Fortunately, Wired comes to the rescue. Specifically, good old GeekDad, who reviews toys and all sorts of other stuff for Wired. And he’s got a list of the five best toys of all time. You might have a quibble here and there, but you can’t deny he’s on to something. Your only problem now is gussying them up as Christmas presents for kids who expect something either (a) glowing, (b) electronic, or (C) alive. But that’s what wrapping paper is for, isn’t it?

“In the immediate aftermath of the Twenty-sixth Amendment’s passage, nearly eleven million new voters joined the general electorate. More than 50% of eligible voters between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four participated in the 1972 presidential election.” (Troy 596). Since then voter participation on the part of young people has dropped precipitously. There are a lot of easier answers floating around to try to explain the maddening phenomena of why young people, whom so many hoped (and continue to hope) would inject energy and vitality into the political system fail so consistently to do so. However, the answer to why young people do not vote in comparable numbers to the rest of society cannot be neatly summed up and indeed, there is no one explanation.

Researchers have advanced a number of demographic and systemic variables that could account for the low overall turnout and the decline since the 1960s. Most of this research follows Anthony Downs’ (1957) conceptualization of voting as a rational decision-making process: when benefits, either instrumental or expressive, outweigh the costs of voting (e.g., registration, learning about candidates, going to the polls), individuals are more likely to vote. This logic helps to explain the higher voting rates of more highly educated individuals (who have lower marginal costs of political information) and the negative impact of strict registration laws (which increase the time costs of voting). Yet, as the following discussion will show, this cost-benefit analysis obscures as much as it illuminates as a number of recent findings challenge the predicted patterns (Roksa 4).

The solution is equally nebulous and, much to the chagrin of political scientists and economists alike, seems to defy concrete measurement. In reality, young people’s unwillingness to vote is a murky combination of institutional barriers, lack of educational resources, psychological and sociological elements. For better or worse, today’s young person needs to feel empowered to exercise their decision-making muscle, at least at first and if youth participation is considered to be a desirable outcome than many people and institutions will have to coalesce to provide that empowerment. In the past, discourse on this topic has been rife with easy, atavistic explanations that only obscure the matter. The data seems to show that pointing our collective finger at the individual citizens that make up each passing generation of youth have not achieved any desirable result. The experts quoted in this paper advocate a new model: “Empowerment efforts seek to enhance wellness, build upon strengths, and identify sociopolitical influences on quality of . An empowerment orientation, however, differs from positive youth development by placing more emphasis on the connection between the individual, micro- and macro-social structures. Empowerment, for example, assumes that many social and health problems can be attributed to unequal access to resources” (Wong 40). Removing barriers to voting legal, institutional and societal, wherever possible is the only conceivable way to increase young voter turnout.

Myths and Easy Answers

Exploring the type of easy-answer theories they have been posited in the past and subsequently revealed to be on shaky empirical ground (or outright disproven) will be instructional as we will be able to observe what misconceptions they led to and how we can avoid them in the future. One theory that seems logical enough on its face is posited in The American Voter Revisited. Lewis-Beck states that younger voters have lesser roots; that the pedantic fineries of politics may be of little interest to young people since the policies enacted don’t effect them directly:

It takes some time for the salience of politics to increase for young adults. Perhaps they are drawn into groups and associations that have a political connection, or become integrated in a community through holding a steady job or buying a home, raising a family and getting involved in local issues. All these steps would make young adults more aware of their own political interests, the impact of political decisions on these interests and the central role of political parties in the processes of governance (Lewis-Beck 149).

This theory is testable from a scientific perspective since there are some young people who are married, hold down full-time jobs, have children, mortgages, etc. Based on studies conducted of younger voters, these citizens are quite a bit less likely to vote. “[P]atterns of young adults, being married decreases the likelihood of being registered, while being in school increases it. The presence of children and hours working do not seem relevant. Thus, the hypothesis that young adults increase their political participation as they acquire adult roles is not supported” (Roksa 14).

Another hypothesis, posed by Martin Wattenberg and many others, is that for various reasons – apathy, cynicism, laziness – young people are less politically knowledgeable than they were decades ago. “Today when it comes to political news stories, one could reasonably say, ‘Dont ask anyone under 30,’ as chances are good that he or she won’t have heard of these stories. Young adults today can hardly challenge the establishment if they don’t have a basic grasp of what is going on in the political world” (Wattenberg 61). This line of reasoning is not only reductive, it suffers from a serious chicken-egg problem. Mr. Wattenberg fails to elucidate whether or not lack of political knowledge led to lower turn-outs or the other way around. What Mr. Wattenberg does state is that for the few that still do vote, their comparative lack of knowledge leads them to be ineffective voters: “[W]e will examine data on whether people of different age groups say they have followed major political events. This is important in and of itself, because if younger people aren’t following what’s going on in politics, they are at a sharp disadvantage in being able to direct how politicians deal with the issues of the day” (Wattenberg 62). I question the veracity of such a statement. Is there an additional box to check on the ballot that says ‘please don’t read too much into my vote I don’t know what I’m talking about’? The author is making an enormous intellectual leap.  He ascribes a mandated message behind one’s vote that politicians are somehow supposed to suss out and convert into actionable policy. Irrespective of the individual voters reasoning – which could be well or poorly thought out – it is still one of many hundreds or thousands and cannot be counted as a directive to the politician voter in any but the loosest sense of the word.

In fact, one could take umbrage with Mr. Wattenberg’s very line of inquiry. His data set, which seeks to prove that young people are less well-informed doesn’t stand up to even basic skepticism. Claiming that in the halcyon days of the New Deal and Great Society, young people were well engaged with the hot-button stories and legislation of the day like the Taft-Hartley Act (1948) and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. However, when presented with data that shows contemporary young people were engaged in similarly important questions he cooks up this pithy dismissal: “Although the 9/ 11 Commission hearings and the abuse of Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib were political stories, each had sensationalistic aspects to them that could be spun so as to provide entertainment” (Wattenberg 72).

This is selective data at its worst. The author has basically said that the fact that young people were just as tuned in to the Abu Ghraib prison scandal as older folks doesn’t count because it had an entertainment value as well. Apparently the discussions of the Taft-Hartley Act in 1948 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 were, in the author’s estimation, absolutely sober and rational debates with no sensationalistic aspects at all. Images of strikes, riots, dogs attacking protestors and police turning fire hoses on black Americans must have been totally ignored by young people in what was surely a very serious political debate with no emotions or prurient interest whatever. If one must parse the data in such a baldly arbitrary way, then there is quite likely a problem with conclusion drawn. It’s easier to say young people are too busy watching Snooki cross our arms, cluck our tongues and yearn for the days of the past. Arguments about video games, entertainment and lamentations of the passing of the newspaper serve as a neat obfuscation of the type of institutional problems that disengage people from the political process at a young age. “The more than thirty year struggle of college students seeking the right to vote in college towns is a direct contradiction to the frequently accepted description of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds as an apathetic demographic. Quite apart from this notion of college students as politically disinterested” (Troy 612).

Another theory, less circular but perhaps equally specious is the idea that young voters are cynical and as such refuse to participate in a corrupt system.

Just what has impaired the development of a sense of duty to vote on the part of this generation of young Canadians is unclear, but it may well have something to do with the fact that they were reaching adulthood at a time when disaffection with politics was growing. This disaffection had a number of sources: the rise of a neo-conservative outlook that advocated a smaller role for the state, a perception that governments were relatively powerless in the face of global economic forces, and a series of constitutional crises and failed accords. All of these factors could have combined to produce a disengaged generation that often tunes out politics altogether. But these circumstances are changing. (Gidengil)

Indeed, it’s difficult to reconcile the image of the naïve idealist young person with this other image of the angry, cynical young person who, as a result, refuses to participate in the process. The fact of the matter is, disaffection and cynicism are not at all the exclusive purview of the young (Gidengil) although it has had its moments where it was a common theme of a young generation: “Political disaffection peaked in the mid-1990s and seems to be waning. Meanwhile, security concerns at home and abroad have highlighted the role of the state. One result may be a renewed sense that politics does indeed matter.”

A third theory additionally states that the youth vote suffers from the very same cost-benefit problem that suppresses voting across the board:

“[T]he notorious incentive problem commonly labeled as the paradox of voting. Democracy requires that, at least at some critical junctures, many can participate in political decisions. But if many participate, the impact of a single vote on the outcome is negligible. Hence, the specifically political benefit of voting becomes unable to motivate citizens’ participation, since the cost of voting—albeit tiny—easily exceeds it. Therefore, electoral participation, at least partially, is driven by other factors than the intensity of preferences regarding election outcomes. The most likely motives seem to be a sense of citizen duty, and various pleasures that may stem from the act of voting itself.8 Thus, whatever social mechanisms generate a sense of citizen duty or entertainment value from electoral participation, the groups that appreciate them best are bound to have an advantage over the others in the electoral arena” (Toka 6).

A young person, like anyone else, is very likely to take stock of their voting possibilities, realize the infinitesimal likelihood that they can really affect the outcome of an election and decide to stay home. To wit: “One interesting finding is that only about 73% believe their vote counts. When asked to identify the most important reasons for voting for a specific candidate, agreeing with candidates 28% on issues was the most frequently identified as ‘most important.’ This was more important than leadership, experience, and character” (Carlos, et al. 27-28). Refutation of this theory is difficult but the reason one must place this on the “easy answer” category for the purposes of this paper is that this explanation is in no way unique to young voters. Absent a particularized hypothesis of why the costs would be higher or the benefits lower to young people in particular, there’s no way to support the idea that the rational choice incentive problem particularly effects young people. As such, it is not actionable as an explanation for why young people in particular tend not to vote.

Resultant Misconceptions

As a result of the relatively low turnout of young voters, it is easy to treat it as a bloc of voters that thinks about things roughly the same way. In fact, if one were successful in increasing the “youth vote” one would likely find it growing ever more disparate, wherein other demographic factors may act as better predictors.

“Of course, anyone can invent neat theories about how a particular set of attitudes can systematically influence political involvement and, at least occasionally, vote choice, too. Suppose that the weakness of integration in the political community is an important determinant of vote choices, and, at the same time, a major cause of young people showing below average political knowledge. Then, even if the relatively ignorant young voters were to become more knowledgeable, they may not vote the same way as the currently more involved, young people do. They will still remain different from the latter with respect to an attitudinal determinant of vote choice” (Toka 23).

This truism seems logical enough, but it’s worth mentioning because if we are to establish that there is no one cause for the depression of youth voting, it will very likely follow that there isn’t one solution. In fact the reason why it is important to not view the youth vote as a single bloc with a single reasoning methodology behind it will help us to understand the solution to the problem and perhaps why any solution has eluded popular political science in the first place. Often, academic and popular articles (including this one) will refer to the “youth vote” as an easy shorthand which is fine enough as long as there is the accompanying acknowledgement that there is no one “youth vote” in real terms.

The second misconception is that young people are equally unlikely to vote across-the-board. This is totally untrue and this fact is very informative for our discussion later on. “[I]t is a serious misconception to suppose that it is the highly educated young who are failing to turn up at the polls. On the contrary, the more education young people have, the more likely they are to vote. Education remains one of the best predictors of turnout because it provides the cognitive skills needed to cope with the complexities of politics and because it seems to foster norms of civic engagement” (Gidengil, Jamieson). Additionally, it is important to note that this is not a purely American phenomenon. Youth voting is low in every country not just the United States. “Young people in the United States are far from unique in not following public affairs and possessing relatively less knowledge of politics compared to older people. These same patterns can be found throughout the established democratic world in recent years” (Wattenberg 80).

“A misconception is that young [people] are being “turned off” by traditional electoral politics” (Gidengil). Young people are not any more turned off to the political system than anyone else. Which is to say that they are quite turned off to the system indeed.

“They are certainly dissatisfied with politics and politicians. Three in five believe that the government does not care what people like them think and two in five believe that political parties hardly ever keep their election promises. However, they are no more dissatisfied than older Canadians. In fact, they are, if anything, a little less disillusioned with politics than their parents and their grandparents are. In any case, political discontent is not a particularly good predictor when it comes to staying away from the polls. Many people who are disaffected with politics choose to vent that frustration by voting against the incumbent” (Gidengil, et al.)

About one-third of the American adult population can be characterized as politically apathetic or passive(Milbrath). The distinction of cynicism belongs to all voters in nearly equal measure. It is a gross misconception to apply disaffection with the system to young people more than any other group.

The easiest nuts and bolts answer to why young people don’t vote is there are bureaucratic obstacles to getting registered and then getting to the polling place and voting. “The results show that 18-22 year olds are interested in the democratic process and in voting, but they lack information on absentee voting requirements and candidate issue stance. Further, results support the literature that suggests candidates do not target their campaign messages to this age group and are therefore missing an important and substantial voting audience” (Carlos, et al 1). In addition to the normal legal wrangling required to get a registration form, fill it out correctly, send it in by the deadline and do all of that without the type of experience with bureaucracy most older folks, many students go away to school and cannot vote in the district in which they reside during the school year (i.e. voting day). “Complicating matters for those students who do choose to vote by absentee ballot are the varied requirements that accompany this choice. Elections laws differ greatly from state to state with respect to procedures for applying for, and utilizing, absentee ballots. Some states allow a lengthy window in which voters may apply for an absentee ballot, while other states restrict this period to just a few weeks” (Troy 610). The fact of the matter is, the registration process is reasonably arduous and serves as an obvious barrier of entry into the voting arena. However, it is a barrier one need cross only once, so while some young people may be doggedly determined to cut through the red tape the first time out it would seem that some aren’t able to do so until they are well into their 20s, 30s or later. “[I]ndividuals in the US do not vote because the political system tends to isolate them, through both registration laws and political party arrangements. A number of other authors have pointed to registration laws as one of the main culprits for low voting turnout and the socioeconomic gap in voting” (Roksa 8).

