

This sounds shallow and superficial. But we live in a shallow and superficial culture, don’t we? A culture of 24 hour news that fails to make us informed, responsible citizens. A culture where we’re expected to choose our Buddy Hollys via a glorified game show.

So I sit here listening to Buddy as I write this and his last hit comes on:

“It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.”

The irony for both Buddy and our culture is not lost on me.

Virtual V. Reality

Buddy Holly died at 22; J.P. Richardson at 28; Richie Valens at (almost unbelievably) 17.

Their combined life spans, 67 years, are less than the average American life span. Bob Dylan is currently 67. Paul McCartney will be 67 in June.

With all the recordings and films we have of Holly, Valens, and the Bopper, whatever virtual eternal youth and joy those technological renderings offer us, what we don’t have are all those years of productivity, artistry, life they and we might have had.

When people die, they die. They’re gone. We don’t have them anymore. We miss them. We’ve suffered a loss.

And sometimes, on a day like this, we remember our loss – and it makes us sad.

That’s the reality. Nothing virtual about it.

There are usually many more cars than this attempting to turn when they have the green and you’re in their way. Sometimes, when you’re lucky, there’s a cab or a bus waiting there too (I gave up after waiting three light cycles for that shot). And everybody going south on Broadway that wants to turn left on 6th is in a hurry to get somewhere, if even to the 24-hour grocery store, the 24-hour gym, or the fast food drive-thru. All that’s left to process in their tightly wound little motorist-y brains is that they want to get somewhere, they want to get there now, and some asshole with legs not pushing pedals is forcing them to wait an extra ten seconds before proceeding to their destination (via the next red light). All the while, their front bumpers come ever closer to your tender flesh and your easily breakable bones and, if you’re like me, you sometimes have a mood to flash a thumbs-up, a smile, a wink, or a condescending, raised-eyebrow, laser-guided side-glare. You, the asshole (after all, if you’re not driving, there must be something wrong with you), go about your merry way on foot, possibly to stand and wait for a vehicle that will pick you up and then stop every so many blocks to pick up more transit footsoldiers. Sometimes, these people end up stopping and waiting for another vehicle to take them the rest of the way.

(The one time I’ve ever outright lost my temper in this crosswalk was thanks to a cabbie who thought it would be clever to maintain ramming speed and then slam on his brakes to properly express his dismay at being so inconvenienced. The one time I’ve ever complained about a bus driver to RTD–I haven’t seen him again since–was after seeing his grin in his rear-view mirror as he plowed into the path of an unknown woman crossing in that same spot.)

Many moons ago this empty lot was a restaurant called the “White Spot,” popular with, as Mrs. Cho would put it, da gaaaaaAAY. I included the shot of the relatively new Beauvallon building (apartments with lower-level sushi bar and shops and gym and whatnot) mainly because of the gorgeous sky (this camera takes great sky shots when it wants to).

I remember one time at the bus stop right there, someone on one of the balconies was shining a laser pointer at bystanders, including me. I was tempted to make a show of it by putting a hand over an eye, screaming, writhing on the ground (or at least staggering around a bit before dropping to my knees) — instead I just shielded my face and took out my phone and started conspicuously pressing buttons. Funny thing, a few months prior I had also had a laser pointer shined towards me by some ruffians in a passing car. There’s a special place in Hades for someone who would do that in the first place, given that some of those are strong enough to burn retinas.

I’d like to think that I’ll never encounter someone who would do something stupid like that out of specific desire to cause harm to another person, but eight years of Bush have shoveled a cumulative metric shit-ton of protein bars and raw eggs into the maw of my already thriving inner misanthrope. It is clear now that giving a fuck about anyone not directly and immediately benefiting you in some tangible, material way is viewed as a sign of weakness. Whether or not we’re ever going to be marching to that particular drum again, certain memes have wormed their way into the national consciousness and/or subconsciousness, and the depths to which it is acceptable to stoop to get what one wants out of life, if one is in the right job title and/or tax bracket, continue their plunge. The ’60s made pointless, bullshit war seem at least tolerable for the power elite to wage (let’s face it), but Bush II brought treasury looting, torture, humiliation, mercenaries, indifferent snark and finger-pointing-at-piles-of-naked-assed-prisoners-in-photographs into it with open arms.

And whereas the last gasps of the 20th Century forced us to accept the meme, “Government’s job is to outsource everything to the private sector and let the private sector take care of you,” the Bush years gave a massive, shit-smeared thumbs-up to the private sector saying “Fuck off, it’s not my job to take care of you, get your own” as its higher-ups took everything they could grab from their underlings and their government alike. The government’s job is now to drop bombs, provide a paycheck for life to our neutered politicians, cut welfare checks for rich people and force my generation, which from what I can see was largely left to raise itself, to shoulder the burden of supporting its Boomer parents (The “Me Generation” becomes the “Gimme Gimme Generation”) as they fight tooth and nail over that last delicious shipment of Tasty, Tasty America Bars™ that were once available in every corner market in Mayberry and West Mayberry alike. The private sector’s job is to take everything it can grab through your labor, your rigged retirement plan and whatever money the government can borrow on your signature to keep them in mink; and kick your ass out on the street the second you’re no longer–wait for it–tangibly and materially useful, immediately.

The best way I can put it based on my own personal experiences is that I have been cleverly brainwashed into believing that I am a waste of money and I deserve whatever scraps the higher-ups are willing to fart down onto me, and not a scrap more, as I bust my ass and endlessly, ultimately fruitlessly, clamor with the rest for their assurance that I am indeed worthy–not just of a paycheck–but of a good living. I get backed into a corner, it’s my own fault for not being someone else. My job goes overseas and I starve, I must not have been trying hard enough. My CEO runs off with my retirement and leaves me holding a portfolio full of worthless stock, well, sucks to be me. That’s Wall Street for ya. That’s what you get for trying to play that big, bad market casino like the big guns forced you to do.

As a child of divorce, I was conditioned to believe that I was in the way, physically, emotionally and especially financially. As a member of today’s workforce, I feel those attitudes being foisted upon me tenfold. I am a fish, in an ever-shrinking pond, and the guy draining it is telling me I’m an asshole for suffocating.

Let’s see what the fresh-faced, desensitized Leaders of Tomorrow™ will do with all this legitimized behavior as they get ready to assume their thrones in the coming years, shall we?

9th at Corona, this afternoon. Just for shits and grins.

The new season of PBS’s long running series Masterpiece Theatre, now known simply as Masterpiece, kicked   off last Sunday with a new adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s brilliant examination of gender relations and cultural  mores, Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

The production is first rate. The actors, young and earnest as they are, seem to have a clear grasp of the key issues of the novel, quaint as they may seem to sophisticated Post-Sexual Revolution viewers. I can recommend it without reservation, something I couldn’t do for last year’s Complete Jane Austen.

In fact, a useful question for us to consider is whether it makes sense for Masterpiece to offer such a production of Tess.  Who would get an exploration of the double standard in these times?

The subtitle of Hardy’s novel is a simple phrase: A Pure Woman.

What the novel (and this fine production) attempts to examine is what Hardy’s (or any) culture means when it uses such a phrase.  As I mentioned above, maybe what makes even a thoughtful presentation of Tess seem irrelevant, perhaps even fatuous, in these same days of this our life is that we’re now two generations removed from the rise of the Women’s Movement (for lack of a better term).  And as we have been wont to do with racism, environmentalism, and class warfare, we have spent so much time wonking about these issues that we have come to think we have addressed them with more than words.

This relegates, in ways we don’t always consciously grasp, Hardy’s powerful depiction of the duplicity of our treatment of male and female sexuality to a sort of Antiques Roadshow valuation – its historical significance carries more weight than its artistic/social value.

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The last generation with significant experience of a pre “Women’s Liberation” culture are The Boomers, those aging self admirers. For us (and I’m as Boomer as it gets) Tess of the dUrbervilles presents a world we know well – a world where a woman was either a “good girl” or “damaged goods” -  a world  that we sought to redefine through our embracing of Free Love.

But as with most Boomer efforts, what we did was glom those cultural sensibilities we claimed so hard to reject onto our practice of the rejection of those sensibilities – guys “knew” that “hippie chicks” were “easy,” for example – useful for getting laid, but not women we’d seriously consider marrying. Even the free and easy sexuality of our college days often wound up as a series of monogamous relationships that “allowed” us to engage in “pre-marital intercourse” which we thought of as leading to a serious end (marriage, family) even when subconsciously we knew otherwise.