Since there are barriers to becoming a first time voter, a young person will not always know what to expect when trying to get involved in their political process.  For multiple time voters, they know where there polling place is.  They know roughly how long they can expect to wait in line, what the people are going to be like, what the smells are like, etc.  It may sound silly but the unknown, even for something as benign as voting can be intimidating and young people haven’t developed the voting “habit.” “Instilling voting habits in young adults would likely increase their voting turnout over the lifespan and therefore increase voting rates overall.  Furthermore, existing research on young adults usually places all young adults into one category without explaining observed variation between those who do and do not vote and/or does not account for unobserved heterogeneity among young adult” (Roksa 3).  In addition to not having actually experienced voting before many young voters have no experienced their first passionate political moment.  Since most young people’s politics are some scrambled version of their handed-down parents politics (Lewis-Beck 140), a lot of people have not had the opportunity to develop their own partisanship or ideology.  “Voting also tends to strengthen a voter’s partisan attachment… The failure of young adults to turn out in large numbers may be largely due to a deficiency of such factors.  As these factors develop, so will the propensity to vote, which in turn will boost those factors as well, until participation in elections is all but automatic for individuals of established age” (Lewis-Black 103).  Increasing ones attachment to a certain ideology increases greatly ones likelihood to vote and while some create that attachment at an early age, for others, it takes time.  Additionally, college students may face hostilities voting near their school from the local residents: “[C]ollege students often face human obstacles as well. Frequently, college students—as a whole—represent a different demographic than their surrounding neighbors. In many cases, community members feel that students are a more politically liberal group and that their interests are contrary to the community’s well-being.

A third and very difficult problem to overcome is the already calcified two-way street of ignorance that already runs between young people and politicians. “Citizens’ equality is, of course, a central component of the notion of democracy. Ordinary citizens may often mistake simple majority rule for democracy—but majority rule itself derives its powerful normative appeal from the fact that it allows each voter to have an equal influence on the outcome” (Toka 2). There is a pre-existing voter inequality problem that exists for young people. Candidates, based on past returns, cannot afford to reach out on a substantively level to the youth vote because the youth vote has been so historically underwhelming. “The present evidence suggests that the socially unequal distribution of turnout and political knowledge does introduce a systematic bias into the electoral arena. If turnout and information-level among citizens were both higher and more equal, systematically different election results may obtain—presumably forcing political parties to adjust their offering to the behavior of a different electorate” (Toka 42). There is, of course, the equally problematic counter-narrative of young people rightfully believing that their interests are not being properly represented by candidates that rarely campaign to them and are almost always at least a generation or two older. Put simply, young people have gotten the democracies they paid for with their lack of political efficacy and turning back the clock on that is going to take multiple elections:

“Suppose that there is a party advocating permissive positions on a range of moral issues, and it appeals to young people in particular. Young people, as we just saw, vote less frequently and know less than their elders. One likely consequence is that the morally permissive party ends up with a lower percentage of the vote than it would have if turnout were 100 percent and all voters equally and fully informed. The wide-ranging political consequences of this percentage difference are the price that the potential electorate of this party—i.e., those who would vote for the party if turnout were 100 percent and all voters perfectly informed—pays for voter inequality. (Toka 10)

Undoing what is now decades of nearly nonexistent conversation between candidates and young voters will take time and commitment from both. “Even people who to recognize that they have a voice and that they have the right to use it will remain disempowered if they do not know how to use it or are prevented from using their voice in such a way as to be heard and to make preferences and demands known.” (Breton 180).

What Can Be Done?

It’s important to realize from the outset that there is a ceiling to getting out the youth vote in America unless something drastic were implemented like mandatory voting or a change in the voting day. As such reforms seem, to put it mildly, unlikely, we will not consider them a realistic possibility. In the surge of support and civic duty that followed the passage of the 26th amendment, 48% of 18-21 year olds turned out to vote in 1972, along with 51% of 21-24 year olds. It should be understood that the solutions contained on the following pages are mild reforms and are unlikely to eclipse those 1972 numbers if implemented. That having been said, the solution to increasing voter turnout appears to be two-pronged with some small subsidiary solutions to supplement. “A substantial body of literature examines the role of socioeconomic status in voter turnout. This research reveals that individuals of higher SES, regardless whether it is measured in terms of education, income, or occupation, are more likely to vote, with education being the strongest predictor of turnout” (Roksa 5). The name of the game is simple to understand and very difficult to execute: greater education and greater empowerment of voters.

Let’s begin with the smaller, subsidiary solutions. As we mentioned earlier, candidates have been burned over-reaching out to youth voters so one cannot blame candidates for being gun-shy to do so again. In fact, the politicians themselves are likely the least culpable party as candidates with broad appeal among youth voters like Howard Dean and Ron Paul are often running at a high-risk with little political reward. It would seem that the solution must be more holistic than a pithy “the candidates need to reach out.” However, were candidates to make a systematic attempt to reach out to young people by discussing their issue in addition to jumping on to pop culture ephemera like social media, then the youth vote would certainly turn out in greater numbers. “One very tangible form of interest is to have a campaign worker or even a candidate turn up at the door: people who reported being contacted by any of the parties during the 2000 campaign were more likely to vote” (Gidengil, et al.). However, this is not unique to or even particularly true of young voters. Any citizen who has direct contact with a candidate is far more likely to turn out to vote than one who hasn’t (Hellman). However, while the risks are well documented, there is a school of political thought that says an effective get-out-the-vote campaign directed at young people conducted by the candidates themselves could be an enormous tactical boon to the right campaign:

Furthermore, changes in the legal structure of voting may affect candidate campaign strategy, election dynamics, and the nature of public policy. For instance, the findings in this report indicate that political candidates, parties, and organizations would be wise to mobilize young citizens in states where voting reforms exist, particularly in states with election day registration. Moreover, those seeking youth electoral support would likely benefit by boosting voter registration rates among young people in states with convenient voting procedures (Fitzgerald 15).

“[C]ampaigns could affect the electorate in many other ways. Recent scholarship offers evidence that presidential campaigns mobilize turnout, alter issue preferences and priorities, change perceptions of candidates, and inform voters” (Shaw 346).

A relatively simple but powerful step would be to remove, wherever possible, any administrative boundaries that would prevent young people from exercising their franchise. “An important explanation that has been largely ignored… ever-changing obstacles—including voter intimidation, restrictive residency requirements, and unduly harsh absentee voter regulations—have at least as much, if not more, to do with keeping students from the polls” (Troy 592). College students, especially are being hit with a lot of bureaucratic red-tape. Easing or eliminating burdensome registration procedures as well as centralizing requirements would go a long way towards encouraging new voters. The problem of low voter turnout in the eighteen- to twenty-four year-old demographic is two-fold. “First, students remain largely uneducated about the requirements for voter registration and participation. Even those students that are aware of the basic legal requirements often get confused by the varying ways in which those requirements are enforced across states. Second, college students will continue to face obstacles and harassment at the polls as long as reasonable accommodations are not made to aid their participation” (Troy 612). As illustrated in the chart above less restrictive balloting including, but not limited to, mail balloting could be the single greatest boon to youth voting.

Beyond the more concrete ideas of changes in the way campaigning is done and legislating looser institutional restrictions lies the twin components to an entire universe of new voters: empowerment and education. The two can be discussed separately. Simply encouraging young people that they have the means at their disposal to make good civic decisions is meaningless without giving them the knowledge of the political system. Conversely, educating people on the manner in which our government works is a fool’s errand unless we empower them with desire to want to exercise their right. We will presuppose that part of the reason young people do not vote is that they don’t feel empowered or confident enough to do so (we will explore this idea in greater detail shortly.) Therefore “the first step in the process of empowerment involves one or more activists bringing together in a mutual-aid or self-help group or organization, people who share particular situation of disempowerment” (Breton 181). Indeed, the organization that should be in charge of this “mutual aid” must be the schools as no other institution will have the captive audience, space or manpower to convey the message to young people while they are old enough to understand but still young enough to receive it on a mass scale. Just as schools are supposed to prepare children and young adults for careers and higher education, so too should it be the schools responsibilities to turn out good citizens:

[W]e can assume that more knowledge facilitates a better use of the vote by citizens—the meaning of “better” being defined here by the democratic ideal that elected officials should be responsive and accountable to citizens’ preferences. Similarly, voting for a particular party or candidate will normally carry more information about a voter’s preferences than nonvoting, and thus give more political influence to a given citizen. Hence, the possible conflict between the democratic ideal on the one hand, and social inequalities in the distribution of turnout and political knowledge on the other” (Toka 4-5).

The key to encouraging young people to participate in politics is to get them to “’tune in.’ Political engagement presupposes political interest. If young Canadians are not interested in politics, they are not going to spend much time or energy keeping up with public affairs, and still less participating actively in the country’s democratic life (Gidengil).

Empowering young people to feel as though they can have a hand in their own future by exercising their franchise represents a sociological and attitudinal shift. Less nebulously, what can be done from a policy perspective; are there concrete actions that can accomplish the goal of getting more young people out to vote? “[T]he single most important step would be to find ways to keep more young people in school. The more education young people have, the more interested they are in politics and the more likely they are to vote, to join groups working for change and to be active in their communities” (Gidengil, et al.). Just as was the case with the other offered solutions, critics say that education has not been enough to encourage young voters:

More access to higher education has provided recent generations with the ability to learn more about politics than their grandparents were able to. But just because the potential is there doesn’t mean that someone will use it. Without reading a daily newspaper, watching the TV news, or otherwise following current events, even the best- educated people will probably not pick up much knowledge about the political world. A lack of basic educational skills might make it difficult for someone to absorb political information, but even the most advanced educational skills will not help if one is not exposed to current affairs through the news (Wittenberg 72)

However, I believe this criticism to be a gross over-simplification and argue that greater education of our civic processes must be the fulcrum of any program to increase voter participation amongst young people.

As we have observed, the youth themselves are often blamed for their own disengagement in politics, More people are attending school, the argument goes, so the kids themselves or parents or entertainment must be to blame for the detachment. This assumes that attending school in and of itself would provide cause people to vote – I argue however, that school is not what gives people the confidence to vote, not even education per se but the feeling of being educated; and that feeling is not being properly conveyed to students. Absolutely more youth are attending college today in real terms but sociologically it would seem that the societal emblem of “educated” is being commensurately withheld, measured not against some inert idea of what makes one “educated” or “informed” but against the totality of the rest of the population (Martin 98). As undergraduate enrollment becomes more and more the norm, increasing as it has by 67 percent between 1985 and 2007 (NCES.gov), students with an undergraduate education are being denied the confidence in their own judgment by a society and political process that states as its mantra education is the silver bullet on the one hand but shouts down the notion that even one an undergraduate education or degree one could be considered informed enough to participate in the political system.

Since it seems to be axiomatically accepted and supported by the facts that the more educated a person is, young or not, then the more likely they are to vote. However, if we stratify the data a little more we see that to not exactly be true. This type of data breakdown has not been specifically studied much in American politics (though it is tangentially referenced often.) There is, however, a Canadian study available that should be similar enough to be usable as a reflection on the American political system. Whereas, in Canada, graduate student voting rates have remained nearly level, if not increased slightly, undergrads and high school graduates have dropped precipitously and surprisingly, at about the same rate. “Another study conducted by the same authors breaks up groups by lesser, middle, and better educated, and predicts likelihood of voting. Turnout for lesser educated youth at age 20 is predicted to be 29 per cent. For the middle educated it is 43 percent, and for the better educated at age 20, it is 58 per cent, which is comparable to total voter turnout for the general population” (Jerema).

It would appear that there is a confidence threshold achieved either by way of education (as represented by the graph) or by way of generalized life experience (where irrespective of education, voting rates increase in the 30s and 40s, when one usually is head of their household and possesses some authority in their professional field) when a citizen no longer feels paralyzed to act as a voter in their political system. In other words, just because people are, from an empirically observed point of view, more educated than they were decades ago doesn’t mean that they necessarily feel more educated (Martin). I must note here that this hypothesis is not necessarily one supported by academic study at this moment. It is, however, based on my admittedly limited experience, the best attitudinal explanation for the ever-diminishing returns on the youth vote. Younger voters, less sure of themselves and their opinions, fearful they might make a mistake or don’t deserve to participate due to lack of knowledge are bowing to the ever mounting societal pressure that they aren’t equipped or prepared to vote even if the law says they are (Wong 80). This type of attitudinal disconnect could be used to explain how our society, absent laws or other binding institutional ways to suppress youth, minority votes, etc. may have found a way to give some voters subtle cues that their input is not welcome: “Across a wide range of democracies, young and old, people whose income or education is low, women, racial minorities and some occupational groups tend to participate less in elections and know less about politics than other citizens” (Toka 6).

So what action does this information say we should take from a policy perspective? It says that empowerment and education must go hand-in-hand from elementary school up through high school civics if we are to agree that participation of young people is a desirable outcome.

The lower social status of youth can be partially justified by their stage of development and legal status. This justification may be warranted from a developmental perspective, as a person’s ability to grasp abstract and complex cognitions is formed in mid- to late adolescence. Legally, young people are not afforded the same rights as adults. Age requirements, for example, determine when a person can lawfully engage in certain activities such as holding a job, voting, driving, and consuming alcohol. As 81 such, young people are not able to fully participate in society in the same manner as adults and have less power to control their own lives as a result. Moreover, this age bias may also create a culture that inhibits adults’ interest in or consciousness to provide meaningful roles for youth involvement in the decisions that affect their lives, and in developing solutions for social problems that affect us all (Wong 80).

Young people are not necessarily encouraged to be decision-makers or complicit in their own destiny in the early years of life. Therefore, it seems unlikely that the first November after their 18th birthday that they would suddenly flip a switch and feel empowered to take on mantle of participatory government. Even when one’s vote is one of only thousands or millions it can still feel like a big responsibility and under that auspice, it would very well seem that the conclusion most people have come to is to simply not exercise their franchise. “As education is strongly correlated with individuals’ political participation, one could argue that young adults have low turnout rates at least partly because they have relatively low levels of education” (Roksa 16).

Conclusion

It’s tempting to believe that current trends will continue on inexorably, but the fact of the matter is, the demographic trend of lesser involvement on the part of young people is a rather recent phenomenon. According to Wattenberg, as recently as 60 years ago, young people were more plugged in to political knowledge than senior citizens. Especially given the well established lack of knowledge or workable theories to explain it, the phenomenon could just as easily turn around in future elections. “[R]esearchers and practitioners that use [empowerment] aim to increase the capacity of individuals, organizations, and communities by focusing on assets rather than problems, and searching for environmental influences rather than blaming individuals. Establishing critical consciousness is a way to achieve this aim” (Wong 40). The rush to blame the citizens of a generation for paying too much attention to things of no consequence and not enough on items of political import is a sirens call that must be ignored because it obscures underlying societal and institutional problems that may be to blame. Surely, the citizens of my generation spent far too much mental energy remembering Homer Simpson’s home town rather than which two women have been appointed to the Supreme Court in the past 5 years. However, if one could take a time machine back to 1948, it seems a sure bet that a lot more 22 year old would be able to recognize Betty Grable than Hattie Wyatt Caraway. When people stop participating in democracy then that is an institutional failure, not a failure of the citizens. Assuming otherwise leads us down a slippery slope to elitism and nothing could be more anathema to the American Republic.

Works Cited

Bartels, Larry. “Uninformed Votes: Information Effects in Preisdential Elections.” American Journal of Political Science, Vol. 40, No. 1. Feb, 1996. pp. 194-230.

Breton, Albert; Breton, Margot. “Democracy and Empowerment.” Understanding democracy: economic and political perspectives. ed. Albert Breton. Cambridge University Press, 1997.

Carlos, Ray; DeMaria, Diane; Hamilton, Derrick; Huckabee, Debbie, et al. “Youth Voting Behavior” 5 April 2004.

Fitzgerald, Mary. “Easier Voting Turnout Methods Boost Youth Turnout.” 2003: Circle Working Paper 1.

Gans. “Turnout Tribulations. The Journal of State Government.” 65(1), 12-14, 1992.

Gidengil, Elisabeth; Blais, Andre; Nevitee, Neil; Nadeau, Richard. “Youth Participation in Politics.” Electoral Insight, July 2003.

Gross, Peter. “Youth voting numbers low throughout history.” , 16 December 2010.

Hellman, Emily. “Outside Contact and Young Voter Responsiveness: An Analysis of Voter Mobilization Techniques and Youth.

Jamieson et al. “U.S. Census Bureau, U.S. Dept of Commerce, Voting and Registration in the Election of November 11, 2000.”

Jerema, Carson. “But university students do vote: Just because voter turnout is low for ‘youth’ doesn’t mean it is low for all youth.”11 February 2011.

Keys, Spencer. “The youth vote is about more than just students.” 29 April 2011.

Lewis-Beck, Michael. The American Voter Revisited. University of Michigan Press, 2008.

Martin, Jane Roland. “The Ideal of the Educated Person.” Educational Theory. Spring 1981, Vol. 31, NO.2.

Milbrath, Lester. Political Participation. US: Rand McNally & Co. 2nd ed., April 1977.

Roksa, Josipa; Conley, Dalton. “Youth Nonvoting: Age, Class, or Institutional Constraints?” New York University Press.

Shaw, Daron. “The Effect of TV Ads and Candidate Appearances on Statewide Presidential Votes, 1988-96.” The American Political Science Review, Vol. 93, No. 2. Jun., 1999. pp. 345-361.

Toka, Gabor. “Voter Inequality, Turnout and Information Effects in a Cross-National Perspective.” Budapest, Hungary: Central European University Press.

Troy, Patrick, “No Place to Call Home: A Current Perspective on the Troubling Disenfranchisement of College Voter” Journal of Law & Policy, Vol 22:59, 2007.

Verba, Sidney; Nie, Norman. Participation In America: Political Democracy And Social Equality. University of Chicago Press, 1972.

Wattenberg, Martin. Is voting for young people? : with a postscript on citizen engagement. Pearson Education Inc., 2008.

Wong, Naima. “A Participatory Youth Empowerment Model and Qualitative Analysis of Student voices on Power and Violence Prevention.” University of Michigan, 2008.

_____

Matthew Record is a public policy and Constitutional law student at Stony Brook University. He’s the drummer and driving force behind the indie pop sextet Fortune & Spirits. He is an editor for musicemissions.com and a staff writer for RazzberrySync, Inc. He’s also the sole contributor to his own blog.

Matthew is from Long Island, NY and hates when people from the Island root for the Rangers. We have one team and it’s the Islanders. Support them.

“He who spareth the rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him correcteth him betimes.” (Proverbs 13:24)

“Withhold not correction from a child: for if thou strike him with the rod, he shall not die. Thou shalt beat him with the rod, and deliver his soul from hell.” (Proverbs 23:13-14)

By now, you’ve probably heard about the video of Texas judge William Adams beating his disabled, then-16 year-old daughter, Hillary, with a belt. You may even have seen the video. If not, a caution: it’s every bit as disturbing as reports would lead you to believe. We’re not used to seeing this kind of domestic brutality on YouTube, especially when it’s punctuated by lines like ”lay down or I’ll spank you in your fucking face.”

I initially ignored this story. I heard the headlines, made the same assumptions as a lot of people probably did and moved along. But today the story hooked me back in when I saw that Adams, in the process of blaming the victim (she only released the tape because he was cutting her off and taking away her Mercedes, he says), suggesting that the footage looked “worse than it was.”

What we see on the tape is prima facie evidence of a crime. It’s either child abuse or assault, depending on the victim’s age, and it sounds like the facts in this case are that she was old enough to make it assault, but the statute of limitations has run out. I would say lucky him, but I suspect that the worst the law could possibly do to him pales to what YouTube has in store.

I don’t know Adams. I don’t his daughter. I have no first-hand evidence whatsoever of the internal dynamics of the family, of whether or not she’s acting out of concern or spite. There’s one thing I’m pretty sure I do know, however: no, Judge, it’s worse than it looked.

I have some experience with what Hillary suffered that night, because it’s similar to what I endured growing up. I was routinely subjected to whippings, either with a belt or a hickory switch, that if they happened to a child today would result in the child’s immediate removal from the home by protective services and the arrest of the offending parent. On multiple occasions I was beaten as badly, or worse than, Hillary Adams.

But – and here’s the sticky part – it wasn’t child abuse. Not by the standards of the day, and not by the standards of nearly all of human history. I was taken in by my paternal grandparents when I was three. My parents split and, well, I’ll spare you that part. It was deemed best for me if I went to live with them. In many respects this was probably the best thing that ever happened to me.

My grandparents, though, were old school Southern working class Baptist, born and bred to the wisdom of the Old Testament. To the modern ear, the idea of beating a child because you love him sounds counter-intuitive, but to people of their generation (born in 1913 and 1914, respectively) you had to administer corporal punishment if you loved a child. Failing to do so was to fail as a parent and to literally risk the child’s eternal soul. The swats with their hands were no big deal. Call those attention-getters, if you like. But when I’d do something they deemed serious, the results could leave welts for days.

There is no question that they loved me. Totally and unconditionally. And I loved them just as completely. I have published poetry honoring my grandfather and in 1989 I took the step of changing my name to his legally (I was not born Samuel) because he was the only real father I had ever had. And just the other day, I described my grandmother as the single most important person in my entire life. I have said many times, and I mean it, that without them I have no idea where I’d be today, but it’s not likely I’d ever have amounted to much. A big part of me feels like I’m betraying their memories in writing this, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that if I can say something that helps, then it’s worth it. I also do not blame them. I’m 100% convinced that my grandparents were purely the products of their context, and that if they were young parents today they’d die before they’d hurt their children.

All that said, violent physical discipline leaves psychic and emotional scars that may never heal. For starters, one comes to accept that love and pain are inextricably connected. One also can’t help seeing violence as a logical and normal solution to problems. Rationally speaking, I know that violence is sometimes necessary and perhaps even appropriate, but if you grew up like I did there’s the uncomfortable tendency to see it as a first resort instead of the last resort.

Those who know me the best probably wonder where this streak of mine comes from. I’m not a violent man, but I suppose you might say there is a great deal of turbulence in my soul. To the consternation of many of my more enlightened friends (and in truth, most of my friends are more enlightened than I am) I have no issue with the death penalty in principle. I have been known to find satisfaction when brutal justice catches up to genuinely bad human beings. I’ve never said this before, but I’m disturbed when I reflect on the kinds of fate I wish for people like Michael Vick. There’s an irony in it, I suppose: in my mind, the worst criminals are those who abuse the helpless. The retribution: render them helpless and visit upon them the same abuse they inflicted.

I hate abusers and always will, but I cannot stand the feelings they arouse in me. Even in pondering justice, the abuse I suffered as a boy fosters an enduring rage that thrives at a deep, inescapable emotional level.

Of course, it isn’t just me. How many millions of people across this country and beyond would read this and understand exactly what I’m saying? How many people think, as did one friend of mine some years ago, that he owes who he is as a human being to the fact that his father beat the hell out of him? And what implications does this have for his children?

I don’t have anything to say here that a legion of child psychologists haven’t said more compellingly, I suppose, but I find myself wishing I could talk to Judge Adams. While those watching the video linked above are absolutely seeing what they’re seeing and I’m hardly absolving the man, I find it perfectly plausible that he loves his daughter and that he was genuinely, honestly doing what he thought was best for her. He doesn’t act like it’s hurting him more than it is her (that line may well have been my earliest education in the art of irony), but part of me suspects that you simply have to slam the door on the part of you that empathizes with your loved one in order to “do what’s best for them.”

It’s pathological in the extreme, but maybe his generation, and some of mine, and certainly every generation that came before suffers from a sort of collective post-traumatic stress disorder. To note that this particular beast is self-replicating seems almost too obvious to mention.

William Adams says his daughter released the video to get even with him. Hillary Adams says she did it so that he would get help. I don’t think the rest of us have any way of knowing who’s right. Regardless, my advice to Judge Adams is to get help. Also, I hope Hillary Adams gets help, because the beast is alive in her. Probably always will be.

This is an ugly case that nobody would ever have known about before the advent of social media. And as banal and pointless as channels like YouTube can be, today it presents millions of American families with an opportunity to learn and heal, and most importantly, to begin putting the wisdom of the Old Testament behind us for good.

The cold air chased me south from New York into Pennsylvania and on through Virginia into North Carolina. “We had snow here last week,” exclaimed Sarah Edwards. “We haven’t had snow in 15 years.”

Edwards was speaking from behind her desk at the Ava Gardner Museum in downtown Smithfield, a Tar Heel town of about 13,000 that’s located a few miles west of I-95. I’d pulled in once before but the museum was closed. Now I was back to get a glimpse into the life of the woman who became the flame who “taught Frank Sinatra how to sing a torch song,” as his band arranger, Nelson Riddle, once described her.

The museum attracts about 12,000 visitors a year — mostly seniors but also “a lot of younger people interested in Old Hollywood,” said Edwards. Admission is $6 and patrons can buy a variety of souvenirs from Ava Gardner post cards to five-ounce jars of regional delicacies like sweet potato butter and moonshine jelly.

Gardner was born in 1922, the youngest of seven children, to Mollie and Jonas Gardner, a tenant farmer who tilled the tobacco and cotton fields a few miles outside of town. It was at the Howell Theater on Third Street in Smithfield where Gardner fell in love with the movies when she saw Clark Gable in “Red Dawn.”

Despite her stunning looks, she may never have made it to Hollywood if not for a chance trip to New York City to visit her sister when she was 18 years old. Her brother-in-law was a photographer, and he did a portrait of Gardner that included a snapshot of her wearing a straw hat and smiling dreamily into the camera. He put it in the window of his Fifth Avenue shop where it was spotted by an MGM employee. The young suitor wanted nothing more than a date, but the encounter led to a screen test and Gardner was signed to a seven-year contract by MGM for $50 a week.

After a few bit roles and poster poses, she hit stardom in 1946 when she starred opposite Burt Lancaster in “The Killers.” Her career spanned 63 movies and she graced the covers of “Time,” “Look” and “Elle.” Born with the perfect stage name, publicists tried passing her off as having the given name of Lucy Johnson.

In some ways she was the typical Hollywood starlet. Her marriages to actor Mickey Rooney and bandleader Artie Shaw lasted only a year, and though she was married to Frank Sinatra for five years, emotionally they were hooked forever. “They couldn’t live with each other, or away from each other,” said Edwards, “and they were always making each other jealous.”

Although she stayed close to her family, Gardner never had children. “She had dogs. Those were her babies,” said Edwards. The first was named Rags, a Pembroke Welsh Corgi that was given to her by Sinatra. After Rags came Rags II, and then Morgan.

Among the memorabilia at the museum is a French silk dress that was a gift of Howard Hughes, a wristwatch she’d given to Sinatra and china place settings from her home in London.

A copy of the family Bible is near the museum’s front entrance, but Ava Gardner was no prude. At 5-foot-7 with an 18-inch waist and size-two figure, she was the pinup girl of an entire generation.

“I don’t remember how many swimsuits I wore out,” she once said. “I shot enough sultry looks to melt the North Pole.”