What we wrought with such a convoluted mindset, which books like Tess (and the Polanski (!) adaptation) allowed us to talk about without talking about our true selves, was a weird, confused and confusing melange of ideas and beliefs about male/female relations that has given our generation a divorce rate unlikely to be equalled in human history.

Boomer women may, then,  occasionally harbor notions of themselves as  Tess Durbeyfields. They’ve spent their lives since puberty arguing Hardy’s assertion that purity comes from somewhere besides an unbroken hymen. But if so, most Boomer men, at least in their rare moments of honesty,  would have to admit to being afflicted with a kind of gender relations MPD – they are both Angel Clares and Alec d’Urbervilles. They want their good girls bad and their bad girls made somehow pure again at the same time.

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Whether Xers or Millenials experience Tess of the d’Urbervilles with a similar troubled ambivalence about gender relations seems unlikely. For them, Tess will seem more like historical fiction than a key for coded discussions of their gender relationship confusions. Their insights will likely be deeper in some ways, shallower in others as a result of their Post-Sexual Revolution orientation. They will certainly be different.

But Tess speaks in a striking way to the Boomer generation – and thus this new PBS rendering of Hardy’s opus might be called “Tess of the Boomervilles.”

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.

Running and writing may be polar opposite activities.

Writing requires long sedentary hours of deep thought; running, by its very nature, typifies motion, yet most runners don’t spend their time thinking about much of anything in particular as they run.

Both activities require solitude, although a runner may race with hundreds of other entrants and a writer requires an audience.

So perhaps running and writing seem like odd bedfellows for a book, but then again, Haruki Murakami has made his reputation by stretching boundaries and asking readers to look at the world in different ways.

His latest book, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, takes a different approach than his usual fiction. Running is a memoir about the two things in Murakami’s life that best define him. Murakami tries to get inside his own head to explain the appeal, and the importance, of running and how that impacts his work as a writer. “For me, running is both exercise and a metaphor,” Murakami explains.

By sharing his own specific experience, Murakami tries to tap into the universal experience of runners everywhere. “Even if the skill level varies, there are things that only runners understand and share. I truly believe that,” Murakami writes.

Whether that’s true or not for each reader, though, remains to be seen. People who aren’t especially interested in running may not glean any new mysteries into what makes people strap on tennis shoes and start running in the sticky summer heat for mile after mile. Runners may not glean any new insights into their own identities or motivations. Murakami writes things like: “If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I’d never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit. All I can do is keep those few reasons nicely polished.” That’s probably not news to even the most casual runner, even if it’s written with pith and polish.

By that standard, Running is somewhat pedestrian. As a memoir, it lacks the wildly imaginative and sometimes surreal turns typically tucked into Murakami’s books.

But Murakami still sprinkles his prose with great little pieces of description: “As I run, the trade winds blowing in from the direction of the lighthouse rustle the leaves of the eucalyptus over my head.”

He also sprinkles his prose with great little truisms of life: “If you live in Boston, Samuel Adams draft beer (Summer Ale) and Dunkin’ Donuts are essentials of life.”

Running succeeds best when Murakami uses his running as a way to talk about larger issues he’s contemplating. In particular, the book is very much a chronicle of a fiftysomething male coming to grips with getting older. He can literally measure his aging in his race times and in his body’s ability—or inability—to perform to his expectations. Frequently, he meets events with the “that’s life” fatalism that marks much of his fiction, but every so often, Murakami struggles with that fatalism as if it’s covering him like a sheet of plastic wrap.

“Most ordinary runners are motivated by an individual goal, more than anything: namely, a time they want to beat,” Murakami writes. “Even if he doesn’t break the time he’d hoped for, as long as he has the sense of satisfaction at having done his very best—and, possibly, having made some significant discovery about himself in the process—then that in itself is an accomplishment….”

He then likens that to writing: “Maybe numbers of copies sold, awards won, and critics’ praise serve as outward standards for accomplishment in literature, but none of them really matter. What’s crucial is whether your writing attains the standards you’ve set for yourself. Failure to reach that bar is not something you can easily explain away,” he says.

And in that way, Murakami weaves his writerly life throughout his experiences as a runner. Rather than serve as polar opposites, they complement each other. His writing finds a runner’s comfortable rhythm.

Readers will find it a comfortable jog.

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.

As a Democratic woman, I breathed a big sigh of relief last night. Hillary did what she needed to do.

She stepped up with class and grace when the moment demanded it. Plenty of Democrats were nervous as they entered the Pepsi Center last night, and a camera cut to Mchelle Obama’s face as her husband’s one-time rival started speaking indicated she might have been among them. But Clinton quickly allayed doubts with an unequivocal endorsement of Barack Obama as “my candidate,” which elicited cheers amid a sea of bobbing signs proclaiming “Obama” and “Unity.”

It was a poignant occasion for Hillary supporters, and even women like me who have been on board with Obama since the beginning. After a video tribute set to Tom Petty’s “American Girl,” Chelsea introduced her mom as her hero and referenced the 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling that her mother had broken open for women. I found myself getting a little choked up listening to this smart, savvy, dogged trailblazer of a woman.

Of course her campaign wasn’t only about the nation – Hillary’s nothing if she isn’t ambitious – but she was pretty damned convincing about how crucial an Obama victory is to the nation’s collective wellbeing. There’s no question in my mind that that’s more important to her than her own aspirations, and if it isn’t to her remaining legions of resentful backers, then they are betraying all that her candidacy stood for, and not least their own self-interest.

The key point in Clinton’s speech was a set of questions she posed to her supporters: “I want you to ask yourselves, were you in this campaign just for me, or were you in it for that young Marine and others like him? Were you in it for that mom struggling with cancer while raising her kids? Were you in it for that young boy and his mom surviving on the minimum wage? Were you in it for all the people in this country who feel invisible?”

To answer that it was just for Hillary – despite all she symbolizes for women – is a breathtakingly selfish response. To vote for John McCain, or to not vote at all, is beyond juvenile and stupid, it’s a breach of integrity. And I write not, as Susan Faludi opined in the New York Times on Monday, as one of the “daughters of a feminist generation that seems pleased to proclaim themselves so ‘beyond gender’ that they don’t need a female president.”

I’d love to see a female president. I have my reasons for thinking that Hillary might not have been our best hope at this particular moment, when a brand-new generation of voters, female and otherwise, are yearning for a thoroughly fresh direction.

Faludi, who harks back to the history of women’s suffrage and its ultimately disappointing political returns, continues that the daughters of that feminist generation, like me, “will still have all the abiding inequalities that Hillary Clinton, especially in defeat, symbolized. Without a coalescing cause to focus their forces, how will women fight a foe that remains insidious, amorphous, relentless and pervasive?”

Where I take issue with here is that women have no coalescing cause without Hillary. Our coalescing cause, as Democrats, is justice, fairness and equality – for all people. Barack Obama is also committed to those principles. If our nominee had been Hillary and not him, would we no longer have a rallying point to fight racism, because the black candidate was the runner-up?

It’s essential for Democrats to recognize that that which unites us is far greater than that which divides us. And to do that, we don’t abandon our desire and our quest to see a woman in the White House. It will happen. If we can put a black man there, we can also put a woman there. Obama’s candidacy is, for me — as a female voter — reason to hope, not reason to despair.

I’ll approach Obama with fearless honesty. He’s a liberal. I oppose liberals. That’s all that’s involved here.

— Rush Limbaugh on presidential candidate Barack Obama; Mr. Limbaugh has renewed his contract with Premiere Radio Networks and Clear Channel Radio, which will pay him more than $400 million; Mr. Limbaugh once referred to Sen Obama and actor Halle Berry as “Halfrican American” on the Jan. 24, 2007, broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show; July 6.

We have sort of become a nation of whiners. You just hear this constant whining, complaining about a loss of competitiveness, America in decline.

— former senator Phil Gramm, one of presidential candidate John McCain’s top economic advisers, likening the nation’s economic problems to a “mental recession“; July 10.

The baby boomers — that prominent group of middle-agers whose massive numbers invite never-ending dissection and speculation — have once again spoken. What they have said is, ” Waaaaaahhh.”

— lede from a Washington Post story by Monica Hesse reporting a Pew Research Center survey measuring “the pessimism, dissatisfaction and general curmudgeonliness of 2,413 adults in various generations”; July 10.

Why should I help you embarrass me?

— response of Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, to New York Times reporter David Kocieniewski, whose story revealed that Rep. Rangel has four rent-controlled apartments “on the 16th floor overlooking Upper Manhattan in a building owned by one of New York’s premier real estate developers … [He uses] uses his fourth apartment, six floors below, as a campaign office, despite state and city regulations that require rent-stabilized apartments to be used as a primary residence”; July 11.

There is no military solution to this war. No amount of U.S. soldiers can solve the grievances that lay at the heart of someone else’s civil war. We must begin a phased redeployment of our forces starting May 1st, with the goal of removing all combat forces by March 30th, 2008. Letting the Iraqis know that we will not be there forever is our last, best hope to pressure the Iraqis to take ownership of their country and bring an end to their conflict.

— from a press release on the campaign Web site of presidential candidate Barack Obama; March 20, 2007.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are also working through this challenging period. They play an important role in our housing markets today and need to continue to play an important role in the future. Their regulator has made clear that they are adequately capitalized.

— Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. in testimony before the House Financial Services Committee; Times reporters Stephen Labaton and Charles Duhigg reported he and Fed chairman Ben Bernanke “sought to reassure the markets about the financial health of the nation’s two largest mortgage finance companies as their stock prices plunged to their lowest level in 17 years on fears that they could face the possibility of a government bailout”; July 11.

… a significant reduction … an ambitious goal … we made progress, significant progress, toward a comprehensive approach … hope Congress funds that effort … help developing nations afford … become good stewards … We’re also taking steps to promote … we can become less dependent … we’re going to have to spend some money … to trade freely … the best way to help alleviate poverty … we had good discussions … We also made some progress on alleviating sickness … committed … pledged to provide … to help deal with … stepped forward to support … committed with partner nations … the United States is involved … working to expand our efforts … we had a comprehensive agenda … accountability is an important part of fulfilling our obligations … agreed to release detailed reports … will help ensure … we agreed on steps to deal with … increasing access … we agreed to take new steps … we accomplished a lot.

— from remarks by President Bush following the G8 summit in Toyako, Japan; July 9.

As we listened to the leaders around the room there was universal praise for the major economies process. There was universal recognition that having these countries in the room trying to find common ground was an enormous contribution to the U.N. negotiations. A declaration was adopted, and Jim will go into that. But the most significant take-away from this meeting, in addition to the very substantive leaders’ declaration, was the desire of all leaders to continue this process. And indeed, there was agreement to hold another meeting of the leaders of the major economies at next year’s summit in Italy. The meeting concluded not only with that decision, but with specific recognition for the contributions of President Bush, and a round of applause for the President for initiating this process.

— Dan Price, assistant to the president for international economic affairs and deputy national security advisor, during a White House press briefing on a two-hour-long meeting of the leaders of the major economies, also known as G8, in Toyako, Japan; July 9.

[O]ur dialogue at political, policy, and technical levels has built confidence among our nations and deepened mutual understanding of the many challenges confronting the world community as we consider next steps under the Convention and continue to mobilize political will to combat global climate change.

— from a declaration by the leaders of Australia, Brazil, Canada, China, the European Union, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, the Republic of Korea, Mexico, Russia, South Africa, the United Kingdom, and the United States on energy security and climate change at the G8 meeting in Toyako, Japan; July 9.

Costello: Well, then, who’s on first?
Abbott: Yes.
Costello: I mean the fellow’s name.
Abbott: Who.
Costello: The guy on first.
Abbott: Who.
Costello: The first baseman.
Abbott: Who!
Costello: The guy playing —
Abbott: Who is on first!
Costello: I’m asking YOU who’s on first.
Abbott: That’s the man’s name.
Costello: That’s who’s name?
Abbott: Yes.

— from “Who’s on first” routine by Bud Abbott and Lou Costello, reportedly translated into nearly 30 languages.

The law itself is a massive intrusion into the due process rights of all of the phone subscribers who would be a part of the suit. It is a violation of the separation of powers. It’s presidential election-year cowardice. The Democrats are afraid of looking weak on national security.

— Bruce Afran, a New Jersey lawyer representing several hundred plaintiffs suing Verizon and other companies, after the Senate voted 69 to 28 to approve what Times reporter Eric Lichtblau called “the biggest revamping of federal surveillance law in 30 years”: July 10.

I don’t think shortening the track is what’s going to help stop these events, because 99.9 percent of the time we’re not having a tough time stopping the cars. It’s just when we get in trouble and you can’t stop them. Another 320 feet isn’t going to do it, in my opinion.

— Johnny West, crew chief for Funny Car drag race Jack Beckman, on the decision to decrease the distance Funny Cars and Top Fuel dragsters race from a quarter mile — 1,320 feet — to 1,000 feet because of the 300-plus mph speeds the vehicles attain; this follows the death of drag racer Scott Kalitta on June 22; July 10.

The question then is, How can white people move to start making the major institutions that they have in this country function the way it is supposed to function? That is the real question. And can white people move inside their own community and start tearing down racism where in fact it does exist? Where it exists. It is you who live in Cicero and stop us from living there. It is white people who stop us from moving into Grenada. It is white people who make sure that we live in the ghettos of this country. it is white institutions that do that. They must change. In order — In order for America to really live on a basic principle of human relationships, a new society must be born. Racism must die, and the economic exploitation of this country of non-white peoples around the world must also die — must also die.

— Stokely Carmichael, speaking in Berkeley, Calif., in October 1966.

But, alas, they had no idea just who would come — youthful Wiffle ball players, yes, but also angry neighbors and their lawyer, the police, the town nuisance officer and tree warden and other officials in all shapes and sizes. It turns out that one kid’s field of dreams is an adult’s dangerous nuisance, liability nightmare, inappropriate usurpation of green space, unpermitted special use or drag on property values, and their Wiffle-ball Fenway has become the talk of Greenwich and a suburban Rorschach test about youthful summers past and present.

— from a New York Times story by Peter Applebome, headlined “Build a Wiffle Ball Field and Lawyers Will Come”; July 10.

Actor Pam Anderson performing a split while wearing 4-inch heels
during an appearance on Australia’s “Big Brother” program; July 10.

We are not going to discuss the steps we have taken or may take to prevent a recurrence.

— New York Times spokeswoman Catherine J. Mathis, refusing to discuss — even as workers began removal — alteration of the Times‘ building facade whose design has allowed climbers and protesters to ascend the building; July 10.

In the Congo, women develop quickly, both physically and emotionally, due to the substantial responsibility society places on them from early childhood. In Kinshasa, the vast majority of teenagers are sexually active with men that are substantially older.

— from the argument for leniency presented by ex-diplomat Gons G. Nachman, 42, convicted of having sex with teenage girls in the Congo and Brazil and taping the encounters; prosecutor Ron Walutes countered in court papers, “Children in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Brazil have the same inherent value as children in the United States”; the judge delayed sentencing so that Mr. Nachman could be examined by a forensic psychologist; July 10.

photo credits:

• Rush Limbaugh: Nigel Parry, The New York Times
• Leaders of major developed nations at G8 summit in Japan: Pablo Martinez Monsivais, Associated Press
• Scott Kalitta’s souped-up Toyota Solara on fire at 300 mph: Associated Press
• Stokely Carmichael: BlackPast.org
• Wiffle ball field in Greenwich, Conn.: Rob Bennett, The New York Times
• Pamela Anderson: Reuters

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

We were just having fun making posters. There was no time to think about what we were doing. It was a furious time, but I think most great art is created in a furious moment.

— Stanley Mouse, artistic partner of Alton Kelley; the pair created hundreds of classic psychedelic rock posters and threw “the world’s first psychedelic dance-concerts at Longshoreman’s Hall in September 1965, essentially starting the San Francisco scene”; Mr. Kelley died this week at age 67; June 3.

When it comes to issues like this, [corporations] don’t want to be anywhere near them and they will cave very, very quickly — anything to stop the pain, anything to stop the press from calling.

— Eric Dezenhall, the head of the crisis public relations firm Dezenhall Resources, on Dunkin’ Donuts’ decision to remove an ad from its Web site featuring celebrity chef Rachael Ray after conservative bloggers complained her scarf resembled a keffiyeh, labeling it “jihadi chic“; May 30.

Tell people the truth, and then they have an easier time adjusting to it. The city is out of control. There is no law. There is no consequence for people’s actions. The whole attitude of ‘Me first and to heck with my neighbor’ has become the status quo here, and it is a serious, serious problem.