A lifelong smoker, she died of pneumonia in 1990 at age 67 in London. The week after her death, People Magazine put her on the cover and called her “The Last Goddess.” She’s buried in a cemetery outside of Smithfield because, said Edwards, “She always wanted to come home to Mommy and Daddy.”

The day she died, Sinatra’s daughter Tina found her father slumped in his room and crying. The woman who lit his torch was gone.

****

A few miles farther down the highway, a billboard for a different sort of museum led me to the home of the late General William C. Lee, considered the father of American Airborne. “General Lee established, deployed and trained the 101st Airborne,” said tour guide Gloria Gulledge, a retired history teacher. “The Airborne shortened World War II by at least two years.”

The Second World War was well under way and the Armed Forces had no interest in “vertical envelopment” as paratroop deployment came to be called. Lee felt otherwise after being stationed in Germany between wars and seeing Hitler’s Luftwaffe dropping paratroopers on training missions, but he had a hard time convincing his commanders. “He was told that no American soldier would ever jump out of a plane,” said Gulledge. “They told him it wasn’t necessary.”

Then came the day that Franklin Roosevelt’s military aide called and ordered the go-ahead. A highly trained tactical commander, Lee had only 27 months to get his fledgling paratroopers ready for the invasion of Europe. He accomplished the assignment but the prepping process took its toll and he suffered a heart attack weeks before the invasion. Instead of flying over France with his men, Lee was back in the United States, in bed at home listening to the broadcast from Europe on a short-wave radio. As the troops jumped out over the French countryside, they delivered a tribute to their absent commander by yelling, “Bill Lee!”

He died four years later, at age 53.

The Lee homestead is located two blocks from the center of downtown Dunn, a handsome, two-story Greek brick revival structure with sandstone steps leading up to the museum’s front entrance. Inside are World War II artifacts from all sides, including various weaponry like the German MP 40 “Schmeisser” that was capable of firing 500 rounds a minute, a Japanese 8mm Nambu handgun and the U.S. M-1 Carbine, of which over 6.25 million were produced from 1942-60.

On an upstairs wall is a white cotton Japanese scarf embroidered with the red rising sun and bordered by the handwritten prayers and well wishes of Japanese family and friends of the soldier who owned it. An American paratrooper donated the scarf to the museum. He retrieved the scarf after killing the soldier in a gunfight during which he was wounded. In another room is a Nazi infantry battle flag that was taken from a building in Waldheim, Germany, three months after D-Day by a dentist-turned-paratrooper.

There was much else to see. Museums, after all, are the closest things we have to time machines.

Chip Ainsworth is an award-winning New England sports columnist.

Great question. Since I’m all in favor of young Deacons taking the world by storm, I thought I’d try to contribute some advice. Here’s a slightly buffed out version of what I wrote.

1: Develop communications skills. Especially the ability to write clearly and flawlessly. The erosion of writing skills over the past 20 years has been dramatic, and a student who can demonstrate this ability has a huge advantage over the competition. A warning, though. When you show us a writing sample, it needs to reflect what you can do, on your own, right now. Too many new grads will present a prospective employer with a sample that’s just gorgeous, but when they’re assigned to write something on day one in their new job it’s clear that the sample was the result of a painstaking semester-long process involving editors, professors and talented friends. In fact, the new hire isn’t prepared to contribute on one of the job’s important criteria.

It’s like showing up for a Match.com date and realizing that your date’s profile picture was one part photo and two parts Photoshop. The reality isn’t what it needs to be and you now know there’s no hope of ever trusting them. It’s bait-and-switch and depending on a variety of factors I might fire you on the spot.

Also – and this applies mostly to women (although not exclusively) – speak like a professional adult. Way too many young women have adopted what we call “upspeaking” (or, more technically, the “high rising terminal”), an inflection pattern that sounds like there’s a question mark at the end of each sentence. What this communicates to the listener is that you have no idea what you’re talking about or that you have no faith in your own judgment.

Listen to accomplished professionals speak. They say “we need to increase our direct marketing spend,” not “we need to increase our direct marketing spend?”

In sum, I’m not going to take you seriously if you don’t.

2: Show me that you understand the difference between earning something and being entitled to it. The Millennial Generation has cultivated a reputation as the Entitled Generation, and while it’s the fault of the parents who raised them and the educational system that failed them at every turn, not their own, they’re still the ones who have to deal with it.

When you graduate from college understand that you’re entitled to nothing but a diploma and you have earned nothing but an opportunity. Those of us who have worked our asses off in our careers will respect that attitude, I promise you.

3: Work on your critical thinking. Another thing Millennials have to confront is that while they’re exceptional in teams and are very good at executing on clearly defined tasks, they come from an educational paradigm that has placed almost no emphasis on the ability to think critically or solve problems. When they encounter a situation they haven’t seen before, they tend to “go limp.” However, if I can hit you with a brand new challenge and you can think your way through to a working solution, you’re going to get lots and lots of opportunities to shine.

Sadly, this one is easier said than done. Effective critical thinking is something that takes a long time to get really good at and it evolves in three stages: 1) something you do; 2) something you are; 3) something you can’t stop doing. You won’t reach stage 3 quickly no matter how hard you work, but if you show up for an interview in stage 1 you’ll help yourself immensely.

4: Cultivate resourcefulness. Once upon a time, back in the good old days, we had these things called “budgets.” A budget, for those of you who have never seen one, is this pile of money that can be used to run operations, hire talent and solve problems.

These days, even people at my level (heck, especially people at my level) are asked to do more and more with less and less. Somedays it feels like we’re expected to do everything with nothing. “Here, here’s a piece of string. Can you dominate a mature, commodified market by end of day?”

Anything you can do to demonstrate a faculty for achieving top shelf results with very little in the way of monetary resources is one that will set you apart in a hurry. The good news here is that you’ve probably been involved in student organizations, and these groups rarely have a lot of money to work with. So your undergrad experience may provide you with quantifiable proof points that will impress a hiring manager.

5: Understand the big picture. At the entry level we’re asked to do small tasks and they may not always make sense to us. But somewhere, hopefully, there is a guiding strategy that provides a context for everything an organization does. Or most of it. Some of it, anyway. Anyhow, your ability to succeed at the entry level and to progress up the career ladder will be helped immensely if you’re able to understand the organization’s overarching strategic goals and where the work you’re doing in the trenches fits in.

People who can do this become leaders. Those who are more at home focusing on tactical executions are going to spend their lives in middle management. This is fine if it’s what you want - and a company with weak mid-management is in dire trouble no matter what - but if you want to lead at a high level, work on understanding the big picture and the long term. (By the way, good middle managers have some strategic grasp, too, so your ability to succeed at this level will require you to understand as much about business drivers as possible.)

This isn’t a comprehensive guide to success, by any stretch. But a recent grad who’s smart, works hard and gets these five concepts will have a big leg up in the interview process and will likely outperform his or her entry-level colleagues.

Best of luck, even if you didn’t go to Wake.

by Matt Gallagher

I slept through 9/11.

When people hear or read that statement, they tend to think I’m speaking metaphorically. “Ahh,” they say. “Weren’t we all?” While I do appreciate my words being consumed as literary insight, and there’s certainly a great deal of truth to that particular interpretation, I mean that as literally as possible. As in, I was drooling on my pillow after staying up too late playing video games during my first week of college when my roommate, a native New Yorker, woke me up in time to watch the South Tower collapse.  

He struggled to reach his parents on the phone. Thankfully, they were both fine. Meanwhile, my eyes stayed fixed on the flames on the television screen. I’d signed Army ROTC contract papers the week before, and my imagination burned with possibility.

A lot of people wrote a lot of things about 9/11 in the days and weeks after, just as a lot of people are writing a lot of things about the 9/11 anniversary right now. Back then, I was particularly drawn to anything that used the term “generational calling,” the thinking that 9/11 could be a sort of postmodern Pearl Harbor for a nation not so sleepy anymore. In the rashness of youth, I truly believed that we were experiencing, seeing, and feeling something that no one else ever had in the annals of time. I had not yet figured out that tragedy shadows existence permanently.

Of all the various opinion pieces and essays I read during that crystallizing autumn, one stuck out and lingered for years after. It was … different. It wasn’t vengeful, or melancholy, or horrified, which I found surprising, because the author of the piece was Hunter S. Thompson, famous for emotional highs and lows. Instead, Fear & Loathing in America, which he authored only a day after the 9/11 attacks, was cautionary, and more than a little Orwellian. “Make no mistake about it,” Thompson wrote. “We are At War now – with somebody – and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives.”

I certainly didn’t like the sound of that, but no one goes to war forever, I reasoned. No American war had lasted longer than what, six, seven years? If our grandparents could whip the Nazis and Imperial Japan in less than four years, we could ferret out some jihadists from their mountain caves in the same timeframe. Further, having witnessed history, I now felt compelled to participate in it. We were at a unique point in American affairs, if not human affairs, and I was at the unique point of existence where I could serve as a participant rather than as a spectator. So I held firm to my ROTC commitment, joining the armored cavalry as an officer four years later, a decision that still fills me with great pride to this day.

I’m still not exactly sure how the war I joined up for became Iraq, but if I’ve learned one thing over the past decade, it’s that history is rarely as cogent and lucid as the history books like to pretend it is. Over the course of those fifteen months in the desert from 2007-09, between the sun, the sweat, and THE MISSION, I picked up David Foster Wallace’s classic novel, Infinite Jest, recommended to me by friends back home. (Admittedly, it took me more than a few times to pick it up and stick with it).  This, in turn, led me to Wallace’s 2007 piece for The Atlantic, “Just Asking.” “Are some things still worth dying for?” Wallace opened. I looked around at the men that made up my scout platoon and nodded. They had taught me that there were. Wallace pressed on in an essay made up entirely of questions. “What if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea?” He posed deep, probing questions, and I for one didn’t have many answers. I wondered if the college freshman I’d been in 2001 would’ve had more; it seemed likely that he would have.

After leaving the Army in 2009, I moved to New York City for a girl and with romantic, foggy notions of becoming a writer. Having felt disconnected and detached in that dorm room from the events of 9/11, it now seemed important to better understand just what it was my adopted city had been through some eight years before. I visited the pit at Ground Zero, talked to first responders about their experiences, and read just about anything I could get my hands on about the subject. And so I stumbled across this short piece in The New Yorker by John Updike, in which he shared his experience watching the horror of the towers’ collapse from a Brooklyn rooftop. Some two weeks after 9/11, Updike somehow snapped out of the daze that has enraptured much of our nation for the better part of this decade, as evidenced by his determination that “with all its failings, this is a country worth fighting for. Freedom, reflected in the street’s diversity and daily ease, felt palpable. It is mankind’s elixir, even if a few turn it to poison.”

Thompson, Wallace, and Updike are no longer with us, of course, casualties of the human condition rather than a terrorist act. The first two killed themselves, the last died of cancer. But their words and wisdoms remain, and any man able to find clarity in the aftermath of tragedy the way they did deserves to have the rest of us spread and share that clarity. Instead of gold, frankincense, and myrrh, they’ve left us with the Gonzo, and the Wry, and the Hysterical – and the acumen to understand that there is nothing more unwise than believing in the new and unprecedented.

We all slept through 9/11, true enough. Some of us woke up. Some of us still haven’t. That’s the beauty of time, though – there’s still more of it. After 9/11, Three Wise Men attempted to convey to their countrymen that the best way to go forward is found in the dust of the past. It’s not too late to heed their words.

_____

Matt Gallagher is the senior writing manager of the nonprofit organization Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America and spent 15 months in Iraq with the U.S. Army as an armored cavalry officer. He is the author of the war memoir Kaboom.

Here comes the Fight Club Generation…

I don’t have the words to explain this situation: its roots and its violent manifestations. Nor do i see myself ever jumping into a riot for the shits and giggles of it. However, i do understand the emotion that would lead to joining a riot like London’s. It wasn’t just sexy, Brad Pitt that made Fight Club a hit you know. For a lot of us, the hollow angst seething into violent anger spoke to emotions we never quite understood and certainly couldn’t verbalize. I’m guessing that most of us still can’t. Maybe if our glorious leaders had valued education as something other than a means to make money we’d be better suited to expressing rage in a constructive manner. But that’s not what happened, is it? Rank materialism is what we were weened on, so maybe the world shouldn’t be surprised when our anger (and that of our younger siblings) expresses itself as looting and property destruction.

In any case, i still don’t have the intellectual and verbal chops to put the confluence of events and outcomes we’ve seen in London into anything concise enough to resemble a blog post. What i do have is a song; it’s been running through my head from the beginning of this and while i won’t say it represents the London riots, it feels like it sums the whole mess up.

In the course of all the previous events,
It is evident that something’s bound to happen.
Come on rear your ugly head to me.
I’ve got nothing to lose but my apathy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

When I was a kid, sports were my life. I have the scars to prove it. Hours under an endless June sky were marked by innings, and days that crept by slow in July heat are remembered as quarters in a never-ending football game. We violently imitated every competition we saw on TV, and when we had to, we invented our own contests. I’m still very proud of my brief reign as grand champion of full-contact croquet, a beautiful sport that drew mothers to our park like June bugs to watermelon rinds. Oh, how they screamed.

The Dad watched us head out to the park every morning to play. He had been forced to go to work at an early age, so he was determined that my brother Glenn and I should have the freedom that boys need when summer descends from heaven and school ends and the nights are short and warm as blood. We repaid this kindness by playing as hard as we knew he worked. If the possibility of injury wasn’t there, hell, it wasn’t a game worth playing.