— J. Stan McCauley, a former Hartford, Conn., mayoral candidate and cable access television personality, likening Hartford to an alcoholic in the wake of “a Thursday hit-and-run accident that was caught on tape left Angel Arce Torres, 78, paralyzed, lying in the middle of a street under full view of passing motorists and onlookers”; June 6.

You cannot say what people are gonna like or not gonna like. You have to stick it out there and find out! If they taste it, and they like the way it tastes, you can bet they’ll eat some of it!

— Bo Diddley, “a singer and guitarist who invented his own name, his own guitars, his own beat and, with a handful of other musical pioneers, rock ’n’ roll itself,” on facing audiences; Mr. Diddley died this week at 79; June 2.

We are a people in a quandary about the present. We are a people in search of our future. We are a people in search of a national community. We are a people trying not only to solve the problems of the present, unemployment, inflation, but we are attempting on a larger scale to fulfill the promise of America. We are attempting to fulfill our national purpose, to create and sustain a society in which all of us are equal.

— from the 1976 keynote address to the Democratic National Convention by Texas Rep. Barbara Jordan, who died in 1996.

We know questions are inevitable given the revelations in the sport. But that doesn’t trouble us for two reasons. One, there is a thing called conscience. Two, Usain doesn’t even want to take vitamin C. We know he is as clean as a whistle.

— Glen Mills, coach of 21-year-old sprinter Usain Bolt of Jamaica, after Mr. Bolt set a world record of 9.72 seconds at 100 meters in only his fifth professional race at that distance; June 2.

In all these crises that the Burmese face, there always is the teaser to take the pressure off the government. They seem like they are going to cooperate, and just as soon as comment dies down, anything that is going to be useful dies with it. Look back at the ‘saffron revolution,’ when they made all kinds of promises about what they were going to do and nothing happened.

— Josef Silverstein, an expert on Myanmar at Rutgers University, on attempts to provide aid to cyclone victims in Myanmar; the “saffron revolution” refers to “a peaceful uprising led by monks that was crushed in September”; June 2.

Cheers! Tears!! I’m here!

— a “tweet” from the the Phoenix Mars lander after touchdown to users of Twitter, a Web microblogging service; the tweets are written by Veronica McGregor, the news services manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif.; according to a Times story, “In the past few years, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s media team has adopted many Web 2.0 technologies, producing podcasts, posting videos on YouTube, blogging and setting up a Facebook page”; May 31.

Politicians think in four-year blocks, so it’s O.K. as long as it doesn’t run out on their watch. People think about it, but they don’t really think about what happens tomorrow. They don’t worry until they turn on the tap and nothing flows.

— Raquel Montón, a climate specialist at Greenpeace in Madrid, reflecting on a growing water crisis in Spain; June 3.

As President Bush’s health chief, Tommy Thompson trumpeted millions of taxpayer dollars to help workers sickened by the Sept. 11 attacks at the World Trade Center, even amid complaints that his agency wasn’t doing enough.

Now, Thompson’s private company has won an $11 million contract to treat some of those same workers — the latest twist in a fitful government effort to determine how many people were made ill by the toxic debris — and to care for them.

— lede of a Washington Post story by Devlin Barrett reporting the award of a health-care contract to Logistics Health Inc., a La Crosse, Wis.-based company of which Mr. Thompson is president; June 4.

And the best way to [marginalize extremists] is to use our national resources to strengthen the institutions of freedom. Institutions, of course, include a democratic system of government, a vibrant free press, independent judiciary, a free enterprise system, places of worship where people are free to practice their faith. These institutions include an education system that provides citizens a link to the world, health infrastructure that combats plagues like HIV/AIDS and malaria, and women’s organizations that help societies take advantage of the skills and talents of half their population.

— from remarks by President Bush at the ceremonial groundbreaking of the United States Institute of Peace; June 5.

I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, only as one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.

— President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force, Europe, who planned D-Day on June 6, 1944.

I’ve been doing everything I can to kill him off for 30 years, but he seems to be coming back.

— Walter Williams, creator of Mr. Bill, who directed his Saturday Night Live character in a “Priceless” ad for MasterCard debit cards in which “Mr. Hands pours hot coffee on him (“coffee: $2”), a personal trainer launches him off a treadmill (“gym: $59/mo.”), and an opened briefcase flips him onto the windshield of a city bus (“briefcase: $120”); June 3.

I couldn’t believe it. I know they’re people too, but couldn’t they have gone on doing what they were doing without getting our community involved?

— Sofia Kamma, a resident of Tilos, a tiny island in the eastern Aegean Sea, after its mayor married two gay couples in defiance of “statements by a senior Greek prosecutor last week that such unions were illegal”; June 3.

Q: Dana, is the President disappointed in the South Korean President’s leadership now that he’s backed off his pledges to reopen the South Korean beef market entirely to U.S. beef?
MS. PERINO: Well, we are going to continue to try to work with and understand the South Koreans’ position, and work with our Congress and our industry as we try to move forward. Obviously the President’s position on the safety of American beef is well known. And so we’ll continue to work with the Koreans and monitor their process.

— exchange between reporter and press secretary Dana Perino at a White House press briefing; June 3.

The hype-to-reality ratio of that one is essentially infinity. Seeing an exponential change in the yield curve is unlikely.

— James E. Specht, a soybean genetics expert at the University of Nebraska, on the announcement by Monsanto, a leader in agricultural biotechnology, that it would “develop seeds that would double the yields of corn, soybeans and cotton by 2030 and would require 30 percent less water, land and energy to grow … [using] a new technique called marker-assisted selection”; June 4.

It’s going on big time. There is considerable interest in what we call ‘owning structure’ — like United States farmland, Argentine farmland, English farmland — wherever the profit picture is improving.

— Brad Cole, president of Cole Partners Asset Management in Chicago, which runs a fund of hedge funds focused on natural resources, on reports that “[h]uge investment funds have already poured hundreds of billions of dollars into booming financial markets for commodities like wheat, corn and soybeans … by buying farmland, fertilizer, grain elevators and shipping equipment”; June 5.

There are limits to which we can keep consumer prices unaffected by rising import prices. I know that the price increases we have had to announce today will not be popular, even though they are only modest. We remain dependent on imports. We are, therefore, vulnerable to global trends in oil prices.

— Manmohan Singh, prime minister of India, announcing “gasoline prices would rise by the equivalent of 55 cents per gallon, about 11 percent, and diesel by 32 cents, almost 10 percent”; India’s “state-run refiners and oil marketing companies … have been posting losses of about $1 billion a week”; June 5.

We’re at the edge of the cliff right now. It’s still at an embryonic stage, like where we were in 1973 or 1974, not as bad as things were in 1979. But it could move in that direction if the Fed isn’t aggressive.

— Scott Anderson, senior economist at Wells Fargo, reflecting economists’ view that “[p]rices have been soaring long enough and fast enough … that the nation is at risk of a self-reinforcing cycle of inflation like that experienced in the 1970s”; June 4.

I never wear a tie. Because I believe when a woman gets dressed for the evening, she should leave at least one thing to the imagination.

— Fran Lebowitz, a satirist and “fixture in the fashion scene since the era of Studio 54,” quoting Coco Chanel at the annual awards night for the Council of Fashion Designers of America; June 3.

We have a strict non-discrimination policy at the Seattle Mariners and at Safeco Field, and when we do enforce the code of conduct it is based on behavior, not on the identity of those involved.

— Rebecca Hale, spokeswoman for the Seattle Mariners baseball team, after reports that “a lesbian complained that an usher at Safeco Field asked her to stop kissing her date because it was making another fan uncomfortable”; June 5.

Take a snip of this then play a little riff, don’t be afraid to try

Don’t need no airplane to get off the ground there’s more than one way to fly

Have a little taste, Baby, don’t hesitate, every hit don`t have to be a song

Gonna take you to the cosmos, Baby, and boogie with you all night long

— from “Cocaine” by the Grateful Dead.

art, photo credits:

• Janis Joplin poster: Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley
• Bo Diddley: Jeff Christensen, Reuters
• Mars lander photo: NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona
• General Dwight D. Eisenhower: U.S. Army photograph, No. SC 194399
• poster for 1967 Grateful Dead concert: Stanley Mouse and Alton Kelley

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

When I was born just after World War II, I told them, the population of the United States was about 141 million; of the world, about 2.7 billion. Now, 62 years later, Americans tip the scale at about 303 million; the world’s population has grown to about 6.6 billion.

A little extrapolation of U.S. Census data, I told them, shows the American population hitting 518 million at mid-century and 758 million in 2100. The world’s population is likely to grow to 14 billion at century’s end. Imagine what that world — their world — would be like, I challenged them.

But I was too optimistic. In a report to be released today, a Virginia Tech professor estimates that between 2100 and 2120 the population of the United States will reach one billion people.

Arthur C. Nelson, described in a press release as an expert in estimating population changes and their impact on planning and economic development, will present his new and as yet unpublished findings at the American Planning Association’s 100th National Planning Conference in Las Vegas.

(Las Vegas seems to be an appropriate place to announce a tripling of the American population in one lifetime. More than 500,000 people live there, and its population has more than doubled since 1990.)

Dr. Nelson says, according to the planning association’s press release, that his predicted population figure isn’t the issue. Rather, the factors driving population growth and the inadequate planning accompanying that growth ought to be closely examined. According to the release, Dr. Nelson points out:

• Public water supply systems often have a 100-year planning horizon, and there is an argument for thinking 500 years out.
• Major rail transit facilities take up to two or three decades to plan and another one or more to build.
• Airports were built less than 50 years ago with the thought they would never need to be replaced, but many have been, with more planned.
• We know enough now about the threat of climate change to shape planning for coastal communities over the next century.
• Government involves many fixed investments that in order to be economical must be paid off over a long period of time.

There are few public policy issues unaffected by one blunt, rarely discussed fact: There are too many of us, and, although growth rates vary from nation to nation, we’re increasing in number at the rate of about 1.17 percent of the world’s population per year.

That impacts health care. Drinking water. Foodstuffs. Commodities. Housing. Energy. Name an issue; population growth affects it. Politicians discuss resource issues solely in terms of scarcity; they do not discuss the other side of the equation — demand caused by increase in population. Population growth determines peace: Wars are fought over resources strained by population pressures.

Paul Ehrlich’s book, “The Population Bomb,” launched the Zero Population Growth movement in the late 1960s. It was widely mocked in a post-war era of economic growth and higher living standards. [ZPG (birth rate = death rate) changed its name to Population Connection in 2002.]

Few are laughing now. My students will have to unplug the cell phones and iPods from their ears and figure out to live, survive, even prosper in a nation that at least one researcher says will triple in population in their lifetimes. Unbridled growth is unlikely to serve my young students well as they inexorably descend to dotage.

Part one in a series.

During its 36-year run, LIFE Magazine traversed a period of technological innovation and peril unsurpassed in the recorded history of humanity. As the first issue was released in November of 1936, a resurgent Germany was constructing the most awesome war machine the world had yet seen, a development that literally threatened the very future of the hemisphere. LIFE’s final issue went to press at the end of 1972, roughly three weeks after NASA’s last manned mission to the moon, Apollo 17, closed the books on a program that proved — theoretically, at least — that humanity was not inevitably bound to this planet.

The technological distance between these two moments is mind-boggling. German engineers working on the development of rocketry could perhaps, just barely, envision a trip to the moon, but for most everybody else such an idea remained the stuff of pulp science fiction. Nonetheless, human technology did cover this distance, and it did so in the almost impossibly brief period of 36 years. LIFE Magazine, a publication designed to depict American life at this particular moment in history, could therefore hardly have avoided becoming a mirror for our vast, and often troubled, technological agenda.

In its fascination with and portrayals of technology through the middle decades of the 1900s, LIFE was inextricably immersed in a larger historical dialogue over the character of scientific endeavor in the West. Enlightenment scholars in 16th and 17th Century Europe had first challenged as baseless superstition received modes of knowledge that had dominated society to that point, ordaining in their stead the superior powers of reason. Intellect was privileged over intuition, and rational, objective science usurped the traditional authority of the Church as ultimate arbiter of truth in the world. Of course, this was the beginning of the argument, not the end.

For purposes of the present discussion, though, the critical concern is how LIFE, one of the most influential publications of the last century, reflected the complex and subtle cultural debate over the potential science and technology held for improving the quality of human life in general, and American life in particular. Western society has traditionally imbued science with both messianic and demonic characteristics, alternately seeing technological innovation as holding the keys to both salvation and self-obliteration. The older messianic view has dominated our public rhetoric, but the demonic view of science first encountered in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus has nonetheless survived, and it finds expression at certain critical points in LIFE’s history.

There is probably no such thing as a comprehensive or definitive analysis of LIFE Magazine, but a close examination of how it portrayed the century’s more important technological moments suggests that LIFE’s view of technological progress was consistent with the views of the American society it served.

LIFE and Its Readership: Reach and Influence

LIFE occupied a privileged place in the popular mind through the middle of the 20th Century. With an average circulation peaking at 8.5 million, it was the most widely disseminated publication of its kind in history (van Zuilen 1977). LIFE’s pass-along rate is difficult to compute, but Wendy Kozol (1994) estimates its total reach in the 1940s and 1950s to have been around 20 million. Figures compiled by Antoon J. van Zuilen (1977) afford a reach estimate that is a bit higher, perhaps even exceeding 25 million readers during the mid-1950s.(1) If accurate, these figures suggest that during its postwar peak LIFE probably reached better than 20% of the population aged 15 and older each week.

The extent of the impact LIFE exerted through its editorials and photo-essays is impossible to estimate, although ample evidence indicates that the magazine was influential among its readers. The editors and photographers employed by LIFE clearly took their mission seriously, tackling the major issues and events facing the U.S. and often risking their lives in the process. We can safely assume that devoted readers of such a publication would share its ethic, and countless letters to the editors support this assumption. LIFE readers routinely took the editors to task for various decisions and policies, but the tone of such correspondence usually acknowledged, at least implicitly, the significance of the event in question. The essential concern was that the stories in question be covered “properly.” We have no way of knowing if the letters LIFE published constituted a representative sample of all the letters the editors received, nor can we assume that the letters written provided a fair sample of overall public opinion. However, a publication that did not fairly reflect the interests of its readership could hardly have posted LIFE’s three-plus decade record of success, so we must believe that some measure of accord existed between the magazine and its readers.

Second, anecdotal evidence indicates the anxiousness with which subscribers anticipated LIFE’s weekly arrival and the degree to which they cherished its pictures. Former subscribers talk with fondness about specific issues they remember and the pictures they hung on their walls. Baby Boomers recount photo-essays that helped attune them to the Civil Rights Movement or “The ‘60s” — and this seems especially true for those who grew up in “culturally remote” areas, far removed from places like Berkeley or Selma, the places where “things were happening.” These readers use words like “community” to describe how the magazine drew people together, establishing through its words and pictures the centrality of particular cultural issues in the life of the society. These stories speak to a compelling mystique about LIFE’s relationship with its readers and the culture generally.

Finally, van Zuilen (1977) cites market research suggesting that magazines contributed significantly to overall knowledge and provided “usable ideas” to “the nation’s citizens and consumers” (74). These findings are of indeterminate value, though, since they seem to focus exclusively on the “consumer” half of “citizens and consumers.” Whether magazines were equally influential on political and cultural ideas remains unclear.(2) Still, as with the anecdotal and speculative evidence above, a degree of influence is indicated.

LIFE at the Outset: The Construction of Technology

Montana’s monolithic Fort Peck Dam dominates the cover of LIFE Magazine’s inaugural issue. This image serves as an apt and prophetic commencement, for over the next three and a half decades LIFE would catalogue, through photographs, diagrams, technical drawings, artist conceptions, and editorial commentary the steady forward march of technology, both at home and abroad. Just as the Fort Peck Dam towered over the landscape and people beneath it, so would LIFE’s vision of progress tower over the imagination of wartime and postwar America.

Many readers may not even have initially recognized the picture for what it was — the rampart-like architecture is more suggestive of a citadel than any dam most Americans had ever seen.(3) However, the perspective of Margaret Bourke-White’s photograph powerfully conveys two important things. First, the minute human figures at the dam’s base signal the immensity of the structure. The photo is intended to inspire awe, and probably succeeded. Second, the photo signals human agency. What the figures are doing is unclear, but their posture suggests that they are inspecting something at the base of one of the tower-like segments. They are bent at the waist, both to approximately the same degree, and would appear to be focused on the same point in the structure. Obviously the edifice is manmade, but the aspect of examination assumed by the two figures emphasizes the act of construction, centralizing the role of the builders in the photo’s narrative. Hence, in the most literal sense, LIFE’s very first impression was of the immensity of technology, and the first humans depicted by the magazine, the two anonymous figures inspecting the Fort Peck Dam, were conspicuously dwarfed by their own (we presume) creation.