Chief among us was Big Sam. He was the first bleeder, the last complainer, and the juggernaut of Fourth Avenue. Big Sam could hit a softball out of the Park, could top a double ringer in a game of horseshoe sprints, and was the first person I ever saw actually touch a basketball rim. But Big Sam’s sport of choice was football. Now, you might find this hard to believe, but he could knock the Tuesday right out of you. I know that sounds weird, but if he tackled you on a Sunday, you’d go to bed on Monday night and wake up on Wednesday morning. That explains why I’m still a terrible speller, since all my 5^th grade spelling lessons were on Tuesdays. So even though I’ve been an English teacher for 27 years, I still struggle with “-i before -e except after…” I don’t know, diphthong or something.

Big Sam had to spend a week with his grandparents every July, so we honored his absence by playing harder and harsher than ever until his return.

That’s when they came.

There were three of them. Tim, Ted, and Tom Pardee had wandered up from Alabama that summer and immediately insinuated themselves into our world. We tried to be friendly and asked if they’d like to join us in a friendly game of dodge brick, but they deferred.

“Isn’t there some kind of sport we could play instead?” asked Tom. “There’s a backstop over there. We could have a catch.”

“Yeah, we could play some baseball,” suggested Johnny Miles. “But none of us brought our catcher’s masks. I guess we could use football helmets. Have a catch? What the hell does that mean?”

“Helmets and masks?” asked Ted. “Why do you need that to play baseball? Only the catcher needs a mask.”

“Not the way we play,” said my brother.

“I don’t suppose you guys have ever played Whiffle Ball?” asked Tim.

“That thing with the plastic bat?” I laughed. “No, man. We play baseball, with a real baseball and a real bat. Whiffle Ball is for school and little kids.”

“You’re just saying that because you can’t hit my Whiffle Ball fastball,” said Tim with a grin.

“You know,” said my brother, “I’m getting tired of dodge brick, and there are nine of us. Three more and we could have a game. 6-on-6.”

“We’ll play,” said Tom. “But only if we can be on the same team. And only if the game we play is Whiffle Ball.”

And eventually, we went along. We argued about if for an hour, but arguing with the Pardee boys was like arguing with the brick that was falling toward your foot. It did no good. So they won. We played Whiffle Ball. And in spite of what he said. I still think I could have hit Tim’s fastball had he ever tried to throw it. All I got was a dizzying array of curves, and when I made contact, the Whiffle ball sailed a majestic 27 feet, if it had the wind with it. Our baseball field was 5 times larger than it needed to be, and the game went on for almost five hours. In the end, we wandered away from a 37 inning, 0-0 tie.

“We win by default,” smirked Tim.

They next day, they came back.

“No Whiffle ball today,” stated my brother in a bold preemptive strike. “We always play basketball on Fridays.”

“We like basketball,” said Tom.

“Great! Well, there’s seven of us, so with you guys here, we can go five-on-five. It’ll be just like a real game.”

“We’ll play,” said Tim, “But only if we can be on the same team and only if we play half-court.”

“Half court? Half court is for girls!” said Ray Miles. It was 1966. Girls’ basketball really was played half-court. They were delicate back then.

“We will play basketball, but we will only play basketball if we are on the same team and if we play half-court,” said Ted. “And we don’t want any of you guys on our team. We’ll play all seven of you. Three-on-seven.”

We argued again, they stood like wooden blocks, and in the end, they won. Again! The strange part was they weren’t very good at basketball. They stumbled and threw off balance shots and never fouled and smiled when they missed easy layups. But they wouldn’t quit. After four hours of this, when three of our players had hit triple digits, we wondered away.

“We win by default,” muttered Tom.

On Saturday morning, as we rested in the shade of the second largest oak tree in Marshall County, they came back. Tim had a football.

“Today is Saturday,” he said. “And on Saturdays in the fall, we always play football. We do this to honor the Crimson Tide, the only college football team forged by God himself.”

“Forged?” I asked. “I heard they were coached by God.”

“They are coached by Bear Bryant, which is very nearly the same thing, you heathen,” said Tom.

“So, now you guys want to play football,” said my brother. “Let me guess, there must be some kind of restriction, something strange that makes the game uniquely yours. No blocking? No first downs? Blindfolded? Australian rules? I give up. What is it?”

“We want to play football,” said Tim. “But the football we want to play is…”

We all leaned forward.

“Touch football.”

And we laughed and laughed. Touch football was a football game without tackling. That’s like a baseball game without high and tight fast balls, or a basketball game without the occasional flagrant foul. It was possible, but it was certainly a coward’s way to play.

“I have to admit,” said my brother at last, “I knew you guys were weird and all, but I didn’t think you were liars. You aren’t from Alabama, are you?”

Tom, Ted, and Tim shuffled in an uncomfortable silence. Finally, Tim muttered:

“No.”

“I didn’t think so,” said my brother. “I hate Alabama as much as the next guy, but even I will be the first to admit that there isn’t a kid in the whole state of Alabama who plays touch football. I ought to slap you for even mentioning Bear Bryant. Anybody who plays touch football hasn’t earned the right. Where are you from really?”

“Iowa.”

“I don’t know anybody from Iowa,” Glenn said, “but to my eyes, you guys have certainly put their entire male population in a state of perilously low esteem.”

“We want to play football,” said Tim. “And we want to play touch football. And since we are the ones who have the football, it must be touch football or no football.”

You aren’t going to believe this. They won again. Four hours later, we were playing touch football. Then Big Sam showed up.

“I wanna play, I wanna to play,” he screamed.

“You can be on their team,” said Tim. “That was third down and they have to punt.”

“I can’t tell you guys how much I missed this place,” said Big Sam. “I’ve spent a week with my cousins and they’re all girls. Mean ones, too. So, did the game just start?”

“Umm, no. We’ve been going at it for about two hours,” said Glenn.

“Two hours? But you’re all so clean.”

“Well, you see Sam, we’ve been playing…playing…”

“Yeah? What?”

“Just spit it out,” I suggested.

“We’ve been playing… touch football.”

Sam looked at all of us. He scanned our faces in the huddle, but we looked away. His face twisted as if he couldn’t understand what Glenn had just said.

“Whose idea was this?” he asked at last. His voice trembled with menace. Glenn pointed at the Pardee brothers, twenty yards downfield, waiting for our punt. Big Sam stood and yelled at them.

“Hey! I just want to let you boys know that I don’t play touch football,” Big Sam screamed.

“Well, if you want to play with us, you have to play touch football,” Tim yelled back.

“You don’t understand! I don’t play touch football!”

“Again, if you want to play with us, you have to play touch football,” Tom repeated.

Big Sam looked at us all with an expression of confusion. When he looked at me, all Icould think to say was:

“They’re from Iowa.”

Glenn’s punt was in the air. Tim eased to his right to make the catch. I found myself hoping he would signal for a fair catch. Big Sam respected the rules above all else. But as he raced past me, I could hear him repeating, over and over:

“I…don’t…play…touch…”

Tim gathered in the ball and turned up field. I don’t have the adjectives to describe Big Sam’s tackle. It was an onslaught of sudden violence, and Tim looked like a fly that had zipped into a freight train. He was coming toward me, and the next instant, he was going away. His fumble flew almost as high as Glenn’s punt. It landed in Tom’s hands and he turned to Big Sam and said:

“Maybe you didn’t hear us. We’re playing tou…”

Big Sam hit Tom so hard, that the last two consonants flew off his word and shattered on the rock wall that was our east sideline. Ted took the fumble and made a break for home. Big Sam caught him along College Street. We heard the collision and saw the smoke.

When Big Sam came back, Tim and Tom had crawled away. We were left to accept Big Sam’s scorn.

“I’ve been gone six days, and when I come back, you guys are playing touch football. Touch football! I can hardly believe it. It’s like this is the Twilight Zone. Do you have any idea what would happen if the kids from Alabama or Georgia or Mississippi found out guys in Tennessee played touch football?”

“Don’t say it, Sam.”

“No! I must, and you must listen! If they found out we played touch football, then they might decide to let other teams into the Southeastern Conference. Strange places like South Caroline or Arkansas. They play touch football there, so why can’t they play in the SEC?”

“Stop it! Stop it!” I cried. “It’s too terrible.”

“You don’t understand,” said Glenn. “These guys, they wouldn’t play unless we played by their rules.”

“Then they don’t play,” said Big Sam. “This whole sorry episode tells me a lot more about you guys than about them. My father learned to play football on this very field. Charlie’s grandfather donated this land to the town to make this park. Now, it’s our turn. Listen, we have a lot of ourselves invested in this place. I broke my arm right there on that sidewalk. Johnny got three stitches from that rusty spike. And a shot. Glenn, you broke a collarbone falling off that slide. We have invested our blood and sweat in this place. Now some guys from Iowa come
in and want to change the rules to suit themselves? And you guys are going to let them? Let them change Iowa, if they want. But this park is ours. Our grandfathers made it, our fathers kept it, and now we’ve earned it, bone by bone and drop by drop.”

“What do we do?” I asked.

“We tackle. We tackle until most of us agree that we don’t want to play tackle anymore. We never let some small group of folks come in and change the rules for us. If more of us want to play touch than tackle, then we’ll play touch. We’ll probably be dead by then or real old, like 20 or 21. What kind of country would this be if we all let a tiny group of people dictate to everybody else what they should or should not do? Majority rules, majority does not run! And one day, our own children will play here. And by God, they’ll play tackle.”

Big Sam went home then, and it was a week before he came back to see us. The Pardee boys, bruised and complaining, were back the next day, it being a Monday and all. They insisted we play International Rules Croquet, but we declined, and added that if they wanted to play croquet at all, they would have to survive a match of our own full contact version. They said they would go home and discuss it, and probably would be back the next day to accept our challenge.

Of course, they didn’t show. The next day was a Tuesday, after all.

A descriptivist views language as it is written, as it develops, without the harrumph, harrumph. She systematically studies linguistic change and records it without comment.

I raise the issue — to harrumph or not to harrumph — because I recently harrumphed … a lot. One of my graduates, who is distinguishing himself in his first newspaper job, is tweeting his stories at light speed to promote them.

As you know, tweets are capped at 140 characters. So Twitterati tend to use shorthand, abbreviations, and other things about which I have no clue to express a thought. Frankly, to me most tweets I see represent a lack of planning on what to say and how to say it. But I have to teach journalism students how to wisely use Twitter. So it’s my prescriptivism versus their linguistic inventions and generational conventions.

So my former student (let’s call him, oh, Charles) wrote this 137-character tweet:

John Gross, controversial Niagara Falls contractor, was back in federal court this morning on 2 fel. chgs. He faces up to 23 yrs in jail.

“2“? Instead of “two“? “fel. chgs.“? We’re now deleting vowels and consonants from words? Surely this did not have to be! Perhaps delete “controversial.” Or “Niagara” if “Falls” is a city’s nickname. “yrs“? Really? Oh, be still, my prescriptivist heart.

So I harrumphed as only a tenured professor can and called Charles to detail the errors of his ways. I’m sure he’s still smarting from the sting of my AP Stylebook whip.

But after reflection, I think I was wrong, and Charles was right.

Did I recognize “fel. chgs.” as “felony charges“? Yes. Did I recognize “yrs” as “years“? Yes. Did I have sufficient understanding of the context of the story to challenge his decision to use “controversial“? No. Did Charles’ tweet adequately communicate meaning? Yes.

Newsmen and women these days use Twitter as one more means to promote their work. Charles even tweets about his colleagues’ stories. Filing on Twitter is another piece added to the backbreaking workload in a newsroom diminishing in staff size. A tweet is necessarily an act of haste. But as Charles does more of it, he will become more efficient. Journalists these days must take on the added task of promoting their work and “establishing their brand” (a phrase that still makes me feel icky, even though I’ve been doing it for six years).

In the coming semesters, I’ll be requiring my students to post their work and promote it — using Twitter among other avenues. I’m going to have to walk a fine line between my inherent prescriptivism and their invention of a language designed to fit a small space.

But I’ll tell them this: Writing a tweet is nothing more than writing to fit, something journalists have done for generations. A tweet is about 22 to 25 words, less if a tiny URL is used. After all, I require them to write headlines of between six and nine words. That, too, is writing to fit. Both are condensed versions of stories that may be several hundred words in length.

So I will see, and perhaps grudgingly accept, what has been anathema to me for my entire professional career — breaking AP style, overlooking punctuation requirements for errant comma splices, and words missing letters. (Another former student, knowing how much I value “omit needless words,” sent me a mug with this legend: “Omt ndlss vwls.” Guess I’d better get used to it.)

But there’s one line they better not cross: I will not allow anyone to drive the last nail into the coffin for the apostrophe. I better not see “its” instead of “it’s.” And I don’t want to hear “my thumbs are too big” as an excuse.

I will probably harrumph less, but I will harrumph nonetheless when I see too many prescriptivist lines crossed.

Meaning matters. Clarity matters. They can tweet “fel. chgs.” if they wish, but it better be crystal clear in the context of the tweet. Too little regard for prescriptivism may leave their tweets less than credible, and their reputations as content creators less than competent.

Two flimsy gray walls, three filing cabinets and one rarely used dry-erase board make up the landscape of my work cubicle. My mind travels often to places I have been and those I long to see, yet this is the daily scenery starving my adventurous soul.

I used to love my job. That was before it became three positions in one.

Since corporations began laying off millions during the economic crisis several years ago, there’s a phrase that’s became all-too-common. Somebody complains about work. Somebody else replies that, “At least you have a job.” We can all use a silver lining on our dark days, but after awhile these six words lose their power to console.

Five days a week, we drag ourselves into the cube farm, into temporary, makeshift work spaces, many of us banging our fists against our internal walls in hopes that someday it will end. One recent study shows that 82 percent of Americans are dissatisfied with their current jobs. Harvard Business School puts the number at a 23-year low. This, I would say, is a problem.

We often compromise happiness for the sake of keeping a stable job, the promise of a pay raise and a well-deserved promotion up the corporate ladder. But what is that all worth when our sanity is in jeopardy? For many, it means a place to live, money for food and insurance for yearly doctor’s visits. But in my three years with the same organization, I’ve received a one percent raise, a position title decrease (in other words, a demotion) and a tripling of my responsibilities. The result of staying at my job: countless days of stress and an platinum membership in the 82 Percent Dissatisfaction Club.

Corporations have many of their employees cornered. Managers keep piling on more work, knowing that their employees have little choice but to take it in stride. These employees were the lucky ones who survived several rounds of layoffs, after all. But I question how many managers have shifted their focus toward stabilizing (or improving) employee morale. In my organization, concerns about morale were like the weather: everybody talked about it but nobody did anything about it. It appears my colleagues and I were not alone. According to BusinessNewsDaily.com, 84 percent of Americans plan to look for new jobs in 2011. We may be stuck in a corner, but we’re not happy being there.

The problem is that those fortunate enough to be offered new positions end up facing similar problems in their new companies – little training, increased responsibility and pressure to meet the same expectations as their predecessors. As a result, researchers predict this same 84 percent searching for new jobs will either remain in their current positions or wind up equally unhappy in their new ones.

We graduated college with the promise that hard work would bring us success. As it turned out, many of us battled several rounds of corporate layoffs by the time we reached 25. Now, those of us holding steady jobs sit in our file-piled cubicles hoping something more glamorous will come along.

My plan? Hide in grad school for the next two years, rack up college loans and jump back into this world with my eyes closed once someone hands me a diploma.

_____

Sara Maurer lives too nomadic a life to put much about her location or career in writing. Since graduating St. Bonaventure University in 2006, her priorities have included travel, meeting new people and learning the ways of the world firsthand. Raised in Western New York, she has lived in Italy, Orlando, Denver, Chicago and New Orleans.

She spends most of her days wondering why people are a certain way and pondering the meaning of life’s seemingly random occurrences. She has a deep passion for helping those less fortunate and believes in the power of paying it forward. She sees communication as fundamental to life as chocolate and guacamole and combines social media with her louder-than-necessary voice to bring people and ideas together.

Sara is on track to receive her Masters in International Social Work from Tulane University. Mildly obsessed with culture, diversity, relationships and finding her role in creating world peace, she finds the most insightful conversations are often struck up with strangers in airports, public buses and bars. Most of her writing aims to reach the fellow lost souls of Generation Y and includes, but is not limited to, reflections of world issues, travel, relationships and maintaining sanity while growing up.

She does not eat animals, never leaves home without a camera and loves Nutella (really, she centered an entire blog post around the Italian staple). In 2007, she went skydiving over the Rocky Mountains in Boulder, Colorado and her parachute did not open, subsequently requiring the use of a “back-up” parachute. This circumstance sums up the story of her life, as she often thinks of a back up plan for the initial plan that never goes as planned while she’s already spiraling into the abyss.

All of us do that at one time or another, claim personality traits that are 180 degrees from reality. Maybe we lie to convince ourselves. Or maybe we’re trying to deflect anticipated criticism. If I say I am an idiot before you can say it, then somehow it takes the sting out of it.  “You can’t fire me. I quit” sort of thing.

It’s no coincidence that the best-selling Christian fiction series is called Left Behind.  Christians, and particularly the small town conservative Christians collectively known as “the base,” are being left behind in every sense of the word—culturally, societally, demographically, technologically, economically, and politically.  So of course, they say, “No, I’m not the one being left behind. You’re the one being left behind.”

That they are being left behind is unassailable. They’re being left behind in terms of demographic relevance. A hundred years ago, 90% of the population worked on farms and lived in small communities. Now farm employment is 0.5%. The U.S. is increasingly a nation of dark skinned people of non-European descent.  They’re being left behind economically as the wealth gaps between the middle class and the upper class and the small town and urban dwellers grows.

They are being left behind culturally, for example as America moves away from formal Christianity. About 20% of Americans now attend church regularly.  And while many Americans consider themselves “spiritual,” increasingly we are shopping from the spiritual supermarket, and not just the Christianity aisle. There are hundreds of recognized religions in America, and we have become de facto polytheistic, e.g., the local YMCA offering classes in yoga. Last week a major Sunday morning show treated the nonsense of reincarnation with a straight face. Perhaps there was a time when a Christian nation might have been outraged. Now it’s not worth a shrug.

Even the dominant shows on TV no longer portray the stable nuclear wholesome small town Christian family (always a myth, demographically, by the way.) Ozzie and Harriett and Leave it Beaver are gone, and TV now celebrates a very different reality, like Two and a Half Men. To the extent the base is portrayed in the media, it is to be ridiculed and mocked, e.g., My Name is Earl, Married with Children, The Simpsons, Family Guy, etc.

Even more poignantly, they are being left behind physically as their children emigrate to urban areas. In a different era, those kids would have stayed home in Kansas and taken care of their parents.  Now, the children give them a cell phone with an unlimited calling plan, a quick hug, jump in the Focus, and get on the interstate for L.A., Chicago or Dallas as fast as they can.

For those Obama notoriously, but accurately, portrayed as “clingers,” these are desperate times. In the book, What’s the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank argued that by supporting Republicans, Kansans vote against their own economic self interest in return for promises to turn back the social clock. Frank’s conclusion was that Kansans are being duped by the economic elite because the Republicans never deliver on the social agenda they promise—repealing abortion, school prayer, immigration, etc.

I do think that’s’ why Kansans vote Republican. I don’t think they are fools or dupes.  They are correct not to worry about economics. Any economic gains for them will be tweaks. The agrarian-centric economy that made small towns prosperous isn’t coming back. (Nor is the Southern version based on involuntary servitude.) That way of life was doomed by a shifting of economic tectonic plates. Technology is going to continue to move those plates. Local farms producing local food for local craftsmen who build local furniture sold in local stores just is no longer a viable economic model, and hasn’t been since the railroad came through. Why bother to vote for economic tweaks?

Deep in their hearts, the base probably also knows their social system isn’t coming back either. They know their son’s roommate isn’t really a roommate and he’s not moving back home to take care of them.  No one is going to move back to small towns, no matter how many feed stores on the square get converted to cafes. And those back pews in the church will never be filled again. Even with 160 channels on the satellite, given the choice, no one really wants to live in stagnant, boring, narrow-minded small towns.  It’s over, and they’re left behind.

What the Republican elite is offering is token agreement.  When the base says, “We’re not the ones being left behind,” the Republicans don’t laugh, like we uber-logical progressives do, but nod and lie soothingly, “Absolutely. We’re coming back to get you. How about some more of that iced tea?” (And of course, it doesn’t cost the Republican elite anything to say that because they live in West Palm, Boston, Phoenix, New York or D.C. with their third wives and a well-stocked bar.)  It’s not much, but these folks are desperate. It’s something.

Soon Republicans will hit the trail in Iowa and sit across the table from the base and promise them they will roll back the clock to a God-fearing nation of white people who live in small towns and never drop the f-bomb. They’re lying through their fucking teeth. And the people across the table know it. But then, if they don’t call the Republican candidates on that lie, then the Republicans promise not to call them on theirs.

After some reflection, I think it comes down to a couple of issues. The first one, I admit right up front, is objectively unfair of me, but there is a part of me that associates Americana with the Baby Boomers, and in particular sees it as a late, faint attempt by the post-Reagan iteration of the cohort to recapture lost authenticity. When you look at the history of Boomer music culture, you start in the mid-’60s – maybe you talk about The Beach Boys, but things well and truly catch fire when four lads from Liverpool step off a plane at JFK. The British Invasion was both transcendent and ridiculous, depending on whether you were listening to The Fabs/Stones/Kinks/Who or lesser coattail surfers like Herman’s Hermits and Gerry & the Pacemakers, but we tend to remember the amazing, and for good reason.

Then you had various American responses to the Invasion, most of them centered on the Bay Area (Airplane, Dead, etc.) and LA (The Byrds and Buffalo Springfield). These were remarkable days, and we know the mythology of the next few years by heart, don’t we? Remember these bands, because we’ll be back to them shortly.

After Altamont, things went really bad for the Boom and its music. Progressive was by and large a retreat into psudo-intellectual rationalism, I’m still not over Disco, and the redemptive Punk/New Wave backlash is something I’m always going to see as distinctly Generation X (arising, as it did, when front-edge Xers like me were in high school). The Boom, which gave us the most idealistic moments of my lifetime, had given up and lapsed into cocooning, multi-level marketing, boxy-assed Volvos and Baby-on-Board Garfields. Two of the greatest journalists of their era tore them apart: Hunter Thompson called them A Generation of Swine and Tom Wolfe had a field day in Bonfire of the Vanities.

Hey, I said I was being unfair, didn’t I?

When you look at Americana today, you see a body of music that draws from all kinds of roots – rock, blues, country, folk, gospel – and in so many ways it winds up feeling like the natural heir, albeit 40 years removed, to the California sounds of the ’60s, doesn’t it? Can you imagine Americana existing, in anything like its current form, without the Springfield? And this is not a bad thing, by any stretch.

Still, from where I sit, all of this adds up to music that feels like somebody else’s experience. When Lucinda Williams or Ryan Adams are playing, I feel like I’ve wandered into the wrong building by mistake, like I really, really don’t belong. (Although I can’t lie – I loved the Mark Knopfler/Emmylou Harris collab and while I didn’t spin the Robert Plant/Alison Krause disc a lot, I bought it and respect the hell out it.)

Of course, I know that a lot of the important artists in Americana are, in fact, Gen Xers like me (heck, Ryan Adams was born in 1974, which was smack-ass in the middle of Gen X). And there are probably holes in my Brit Invasion/California reaction/Disco narrative big enough to drive a tour bus through. I know this, I accept it, and I’ll be fine if people use the comment thread to correct my revisionism.

The second issue is a little cleaner. Western history is defined, in part, by a tension between rural and urban that goes back at least to the Bible (Garden of Eden vs. New Jerusalem and on through Enlightenment vs. Romanticism, etc.). Americana is music that strives for the natural, whereas I have always been more a creature of the technological. But that’s just me.

Lately, though, I find myself wondering if there’s an alternate thread, perhaps a New Wave of Americana, that hasn’t been identified as such. The artists that got me to thinking about this are The Blueflowers, a Detroit-based band that reminds me of absolutely nobody I’ve ever heard from Detroit. Before we go any further, let’s pause and watch the video for “The Lovely Ones” from their marvelous new CD, In Line with the Broken-Hearted.

Click here to view the embedded video.

The Blueflowers market themselves using the Americana label, as in this bit for their 2009 debut CD: “a cinematic mélange of alt-country, gothic Americana, 1960’s psychedelia, and indie pop.” Which I suppose is fair, but I had listened to the new CD 10-15 times without the word “Americana” once occurring to me. So I dropped guitarist/songwriter Tony Hamera (who I’d been introduced to by The Lost Patrol’s manager, Ed Colavito) a note asking about the categorization. Here’s what he had to say:

The only reason I give us the generic label of ‘Americana’ is because I really don’t think any of the more specific genre descriptions fit us – we have elements of country, surf, garage rock, psychedelic rock, etc., but none of those in and of themselves fit our style exclusively, so I just went with ‘Americana.’ The bands that influence me the most tend to be the bands of the mid-late 60′s ie The Walker Brothers, The Zombies, The Turtles, The Shangri-La’s, Roy Orbison, etc. combined with the ‘newer’ alt-country/Americana artists like Neko Case, Mazzy Star, Nick Cave, Tarnation, etc…

So there you have it – Americana as a sort of catch-all driven by the need to market yourself in terms people recognize. Except…except that The Blueflowers have a lot in common with The Lost Patrol (and if you’ve paid any attention at all you know how much I respect what they’re doing). And then there’s Munly, whose insanely dark Petr & the Wulf was one of my co-CDs of the Year for 2010. And Munly is also a key piece of Slim Cessna’s Auto Club, the iconic expression of the alt-Western Denver Sound. And what about the rootsy left-hand turn out of Neo-Soul that Nicole Atkins takes in her latest, Mondo Amore? (And for that matter, what about that far broader Neo-Soul context provided by Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings and She & Him?) Hmmm….

All of these bands are producing music that’s born of uniquely American roots – by and large the same roots we associate with all Americana, in fact – and yet they seem not to be associated with what we think of as the Americana mainline. Many of them do, however, remind me of that “alternate thread” I mentioned above. If we think back to the early 1980s, one the  greatest bands in American history was taking form in Athens, and that band, REM, owed a great deal to the California bands I noted earlier. Have a look at the “influences” section in their AllMusic entry: The Byrds, Gram Parsons, Buffalo Springfield.

REM cultivated a sound that was grounded not just in the American, but in the gothic, the music of the American underbelly. Minor chords and oppressive humidity, the downbeat haunt of the underclasses, vistas that manage panoramic sweep and intimate ennui all at once, tent revivals and the antebellum. REM’s sound was beautiful, but it wasn’t uplifting (not until “Shiny Happy People” came along, anyway, and that was mainly to see if we were paying attention).

Maybe I’m reaching, but it seems to me that there’s an intimation of an Americana New Wave under way, and this movement is distinctly at odds with the thoroughly-commodified mainstream in just about every way imaginable. My guess is that there are a lot of other artists I could stir into the soup, as well.

Time will tell whether or not I’m imagining things, but for the moment I’m enjoying the resonance and texture these bands represent, whether we’re talking about the gritty medicine-show naturalism of Munly and Slim Cessna or the cinematic majesty of the Lost Patrol/Blueflowers double feature.

Let’s leave you with another one from The Blueflowers. Hope you enjoy it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

First, American troops raided Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and killed al Qaeda’s leader.