To what degree was LIFE’s use of this image deliberately geared toward the glorification of technology, and more broadly, to what extent were LIFE’s portrayals of technology and science through the years the result of an editorial agenda, either explicit or implicit? These questions, like those above concerning LIFE’s influence, are difficult to answer. As Kozol (1994) suggests, LIFE defies categorization. Trends and tendencies can be identified and examples can be produced in support of innumerable hypotheses, but in the end the magazine’s inherent heterogeneity confounds even the most patient scholar. Cultural truths and textual themes revealed in one issue and supported by close readings of several others are dispensed with the following week, almost as if the editors were intent on contradiction. And in a sense perhaps they were, for LIFE set out to depict American society, which is nothing if not richly complex and frequently self-contradictory. It is therefore with great trepidation that this or any other study of LIFE Magazine goes searching for themes.

Still, some of LIFE’s identifiable tendencies are stronger than others, and despite the contradictions we occasionally find evidence of what might be characterized, if only cautiously, as an agenda. One such example occurs, appropriately enough, in the editorial introduction to the first issue.

Photographer Margaret Bourke-White had been dispatched to the Northwest to photograph the multi-million dollar projects of the Columbia River Basin. What the Editors expected — for use in some later issue — were construction pictures as only Bourke-White can take them. What the Editors got was a human document of American frontier life which, to them at least, was a revelation.

Having been unable to prevent Bourke-White from running away with their first nine pages, the Editors thereafter returned to the job of making pictures behave with some degree of order and sense (11/23/36, 3).

A clearer and richer statement of an editorial agenda is hard to fathom, especially where the elusive LIFE staff is concerned. Several points are worth noting. First, before LIFE ever published a single page, it had assigned one of its crack photographers the task of shooting construction, indicating the exceptional newsworthiness of these projects in the minds of its editors. Second, the editors make clear that they dispatched Bourke-White with certain expectations — they knew what they were after, and were fully anticipating that she would deliver the goods. The significant point here is the degree of foresight to which the magazine explicitly admits. Substantively, if not literally, a story has already been written about these construction projects, and the editors only need their photographer to fill in the pictorial details.

Third, while the real story Bourke-White uncovered was, in the editors’ estimation, a “human document,” they nonetheless graced the cover with a technology photograph that was thematically at odds with the photo-essay inside the covers. That story concerns life in Roosevelt’s New Deal boomtowns, an existence which the magazine depicts as dirty and degenerate, and which is typified (in the editors’ view) by a toddler sitting on a bar as the Saturday night bacchanalia rages around him. The decision to put the dam on the cover despite its irrelevance to the more compelling “human document” perhaps reflects the editors willingness to privilege their admitted “expectations” over the substance of the field photojournalist’s findings. Their insistence on the prefabricated agenda hinted at in the editorial quoted above ought to give the reader pause, however; what is thus implied is that truth resides, a priori, in LIFE’s New York offices, and the remainder of the vast global landscape exists merely for purposes of illustration.

Support for this assertion is found in the closing words of the passage — “making pictures behave with some degree of order and sense.” The pictures only make sense when compelled to, and it is the job of the editors to make the pictorial document “behave.” Order and sense are sought after, and the editors alone possess wisdom sufficient to define the record — in other words, the truth is not as self-evident from the photographs as the reader might have suspected. The tone of the comment is light, almost joking, but the words remain, and can be read as a surprisingly honest acknowledgment by the editors of the inherently constructive process involved in the production of a LIFE-sized photographic record.

The “later issue” in which Bourke-White’s Columbia Basin construction photographs were to be showcased finally arrived almost eleven months after the Charter Issue. Entitled “Roosevelt Builds the Biggest Dam And Envisions a New Society” (10/11/37, 34-39), the photo-essay detailed the construction of the Grand Coulee Dam near Grand Coulee in central Washington. Roosevelt was called “one of the greatest builders of all time” and the dam, “his mightiest work,” was “the world’s biggest building job.” This essay was replete with specifications, capacities, dimensions, and six pages of majestic photography — as Bourke-White’s pictures stretched toward the horizon, they demonstrated how aggressively the dam was expanding to fill the landscape, leaving the reader little room to doubt the sheer magnificence of the undertaking.

LIFE characterized President Roosevelt’s project with a startlingly utopian vocabulary, centering on his “vision of the new society which he expects [the dam] to help create,” (35) and wondering aloud whether “Roosevelt the Builder laid in Grand Coulee one of the foundation stones of a new society, or left behind him a monument as colossally wasteful as Cheops’ pyramids” (39).

Immediate purposes of the Grand Coulee project are two. One is to generate nearly 2,000,000 kilowatts of power per year which, added to the production of Bonneville Dam further down the Columbia, will electrify the homes and farms of the Pacific Northwest, spur the industrial development of its vast natural resources. Other is to turn Grand Coulee into a 23-mile reservoir from which waters will sluice down on the 1,200,000 rich but arid acres of the Columbia River Basin to the south, creating new homes for 30,000 drought-stricken farm families.

Beyond these aims lies President Roosevelt’s long-cherished vision of a whole new U.S. society based on Power. For when drudgery-relieving Power is almost as cheap and abundant as sunlight, he believes, free citizens will have leisure and dignity enough to make democracy really work (35).

The Grand Coulee Dam was expected to electrify the Northwest and spur industrial development, presumably resulting in higher employment and an improved standard of living; allow the irrigation of currently unproductive land, boosting agricultural output and providing work for thousands of Depression-sacked families; and most importantly, it would afford through “Power” the “leisure and dignity” necessary to engender a genuinely successful democracy. In short, the general condition of the nation would be improved as direct result of technology — here manifested in the dam project — which is depicted not as a panacea for the country’s ills, but rather as a representative piece of F.D.R.’s larger technological agenda.(4)

Lest anyone doubts the significance of the Grand Coulee project in the American debate over technology or LIFE’s framing of that debate, note how in the passage quoted earlier the mundane, lower-case “power” of line two has been mystically transformed by the second line of the following paragraph into the personified (deified?), upper-case “Power.” Even if this shift is read as sarcasm on the part of an editorial staff that didn’t especially like Roosevelt or his progressive politics, it nonetheless signifies the reverence with which some in the society approached technology. Whereas “power” denotes the simple application of electricity, “Power” confers agency, imbuing applied electricity with will and purpose and charging it with the task of ending the Depression, providing for the economic welfare, advancing agricultural productivity, and enabling at last the full, utopian realization of democracy.

The centrality of technology to LIFE’s cultural mission was thus firmly, if implicitly, established in the first year of the magazine’s existence; the fact was made explicit by the editorial decision within a few months of the launch to offer a weekly Science and Technology section. LIFE’s treatment would not be unitary, predictable, or unproblematic, but it recognized the importance of technology to the country’s future. Founder Henry Luce also recognized that, in another sense, LIFE itself was “based on technology, paper technology, photographic technology” (van Zuilen 1977, 264). It is understandable, then, that the publishers of a magazine based on one form of technology might be unusually cognizant of the ways in which their culture was dependent on other forms of technology.

_______________

LIFE and Technology series

• Part one: “…to see and be amazed…”
• Part two: ideologies of science and technology since the Enlightenment
• Part three: war and postwar
• Part four: the bomb as spectator sport
• Part five: the space race
• Part six: Final issue

NOTES

1: This number is speculative, and is based on the extrapolation of readership rates from a decade earlier. There’s no evidence before me to suggest that these rates would have varied significantly — in fact, the numbers seem to indicate that the decades were fairly similar, demographically speaking.

2: Additionally, this research is the product of methodological approaches of which I am highly suspicious. Add to this an explicitly stated marketing agenda, and there is ample reason to see these numbers as “optimized.”

3: In fact, one anecdote has an elderly man remembering vividly the cover of the first issue, with its photograph of “that castle in Spain.”

4: If LIFE was willing to cast the project’s potential in grandiose terms, it also provided F.D.R. with the potential for failure on an equally grand scale. Its invocation of Cheops suggests that failure to engineer this new society would mark the President as one of the greatest wasters in recorded history.

SOURCES

Kozol, W. (1994). LIFE’s America: family and nation in postwar photojournalism. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

van Zuilen, A. (1977). The life cycle of magazines: a historical study of the decline and fall of the general interest mass audience magazine in the United States during the period 1946-1972. Uithoorn, Netherlands: Graduate Press.