And today is the 50th anniversary of America’s first manned space flight. On May 5th, 1961, Alan Shepard lifted off from  Cape Canaveral for a 15 minute flight that got America on the board against the hated Soviets, whose hero Yuri Gagarin had not only already flown in space but had orbited the earth some weeks earlier.

While Shepard’s flight was only a jog compared to Gagarin’s, it had plenty of drama. The US was trailing the Soviets in rocket technology and the previous two launches (one with a dummy astronaut) had gone off course and subsequently  had to  be destroyed.  No one at NASA could say for certain that Shepard might not go the way of his mannequin predecessor.

In fact, Shepard’s flight was delayed three days as NASA technicians tried to solve potential flight problems.

Finally, on the morning of May 5, Shepard was strapped into the Mercury 7 capsule and sat through hours of delays – delays so long that he ended up urinating in his space suit. After one last delay was mentioned, Shepard, known both for icy cool and a wild side (he drove a Corvette and had a reputation as a party animal), spat out those famous words as only a military officer could: “Why don’t you fix your little problem and light this candle?”

The techs resumed the countdown and America soon had its first astronaut hero.

Shepard went on to parlay his “first American in space” status into millions of dollars in earnings.

But even cooler, he’s also the first guy ever to do this:

Click here to view the embedded video.

by Tom Shortell

I was scrawny, zit-faced sophomore sitting in Spanish 2 Honors when Principal Abatemarco informed my high school what had happened in Lower Manhattan the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. The school is a 50-mile drive from where the towers stood, and everyone knew someone that never came home that day. My hometown of Middletown, NJ lost 37 people in the attacks, the highest amount of any city outside of New York.

In the coming months and years, I watched as thousands of young men and women died in a war of retaliation, and thousands more died in a war that was loosely tied to it by some political leaders.

I floundered as the nation debated whether the cost of potential safety was worth the definite loss of civil rights.

I cringed as the national dialogue grew increasingly vitriolic once the kumbaya moment passed.

Lastly, I realized America was turning the great amount of international support into fear, contempt and frustration.

This was the national background as I transitioned from a child to an adult, and I honestly can’t think of a better metaphor. There’s not much more destabilizing than going from a teenager who thinks he’s finally figured out the important stuff to questioning what was important in the first place. For every relationship that ended badly, there was a PATRIOT Act. For every awkward high school prom, there was an uncomfortable Abu Graib to match. For every moment of self doubt, there was another soldier not much older than me dying in a desert halfway across the globe.

I don’t say this to make light of tortured prisoners. I don’t mean to demean the tremendous sacrifice of soldiers or the loved ones they left behind, either. I simply identify with the struggle to find one’s identity.

The United States, I was told growing up, were the good guys. We re-established democracy through the American Revolution. We put an end to the Nazi genocide in Europe. The Cold War (of which I have only vague memories) proved we were on the winning side of history. Sure, no one liked to talk about Vietnam, but our intentions were noble, I was assured.

From what I could see on the news, however, America wasn’t wearing the white hats. We were making shady deals with warlords and tyrants to track down a madman somewhere in a country most of my classmates couldn’t find on a map. We were locking up people in prison without seriously considering their guilt. When our allies questioned our ways, we renamed french fries to make a point.

Perhaps I’m naively projecting my own personal struggles of growing up onto a country turned upside-down by the worst day in American history. After seeing the reactions of adults coping to understand the same things, though, I don’t think I’m far off.

Tonight, I am a 25-year-old man sitting in my apartment wondering how much later I should stay up watching the news with work tomorrow. Unlike the people on television and the college students blasting Lee Greenwood from their cars outside, I’m not in a celebratory mood. I cannot find joy in the death of one man, not with the mountain bodies left behind in the last 10 years and the two, maybe three, wars still ahead.

That, I suppose, is a sign of maturity.

Tom Shortell is a New Jersey expatriate working as a reporter in Pennsylvania. He will gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

Forgive me for abstracting and oversimplifying a bit, but one might argue that American politics breaks along the following 10 lines:

• Social Conservatives
• Neocons
• Business Conservatives
• Traditional Conservatives (there’s probably a better term, but I’m thinking of old-line Western land and water rights types)
• Blue Dog Democrats
• New Democrats
• Progressives
• Libertarians: True
• Libertarians: American (Tea Party)
• Greens

There are points of overlap, obviously. In a pure parliamentary environment, these might hypothetically be ten distinct parties, or at least four or five. SocCons are defined by a fairly unitary range of religious concerns, and while they can easily make common cause with certain groups, economic issues are peripheral to their raison d’etre. Neocons and Business Conservatives (Country Club Cons) seem to overlap quite a bit and they appear to get on well with TradCons. The New Dems are functionally indistinguishable from Business Conservatives at this point in history, and the Blue Dogs might be thought of as New Dems with a healthy streak of SocCon running through them. There aren’t enough True Libertarians to shake a stick at, but the perspective is viable enough to be counted here. The American Libertarian/Tea Party is a strange brew driven by radical, race-inflected anti-tax and anti-government ideology. It has been heavily funded by BizCons, draws heavily on a bastardized understanding of the writings of Ayn Rand, and should never be confused with true Libertarianism.

Serious Progressives and Greens can be hard to tell apart – many Greens seem to be people who have given up on the utility of the Democratic party, and their official platform reads a lot like any strongly progressive mission.

If you’re familiar with the Political Compass, we might use that framework to express these positions graphically:

These ten different parties, such as they are, have to cram themselves into a two-party system, and the result usually shakes out this way:

• Republicans: Social, Business, Neo and TradCons, Libs and Tea Party
• Democrats: Blue Dogs, New Dems, Progressives and Greens

However, when it comes time to pass laws, order frequently break down. During the Bush years we saw a lot of Blue Dog and New Dem cooperation with the GOP, and under Obama we’re seeing the continued dominance of that “center/right” coalition, a practical result that frustrates progressives, especially in light of all kinds of polling showing that once you set aside labels and ask people to focus on what sorts of outcomes they believe in, the American public is far more supportive of progressive policies than is commonly understood.

The American Parliament

If we moved to a proportional parliamentary system (no, we’re not going to, not in a million years, but hypothetically) and shifted the coalition building process to the governing phase instead of the campaign/electoral phase, we might initially see the 10 hypothetical parties coalescing into a shape that looks something like this:

• Social Conservatives – significant enough numbers to go it as a distinct entity that can demand concessions on its core issues from all constituencies except the Progressives.
• NeoLiberal – the grand coalition of wealth-minded conservatives, New Dems and Blue Dogs, plus the Tea Party.
• Progressives – Progs plus Greens now have enough stroke to exert viable leverage on the legislative process.
• Libertarians – May choose to ignore social libertarianism completely and join Neos, but could decide to go it alone or to forge something with TradCons.

Over time, we might expect a shift to take place. We know some things about the American public. For instance:

• The backbone of the social reactionary segment of the population (specifically, SocCons and Tea Party) is aging and…
• the huge Millennial generation rejects race-based and anti-gay politics completely.
• The Mills are more concerned with social justice than any generation alive.
• Immigration and demographic patterns are shifting dramatically, and within a few decades whites will no longer comprise a majority of the nation’s population. The largest gains are being made by Latinos.
• The current trend toward concentration of wealth in a few hands will eventually reach an inflection point. Either policies will be enacted to disperse the wealth or, if history teaches us anything, broad economic distress will lead to a social explosion. Put simply, the trend of the last two generations toward concentration of wealth isn’t sustainable.

If these trends hold, we might expect, over the course of the next couple of decades, a distinct slide to the left. This adjustment would remove the NeoLiberal coalition’s right flank and could very well see the emergence of a new American coalition that looks and behaves a great deal like European Social Democracy. Since America is also overwhelmingly Christian, the leftward shift of religious institutions driven by the die-off of older SocCons and the Millennials’ concern for social justice might also spur the rise of an American analogue to Christian Democracy – an eventuality that would almost certainly be fueled by the increased impact of Latino voters, who are (for the time being, anyway) more progressive economically but driven by Catholic social mores.

Back to Reality

So many ifs, so many variables, and all of it predicated on an assumption of magic-wand proportional representation. As I said off the top, a thought experiment. Still, even if you set the governmental structure aside, the social, economic and political dynamics on which the preceding section is premised are very real. The rest of the world has seen similar coalitions and constituencies arise in both proportional and pluralist systems, and there’s no reason to believe that it couldn’t happen here.

The kicker, of course, is a lesson that European history teaches in painful detail: to wit, the road to a more productive democracy sometimes has to navigate hellish terrain, and there are those in the US who believe that it’s going to get really, really dark before dawn.

Perhaps. At a minimum, though, it never hurts to note where we are, to dream about where we want to go, and to plan meticulously for the journey.

The late Richard Pryor, often hailed as the greatest comic to ever take the stage, is the American Chaucer. A master storyteller in the grand tradition of West African griots, fired by passion and pain, possessed of keen insight, he was also a brilliant impersonator with amazing range, an intuitive actor who never got his due, a social critic, a writer, a folklorist, a philosopher, and, most importantly, one funny motherfucker…

[On being severely burned] “I got to the hospital—You can really tell when you’re fucked up, when the doctor goes, ‘AAAUGH! Holy shit! Why don’t we just get some cole slaw and serve this up, whattaya say?’” – Richard Pryor, ‘Live on the Sunset Strip’

Bill Cosby, Buddy Hackett and other comedy legends were renowned raconteurs, but Pryor was without parallel. In addition to his own humorous observations, cheeky sex talk and ingratiating self-deprecation, Pryor would often perform as a host of characters in continuous, nuanced dialogue, sensitive to the humanity of the souls he portrayed even while gleefully sending them up. He relished dialects, slang, cadence, street parlance, foreign accents… Pryor adored the music of language, especially in the guise of his alter ego Mudbone, whereas Pryor’s contemporary George Carlin savored the meaning of words. They complemented each other, a duopoly of comedic brilliance that reigned supreme for decades. Pryor in particular spawned legions of copycats and imitators, including a young Eddie Murphy, who in his earliest gigs would perform Pryor’s material verbatim and call it a tribute. But no one could match Pryor’s boundless wit, liberating raunchiness, and gift for connecting with the audience.

“To fully appreciate the power of Richard Pryor as a stand-up comedian, you had to follow him at the Comedy Store. I did once, and I’m lucky to be alive.” – David Letterman

Pryor was brave, too. He regularly poked fun at his own impulsive libido and temperamental persona with an unprecedented frankness, earning him deep adulation among his fellow comics as well as the devotion of women spellbound by his charismatic vulnerability. He made light of his troubles and his contradictions, exposed his pains and fears, made it okay to laugh at how hopelessly human we all are. He rarely wasted a line; no matter what he said on the stage, whether in packed clubs or sold-out arenas, there was typically a larger point to the punchline, whether to lay bare an injustice, bind us with our myriad commonalities, or even find redemption in a reflective moment.

“Richard had that thing where he could make you laugh so hard and then all of a sudden he’d break your heart.” – Robert Townsend

Times have changed since Pryor’s prime. Some say the 1970′s was a wasted decade, full of garishness, scandal and pollution. Yet heroes, icons, agents of real and lasting change, smashers of stereotypes, molders of youthful opinion, abounded: Muhammad Ali. Bruce Lee. Billie Jean King. Shirley Chisholm. Harvey Milk. Daniel Ellsberg. Gloria Steinem. César Chávez. Ralph Nader. John Denver. Carl Sagan. George Carlin. And Richard Pryor… a skinny kid from the backstreets of Peoria who lived out the American dream by parlaying his considerable talents into superstardom, and who played a part in the nation’s social progress that still has yet to be fully understood or appreciated.

Perhaps inevitably, in the ever-changing American big picture, Pryor’s image has begun to fade; history will likely render him obscure, his life story shrouded and much of his humor made anachronistic by the passage of time. But his enormous influence will reverberate among the people, as would that of any great storyteller down through the ages, for as long as America exists.

“I was leaving [Africa], and I was sitting in a hotel, and a voice said to me, said, ‘Look around, what do you see?’ And I said, ‘I see all colors of people doing everything, you know?’ And the voice said, ‘Do you see any niggers?’ And I said, ‘No.’ It said, ‘You know why? Cause there aren’t any.’ And it hit me like a shot! Man, I started crying and shit, I was sittin’ there, I said, ‘Yeah, I’ve been here three weeks, I haven’t even said it. I haven’t even thought it!’ And it made me say, ‘Oh my God, I’ve been wrong. I’ve been wrong, I got to re-group my shit.’ I mean, I said, ‘I ain’t gonna never call another black man ‘nigger.’” – Richard Pryor, ‘Live on the Sunset Strip’

And I admit it – I have my own cynical streak, and sometimes it threatens to take over completely. Like so many of my fellow Xers, I can be quite snarky. Snark has its place, I suppose, but I detest people and artists who don’t have anything else. What does it say when I can despise you even when you’re right?

Which brings me to a band I hate. If you’re looking for a band that sums up everything that’s wrong with m-m-m-my generation, here they are, in all their sneering, self-superior, all-bitch-and-no-solutions glory.

Click here to view the embedded video.

But the astronauts themselves were rock stars – before there were rock stars. They were real, live American heroes – and while I and many of my generation found ourselves torn between widely varying (although not so different, we now know) heroic types, no one doubted the courage – sometimes tragically expressed – of our space explorers. We lost  some of our guys (including my personal favorite, Gus Grissom) – but we had to beat the Russians. If they took over space, life as we knew it would be over. Over….

And they had the first space hero – Yuri Gagarin.