If it was the Marlins, you wouldn’t see people in Florida getting up at 5 a.m. And if it was the Yankees — well, their fans aren’t real. They just buy the hat.

— Helio Rocha, a restaurant manager who stayed up all night in anticipation of watching the Red Sox’ Major League Baseball opener (played in Toyko) at 5:30 a.m. in famed Boston watering hole Cask ’n’ Flagon; March 26.

Adam Smith’s invisible hand has a puppeteer: the Federal Reserve. In case there is any confusion about who was pulling the strings behind the scenes of JPMorgan Chase’s acquisition of Bear Stearns, the curtain was lifted Monday. By raising its bid — with the grudging approval of the Fed — to $10 a share, from $2, JPMorgan exposed what had long been whispered about but no one dared to say aloud: the Fed is officially in the deal-making business.

— from Andrew Ross Sorkin’s “Dealbook” column in The New York Times; March 25; emphasis added.

Largely due to the aging of the baby boomers and rising health care costs, the United States faces decades of red ink. … If the United States continues as it has, policymakers will eventually have to raise taxes or slash government services that U.S. citizens depend on and take for granted. … Over time, the U.S. government could be reduced to doing little more than mailing out Social Security checks to retirees and paying interest on the massive national debt.

— from a March 15 speech at Brown University by David M. Walker, who resigned as comptroller general of the United States earlier this month; emphasis added.

I’ve never seen a government be able to circumvent the business cycle in a capitalist economy, but at the same time, the government is going to pull out all the stops to minimize the instability. The grim reality is that recessions are a part of life. It’s like surgery. You don’t feel good as you get out of the operating room, but inevitably there’s a healing process and things get better.

— David A. Rosenberg, chief economist at Merrill Lynch; March 14.

Arguing about whether we can or cannot already see the effects is like sitting in a house soaked in gasoline, having just dropped a lit match, and arguing about whether we can actually see the flames yet, while waiting to see if maybe it might go out on its own.

— Ross A. Alford, a tropical biologist at James Cook University in Townsville, Australia, saying “scientific tussles” regarding the impacts of climate change can be distracting; March 25.

The next president of the United States seems sure to be more committed to environmental policy than the current president is, and a carbon tax is high on everyone’s list of options. Indeed, a carbon tax has been promoted almost as a panacea — just pop in the economic incentives and watch them work their magic. But unless steps are taken to lock the tax revenue away from policymakers and invest in substitutes, a carbon tax could lead to more revenue rather than to less pollution.

— Monica Prasad, an assistant professor of sociology and a faculty fellow at the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University and the author of “The Politics of Free Markets,” in a New York Times commentary; March 25.

Karima Tung, 12, one of three girls home-schooled by their mother, reading the Koran.

I don’t want the behavior. Little girls are walking around dressing like hoochies, cursing and swearing and showing disrespect toward their elders. In Islam we believe in respect and dignity and honor.

— Aya Ismael, a Muslim mother home-schooling four children near San Jose, Calif., one of many parents of many faiths “who … are often inspired by a belief that public schools are havens for social ills like drugs and that they can do better with their children at home; March 25.

The Speaker believes it would do great harm to the Democratic Party if superdelegates are perceived to overturn the will of the voters.

— Brendan Daly, spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., repeating the speaker’s position that “superdelegates should not ‘overturn the will of the voters’ in the face of criticism from top donors to Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton,” D-N.Y.; March 27.

As to our right to vote, and have that vote count, there can be no debate. The goal is simple: One person, one vote.

— Sen. Bill Nelson, D-Fla., on his intent to propose legislation that would create six rotating, regional primaries to select presidential candidates, while the Electoral College would be abolished by a constitutional amendment; March 27.

I had a very simple formula: If it affected the life of a U.S. citizen, you woke the president. At 3 o’clock in the morning, unless there is a nuclear holocaust coming, there is not much the president has to decide. What you are doing is starting to put into gear the response of the U.S. government on behalf of the president, not necessarily by the president.

— Kenneth M. Duberstein, President Reagan’s last chief of staff, noting that presidents rarely make snap decisions at 3 a.m.; March 16; emphasis added.

Mark Halperin of Time magazine in the cargo bay of an Obama bus recently in Ohio.

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?

— S. Robert Lichter, director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, arguing that the decision by major news organizations to cut back on “campaign bus” coverage of presidential candidates is long overdue; March 26.

In relying on documents that I now believe were fake, I failed to do my job. I’m sorry.

— Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Chuck Philips of the Los Angeles Times after the Times “acknowledged that it unwittingly relied on fabricated FBI documents, created by a con man, for a report that implicated associates of rap mogul Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs in the 1994 shooting of rapper Tupac Shakur”; March 27.

We landed a few hours before daybreak and as soon as I got off the helicopter my night vision broke, I was surrounded by the sound of artillery rounds, people screaming in Arabic, automatic weapons, and the terrain didn’t look anything like what we were briefed. I knew it was going to be a bad day and a half.

— a March 7, 2007, journal entry of Jerry Ryen King of Georgia about air-assault sniper mission in a known al-Qaida stronghold just north of Baghdad; he died in Iraq April 23, 2007, along with eight other soldiers after suicide bombers blew up two dump trucks outside a school building they were in; March 25.

People think I have to justify this war just because my son died in it. That’s not the case. I think we must secure that area of the world and make it stable, otherwise my grandson is going to be over there. … You have to do what you’re called to do. My son stood for the honor and the dignity that should have been given him in his death. I would never stop anyone from going, because down deep inside I know my son did the right thing.

— Peggy Buryj, whose son, Pfc. Jesse Buryj, died in Iraq on May 5, 2004; March 19.

Listen to the words of Iraq’s Deputy Prime Minister: “Last year was the year of security,” he said. “This year is the year of reconstruction, it is the year of services, and it’s the year of combating corruption.” We’re going to help them meet those goals.

— from a speech by President Bush at the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio; March 27.

This isn’t like World War II. There’s no VJ Day, no sailor kissing a girl when he comes home. This is somebody saying that trend lines indicate a sustainable level of violence. That’s not a great feeling.

— Army Capt. Derek Bennett of the 1st Armored Division, who entered Iraq in April 2003 on a 90-day deployment that military planners stretched to 15 months; March 19.

If you read the foreign media, the only message you can get is that China is very heavy-handed, and they are doing a lot of bad things in Tibet, and they are totally out of their minds. And they talk about the Dalai Lama as if he’s God.

— Gao Zhikai, a former Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs official, claiming foreign media about Chinese actions in Tibet have been biased; March 25.

Q: On troop levels in Iraq, The New York Times is reporting that General Petraeus recommended to President Bush putting off any decisions on further troop reductions until about a month or two, perhaps after July. And they also say that it now appears likely any decision on major reduction of American troops for Iraq will be left to the next President. Do you take issue with that characterization?

MS. PERINO: Well, a couple of things. One, the President gave a speech Wednesday, March 19th, in which many headlines were similar to the ones that you read about today. So the President is in a process of getting briefed by his senior advisors, both those that are on the ground and here at the White House, at the Defense Department and at the State Department. So, across-the-board, the President is getting all of this input, taking it into account before he makes a decision. And those decisions aren’t going to be made public until he’s ready to make them public.

And I think it’s prudent for him to allow Ambassador Crocker and General Petraeus to come back and provide information to Capitol Hill. He’ll continue to consult with Capitol Hill before he makes a decision on the way forward. But he’s made — he’s not been shy about saying that we will have to make sure that the gains that have been achieved over this past year not be erased by acting too quickly in bringing troops home. Remember, all of this is conditions-based. So from the very beginning, if I go back to January 2005, President Bush at that point thought that we would be able to start announcing troops coming home. That didn’t happen because of the Samarra mosque bombing and the violence that ensued. So then in late December 2006 and January 2007, the President made another decision based on conditions on the ground, and that was to send more troops in.

Nine months later, in September of 2007, the President makes yet another decision based on conditions on the ground, and that was that because of the success we’ve had some troops would be allowed to start coming home. And I would just point to you there’s a pattern here, that the President listens to the commanders on the ground and makes decisions based on that regard.

— exchange between reporter and press secretary Dana Perino at a March 25 White House press briefing [emphasis added].