Now, NPR blogger Robert Krulwich offers a fascinating look into the madness that drove the Russians in their competition to conquer space ahead of us – and of the high price some Russian heroes paid. Krulwich relates this tragedy from the new book Starman: The Untold Story of Yuri Gagarin which recounts the story of Vladimir Komarov, a Russian astronaut assigned to fly a mission doomed to failure – and of his friend, the aforementioned hero of the Soviet space program Gagarin, who tried to save him – and perhaps paid with his own life for the anger he felt and expressed to Leonid Brezhnev after his friend was needlessly sacrificed for “Realpolitik.”

Perhaps most painful to read is the description of Komarov’s final moments – his own recounting of the failure of system after system in his shoddily constructed space craft – and his railing against the Soviet engineers, space program, and government that sent him to his death.

While Krulwich doesn’t draw a line between the dots, once you read about what Gagarin did to Soviet leader Brezhnev when he met with him to discuss Komarov’s death, you’ll wonder yourself if Gagarin’s subsequent death in a plane crash was the tragic accident the Soviet media reported – or more Realpolitik.

Provocative stuff…and a look at how the Cold War played out on one of its more spectacular fronts.

Stanley’s career during the 1960s and 1970s was one that seems almost dreamlike now—maker of acid and principal sound guy for the Dead. Which meant, presumably, he spent his time on tour with the Dead, and selling acid all over the place. He did, of course, go to prison for the selling acid part of this equation. People seemed pretty pleased with the product at the time, though. Then, of course, that nasty old US government stepped in and banned its possession in 1968. What seems little remembered now is that for decades, LSD had an important role in psychiatric treatment—it was originally synthesized at the pharmaceutical firm Sandoz Laboratories in 1938, and for decades was used by shrinks for treatment of a variety of disorders. It was the drug of choice for therapy, apparently. Cary Grant stunned everyone by revealing he had taken LSD more than 60 times for treatment. Grant thought it was great. He wasn’t alone.

And this was a time when altered states seemed like a groovy idea, and the LSD experience proved to be widespread, and great copy for a media that had little sense of what was going on, other than there was something out there called the counter-culture, which no one really had a clue about. And before it got co-opted by the media and the advertising industry, it did seem like a genuine attempt to develop some alternative modes of living. There was a thriving back to the land movement for a time there. And a thriving lively investigation of “Where do we want to go and how do we want to get there?” types of questions. It’s the same spirit that gave is the transformative The Whole Earth Catalog. Surprisingly, much of this persisted well into the 1970s, particularly in the environmental movement, although without the psychedelics, of course, and the 1960s didn’t really die until the election of Ronald Reagan killed it off in 1980.

LSD died well before that, of course. The threat provided by that age old tension between control and ecstasy resulted in a predictable reaction—attempting to shut down the potential sources of ecstasy. We’ve been through this before throughout the whole of human history, since priests came along, and we’ll go through it again. This tension probably is a characteristic of human culture—as Terence McKenna has argued (in, for example, Food of the Gods), there’s ample evidence that humanity has spent much of its history in various altered states. Our survival mechanisms must indeed be pretty powerful. And what scared people in the 1960s is the same thing that always scares people about any substance that alters perceptions—loss of control. So there was the predictable response from conservative America (and Britain, to a lesser extent) to ban the substance, as if that was supposed to do any good. All it ended up doing, as Stanley feared, was degrade the quality of the merchandise, as they say, and lots of bad trips resulted.

Stanley continued to thrive, because in addition to chemicals, he knew about sound and electronics from his stint in the Air Force, and he somehow ended up as not only one of the Dead’s early financial backers, and principal substance purveyor, but also their sound guy, along with Bob Thomas. Stanley’s nickname was Bear, and there’s a Dead album titled Bear’s Choice, which are some of his favorite Dead cuts. A live album, too. The Dead, it should be said, revolutionized live music recording and performance as much as the Beatles did in the studio, and much of that was Stanley. It should also be noted that the Dead weren’t nearly as fastidious as Stanley in their ingestion of various pharmacological substances—Pig-Pen, Brent Mydland, and, of course, Jerry Garcia all managed to OD on something or other. But not Stanley’s acid. (Being a keyboardist for the Dead at times seemed to resemble being Spinal Tap’s drummer, but maybe that’s just with hindsight.)

It was quite a time, and Stanley was in the middle of it, right there in San Francisco. It gave us great music, a new journalism, The Whole Earth Catalog, Jerry Brown, hippie dresses, much better food for a time there, and a level of social concern that has not been duplicated since. That it went sour eventually was not the fault of those whose ideals, or for that matter simple playfulness, drove the period. Culture changes, and the period is now regarded with some degree of amusement, if not outright scorn, depending on your point of view. It’s scary to see how much of the Republican agenda, driven by windbags like Gingrich and Limbaugh, still embodies the culture wars of the 1960s. But they weren’t really wars at all. More like skirmishes. But it’s funny from where I sit now to discover that hippie is now a derogatory term for people who attended Grateful Dead concerts in the 1990s.

There was the real work of the civil rights movement, which was the significant achievement of the 1960s. The rest was driven by, well, what, exactly? Much of the attractiveness of what was termed the counter-culture was that it didn’t really take itself seriously. A sense of playfulness on a societal level, I suppose. Of course, that war and the draft overhung everything, so there were a sizable number of people who, given the absurdity of that event, weren’t prepared to be serious about much of anything else. Who wouldn’t want to listen to the Dead with a bunch of your friends, all wearing funny clothes, while pondering how cool it was that men were walking around on the moon or orbiting the planet, and wondering if you were going to be drafted the following week? But that time has passed, as these things tend to do. And digging out that old headband won’t bring it back, fun as it was.

“Dad? Can I have this stuffed shark?” Joey asked.

“No,” I said. “How much does it cost?”

“Only $44.95,” he said.

“Oh. Then I’ll change my answer. From no to Hell No.”

“Watch your language,” snapped Nancy. “People will think we’re Red Sox fans. Oh, look at this glass jellyfish. This is just precious. I want this, and it‘s on sale for only $69.95. Here, buy me this. Put it with in the basket with Joey’s stuffed shark. Look! Look! Fuzzy pencils and they‘re only a dollar each! Get 20 of them.”

“I could buy a real beluga whale for what I’m spending in here,” I lamented. “The problem with you guys is that you never knew Johnny Spoon.”

“Did you say you wanted some beluga spoons?” Nancy asked. “I saw some right over there.”

She wasn’t listening, but I told the story anyway.

I really didn’t know Johnny Spoon that well. He was my brother’s age, and only rarely ventured into our neighborhood. Johnny Spoon was deep. FM radio deep. He scorned the music we took for granted, (that Steppenwolf? bad). He read and understood Hermann Hesse (that Steppenwolf? good). On July 16, 1969, Johnny had made up his mind to steer his life in a new and very un-1969ish direction.

“I’ve decided to live for money,” he said. “I know that kind of raw capitalism is considered bad these days, by hippy types and such, but it seems to me the easiest way to live.”

“How do you figure?” asked Glenn.

“Well, if I live for money, then it’s easy to discern a good day from a bad day. Let’s take today. I stand here this morning with 7 cents to my name. One nickel and two pennies. Now, if at the end of the day I have more than seven cents, then I can reasonably assert that today was a good day. But if I have lost my seven cents, then anyone can see that it was a bad day. If I end the day with exactly seven cents, then I will have achieved the kind of balance that philosophers dream about. You see, we all expect some bad things to happen to us in life, but as long as those bad things are countered by some good things, we can keep going. Yes, this philosophy has an appeal to it. I only have to earn enough money for food and drink and shelter. Since I live at home, shelter‘s taken care of. Water is free, and even if it wasn‘t, what kind of idiot would pay money for water? It comes free right out of the tap. And I’m not at all hungry. Yep. Living for money. I’m surprised nobody else has thought of that.”

At that very moment, as if the universe decreed it to be so, Coach Crabtree pulled up alongside us in his beat-up pick-up truck. In the truck bed sat our two neighbors, the Miles brothers, and Wayne Ketchum.

“Hey, boys,” drawled coach Crabtree. “I need some work done on my farm. I got some wood that needs to be stacked. If you three’ll jump in, we should get it done in an hour or so. What d’ya say?”

“Sure,” said Johnny, foolishly speaking for all three of us. “See how easy my new philosophy is? Coach will certainly pay us for the honest labor we perform for him, and my current cash reserves will increase. I read something in a Shakespeare play once, about how simple men spend their days in profitable labor and their nights in Elysium. That‘s us.”

“What’s Elysium?” I asked.

“I think it’s some kind of furniture,” said Glenn. “You know, like an ottoman.”

“Oh. What’s an ottoman?”

“A kind of empire,” said Johnny.

And so we piled into the truck bed and magically became a work crew. Wayne Ketchum was overjoyed at the prospect of getting paid, since all he wanted to do was look at Coach Crabtree’s wood pile. He was funny that way. As we rode out into the country, we all made grand plans for the money we’d earn.

The wood pile was as big as a two story building, but with six of us, we made short work of it. After an hour of separating little boards from big boards, we were sweating and pleased with ourselves. Coach Crabtree saw in our industriousness an opportunity. He asked if we’d help him mend a fence or two. Johnny jumped at the prospect of more work, and we trailed behind him. After our fence repair, it was close to 3:00, and we, being city boys unaccustomed to real labor, were about played out.

“Come on, boys,” said Coach Crabtree. “I’ll let you see my cows and then we’ll call it a day. They’re just right over…Oh no! My cows are out! Boys, my cows are out. Y’all are gonna have to help me round up my cows.”

And we did. For the next eight hours, we wandered through the back country of Marshall County, Tennessee looking for cows. We didn’t know how many we were supposed to find, or whether or not the cows we herded back were in fact Coach Crabtree’s. He admitted that he had no real idea which cows were his, but since he had no intention of selling cattle with the price of beef so low, he would wait until he heard from his neighbors. Wayne Ketchum wandered away to the east, and we didn’t see him again for three days. He was eventually found by a nice Amish family, who filled him with bread and butter, then dropped him off at the city limits.

“You should see the piles of wood them Amish have,” he said. “All nice and neat. They use it to build barns.”

It was nearly midnight when Coach brought the five survivors back to the park. We were hungry, thirsty, scratched, splintered, bruised, chigger-and-tick-covered, and bone tired. I wouldn’t feel such a weariness again until boot camp, but Johnny was in high spirits.

“We worked for him for 14 hours,” he said. “If he pays us just two dollars an hour, that’s 28 bucks. I will have finished the day with a 28 dollar profit. My net worth has increased by 40,000%.”

The five of us dropped out of the truck and stood at the curb, waiting for our wages. Coach Crabtree walked around to face us and reached deep into his pocket.

“I gotta go tell the sheriff that I lost Wayne,” he said. “but let’s settle accounts first. You boys done a good day’s work today.” Johnny stretched out his right hand to accept our payment. “Go buy yourselves some eat-a-snacks.” Coach dropped six quarters into Johnny’s hand, then smiled and climbed into his truck and drove away, swallowed by the July night. We stood in his exhaust, awash in knowledge.

“What just happened here?” asked Johnny. “He gave us 6 quarters for a whole day’s work? That’s not right.”

“No it isn’t,” said Glenn. “How are we supposed to split six quarters five ways?”

“And what’s an eat-a-snack?” I asked.

“You guys don’t get it,” said Johnny. “You just don’t get it. We gave away a day of our youth for thirty cents. We have lost July 16, 1969 forever. It’s gone. He bought it from us. For thirty cents.”

“Look,” said Johnny Miles. “He’s coming back. It probably just occurred to him that he didn’t pay us enough. He’s probably coming back to give us a hundred dollar bill to split five ways.”

“Yes,” said Johnny. “That must be it. He was tired, too. He just forgot.”

The truck screeched to a stop, and Coach Crabtree ran around to us. He stood in front of Johnny, and pulled one of the six quarters from Johnny’s right hand.

“That was close,” he laughed. “That’s a 1918 quarter worth $400. I didn’t mean to give that away. ‘Night, boys.” The truck roared away again. Johnny began to tremble.

“Well, now I feel better,” said Glenn.

“Me, too,” I said. “Give me my quarter so I can go to bed.”

As we gathered our silver from his bloody hand, Johnny stood there with a shocked expression.

“Hey, look on the bright side,” I said. “You started the day with 7 cents, and now you’ve got 32 cents. By your own definition, that’s a good day.”

“No,” he muttered. “I traded something of great value for this quarter, and I got the raw deal. I think I’m just going to stand here for a while and think about things.”

He might have stood there all night, if Coach Crabtree hadn’t pulled back onto Fourth Avenue. We scattered and Johnny scattered with us. Johnny Spoon didn’t come back to the park for a long, long time. The next day I saw that the quarter I had grabbed was the 1932-D Washington quarter, worth about $60. The Dad asked me how I came to possess it, and when I told him, he laughed and laughed.

“Is that a true story?” asked Nancy.

“Mostly true,” I said. “I did change a few names, but you can ask Glenn about it. Just don’t tell him the part about the rare quarter. He doesn’t need to know that.”

“If you were to find that quarter, you could sell it and send Johnny Spoon his share.”

“Nah,“ I replied. “He was better off with the hard-earned knowledge than he would have been with the money. Besides, Johnny didn’t care about money so much after that day. I think he learned all he needed to know about money on July 16, 1969. You know, if there had been more Coach Crabtrees 40 years ago, we’d live in a different world. But the Crabtrees don’t coach anymore. Now, they get elected governor of Wisconsin, and expect folks to be grateful just to have a job. ‘Here, take this loose change and be happy, you ingrates.‘ Poor Wisconsin. Poor all of us.”

“You should have returned that rare quarter to Coach Crabtree,” said Nancy. “That’s probably what he came back for.”

“Oh, no doubt,” I said. “But it seemed right for me to keep the quarter, even though I have since lost it. Johnny was right. There has to be some balance to the universe, especially when we’re the ones left holding the scales.”