CNN: Do you see yourself as an elder statesman now?
DAVIES: Aw, no. When I get up on stage I’m just another punk trying to make contact with the world. Yes, I’m older, but I’m not that much wiser. I still make the same mistakes I would have made years ago. … I know people look to me to have all the answers [as an elder statesman] but remember, I don’t have all the answers. Maybe that’s why I’m still doing it.

— interview exchange between CNN’s Todd Leopold and Kinks frontman Ray Davies; March 27; emphasis added.

Ever wanted your own floating estate? The perfect toy for those in the billionaires club, the newest design from Monaco based Wally Yachts is in a class of it’s own- the newly termed ‘gigayacht’. For roughly £100 million the lucky buyer will surpass the league of the mere megayacht to become the exclusive owner of the largest private vessel known to man. At 59ft across and 2,730 tons at half load, the aptly named WallyIsland will have everything the super-rich could ever dream of (a tennis court, pool and five accommodation decks including a main saloon, dining room, library, cinema, spa and fitness area) and even a growing garden with shrubbery and flower beds that will be fed by an irrigation system. With fuel tanks big enough to enable five years of cruising, and space for 40 crew and 24 guests, two 45ft motor yachts, two 27ft sailing yachts, two cars and water-toys including six jetskis, the design company expect it to fulfil the dream of someone who wants to “live comfortably on board fulltime, like on their own estate”.

— description of a Wally Yachts “gigayacht”; [emphasis added]

photo credits:
Muslim child: David Kadlubowski, The New York Times
Campaign bus: Damon Winter, The New York Times

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

Why worry about paying off all the debt? Well, the Fed controls money supply by using dollars to buy the bonds which the US government issues to cover its debt. No debt, no bonds … and the Fed had to consider new ways of controlling money supply.

At the time then Fed Governor, Alan Greenspan, would rather that additional capital went to prepare the US economy for the pressure to be placed on it through obligations in Social Security and – especially – Medicare.

Squandering the Surplus

As events played out, shortly after the tax cuts were made permanent (for any given value of permanent) events changed dramatically. It turned out that the massive tax bonanza was as a result of short-term capital gains which were being unwound. The surplus turned into a hair-raising deficit overnight.

Bush’s tax cut did have another unintended consequence. The Fed lowered interest rates to counteract the sudden liquidity crunch that came from the tax shortfall (and stock exchange shrink). This made Americans feel richer. They bought property.

Banks had long packaged their debt into what are known as Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs). It works like this. If you know the chance of default is 1.5% then you can package a whole bunch of loans together (say $10 million in a single tranche) and sell it as a single package. Banks do this for a simple reason. By international banking law (updated to Basel II in 2008) banks may only carry a certain amount of debt relative to their total deposit base (this keeps them solvent in case of a bank run on their deposits, since they can’t call in their debts immediately). By packaging the debts and selling them, they then remove this debt from their books.

Companies would buy CDOs for some discount rate relative to the expected default (so, perhaps that $10 million tranche would be sold for $9.5 million). However, in case of default the buyer would lose both the capital and the interest in one go. If the risk had been calculated correctly, no problems. If the risk hadn’t been …

This resulted in a moral hazard situation. Since the banks weren’t carrying the actual risk, and the people buying the debt weren’t that familiar with risk profiles, the banks started lending to people who shouldn’t have a hope in hell of getting a loan. Those people (with no jobs, no assets, and no income) are known as the “sub-prime” borrowers.

These loans got packaged in amongst the rest. Because the loans are sold as solid packages, though, the standard risk of default continues but is astonishingly high on sub-prime loans over and above the predicted rate of failure. Companies took out very elaborate insurance on these risks in the form of derivatives and hedges.

Losing the Plot

All of this clever financial packaging had the effect of immeasurably complicating debts until no-one was really sure who had what, or what the impact would be. Hence the slow and erratic declaration of write-downs all across the world that significantly exceed the real value of sub-prime losses (some 1.5% of all home loans issued).

The more amusing thing (for those who find humour in this) is that the hedge funds and insurance companies who bought these CDOs often took out loans from the other banks who were also selling CDOs in order to cover the debts. In other words, the debts never left the bank’s books.

So, this has resulted in a liquidity crunch (exactly what Basel II was supposed to prevent) and the rapid devaluation of US housing stock. All those unfulfilled loans are now not backing all the US dollars in circulation. Rapid devaluation of the US dollar has followed to soak up the excess money supply.

At the same time the US has not reformed either of Social Security or Medicare and fully 76 million people out of the total 150 million of the US employment base are due to retire over the next 10 years as the Baby Boomers hit 65. This will increase consumption while reducing production. Leading to inflation and tax collection shortages which would make Medicare even more unsustainable than it is now.

Dealing with the Morning After

Hence, hoping that the US economy is simply suffering from a bout of investor negativity is a somewhat optimistic given the overhead still to be dealt with.

Both inflation and the obligations facing Medicare are within the ambit of US government control. Neither the current democratic contenders for the presidency (Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama), nor John McCain, have given any indication that they take this seriously. In other words, worries are likely to continue over the medium term.

And, for the rest of the world, a shrinking dollar and recessionary America is continued cause for concern.

In the final analysis, what Americans may consider the lasting legacy of GWB’s administration won’t be the war in Iraq, but the lingering headache of the opportunity to reform Medicare lost for good.

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.)

It’s been a rough couple of months.

On the blogging front, the two “big” stories I spent most of 2007 writing about, the evil that is Blackwater and the Jena 6 travesty of justice, are gone from the news cycle. In the first case Blackwater coverage is now buried – by, I suspect, tacit agreement between the Bush junta and corporate media – so as to allow Erik Prince and company to slither away with minimal (if any) punishment for their crimes against humanity in the name of protecting “American interests” in Iraq. In the second case, Jena’s impetus toward equal treatment under law has dissipated (sadly) due to revelations that the principal prosecutee/cause célèbre has been something of a habitual criminal whose previous unsavory behavior had been excused with wrist taps for the following reasons: 1) he was a star athlete; 2) he committed his crimes against fellow African-Americans rather than against whites in his home town in the deep south.

Since the relegation of these important stories to Trotsky’s dust bin, I’ve been at loose ends trying to find another story to follow to fill my niche as resident Museum Quality Boomer Idealist© for this publication.

On the personal front it’s been a painful, contemplative time.

For those (few) of you (God bless you, every one) who’ve followed some of my rock music writing both here and at my blog The Savoy Truffle, you’re aware that I was a musician myself for a good number of years before retreating to a life in academia and as a writer. I played in a band back in the seventies – a band that was approached by record companies (while this sounds laughable now, back in the Beatle-cene Epoch it used to be a statement of some importance). We wrote and played power pop with country, blues and folk inflections. Some people thought we were pretty good.

Our drummer, Tony, died suddenly in October. I’ve been having real trouble getting past it. I’m haunted by what might have been. I keep remembering a quote from Peter Townshend: “Yeah, fans can say,’That crazy drummer of yours is dead. Get somebody else to play drums.’ But it’s different for me – my friend is dead. Do you understand? My friend is dead.”

Events like Tony’s passing – which we Boomers are starting to experience with alarming regularity – makes stuff like the Presidential campaign, which seems so important to the Xers who dominate this blog, seem like a lot of horse shit to me these days.

I’m trying to figure out what’s important to me now. While there’s still some time.

My fellow Boomer, Randy Newman, tried to tell everyone years ago what’s really important in life. All one has to do is fill in the blank to this lyric from one of his most well known songs:

“It’s _____ that matters….”

That’s revelatory about me as a Boomer. About all us Boomers. I notice that when I talk with my Boomer friends that we know we have an interest in this election. We know what we face. Our infrastructure is crumbling. Global heating is perhaps past fixing. We have to free ourselves from fossil fuels and develop our alternative energy sources. We have to do something to reverse the determined march toward idiocracy that our current public policies on education are causing. We have to stop that imbecilic war and stop pouring our country’s wealth down the rat hole that is Iraq. We have to stop electing the stupidest, most fucked up members of our generation as leaders of the free world.

But we’re also concerned about the important things. The things that make Boomers – well, Boomers.

The original Kinks are getting back together.

Led Zeppelin, with Jason Bonham replacing his dad John on drums, may be planning a tour.

Of course these events may not seem important to those in the slacker/latchkey/blogging generation.

Most of them can’t afford the tickets, anyway.

See the Randy Newman quote above.

We Boomers still have all the high paying jobs.

But there’s hope. We Boomers will go the way of Tony soon enough.

Feel better now? I know I do.