My friend, like me, married young – at least by today’s standards. We are in our late forties. And our generation seems to be one in which women are making this decision in droves, turning the old stereotype of the male midlife crisis on its head, leaving behind hurt and often clueless husbands who are incredulous that this is happening to them.

It didn’t strike me till recently that eight of the ten divorces I’ve been aware of among my circle of friends and colleagues in the last five years have been initiated by women. In every case, these have been women with children who have been devoted to their families for years. None is wealthy, none is leaving on a caprice after which they reinvent themselves with cosmetic surgery and a convertible. And none is a pop-culture cougar, pursuing her own youth via a younger man in a new version of the classic life upheaval.

For all these women, divorce means that comfortable family homes in which they have lived for decades have to be sold, the material accoutrements of lives pruned and retooled to cram into an apartment with a daunting monthly rent. Many are struggling to bring old resumes into the 21st century digital job-seeker realm. Some have prepped in advance for this day, already lining up a couple of low-paying jobs – front office at their kids’ school, piano accompanist for the school choir – before taking the plunge.

Child custody is negotiated, usually jointly, and kids start shuttling back and forth between mom’s and dad’s new residences. And for the majority of these women who have not left their marriages for someone else, most will be facing singlehood as they approach or enter their fifties. There is the online dating realm to wade into some months later, with a steady stream of not-quite-right E-Harmony candidates to fit in dates with around the kids’ soccer games and prom dates and SAT tutoring sessions.

It’s not a very romantic picture.

Granted, while the situations I am pondering are anecdotal and each is distinct, I’ve done enough casual research since my surprising ‘discovery’ to identify a trend. It’s not just here in my Boulder, Colorado bubble that midlife women are the ones choosing to upend and move on.

Several years ago AARP magazine reported that the number of people ending marriages after 50 is increasing. Two-thirds of those divorces are requested by women. And, the article notes, while women do the walking, men don’t see it coming.

In 2008, Oprah.com ran an essay by Ellen Tien called “Confessions of a Semi-Happy Wife,” in which the author suggests her “Mid-Wife Crisis” is that of Everywoman stuck in a “thumpingly ordinary” marriage who yearns for freedom, novelty and alone time.

In “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off,” Sandra Tsing Loh wrote in The Atlantic last summer of ending her 20-year marriage, garnering criticism for universalizing what some saw as a selfish, petty move to jettison a good guy (and dad). Yet she seems to speak for many women who look ahead to a second half of life in which they no longer wish to settle for tedium and mediocrity, even if it means venturing into a vast, unknown sea tossed with some frightening gales.

I remember asking my grandmother, as part of a college oral-history project, how it was that she and my grandpa had managed to stay married for 47 years, and her best friend across the street for nearly 50, when each had at least one child who had divorced.

“I don’t suppose we thought we had a choice,” she replied, matter-of-factly.

That’s clearly not the case today.  So what is going on?

I have a theory.

I call it the gender-generation gap. Here’s what happens: you start with a woman who’s a Gen-Xer or at the tail-end of the Boomers, who came of age in a rather heady era in which she imbibed feminist visions of possibility trumpeted by her predecessors, women who had burned bras and pushed ceilings, lobbied for daycare and flextime, hashed out a new vocabulary in which ‘head of household’ and ‘housewife’ were swapped for visions of ‘co-equal’ partnership.

The young men they married in the 1980s, however, weren’t reading advice for career girls or ‘how to have it all’ in Glamour magazine, let alone Gloria Steinem in Ms. The greater numbers of girls who had joined them in college classes was an added bonus, not a social trend to scrutinize. And when they went home on weekends, typically they re-entered a nest in which their needs were cared for by a traditional mom who fed them, kept them in new clothes, did their laundry and probably made their beds.

What we are seeing some 20 or 30 years later, I think, is a glaring gap in gendered expectations of what marriage would – and should – be.  The men who are husbands in their 40s and 50s today — despite being a decade into the 21st century, despite feminism existing in the minds of their children as a history-book relic, despite taken-for-granted rhetoric of equality – are grappling with a world framed by legions of June Cleaver moms – or at least Carol Brady — yet shared with wives who thought they’d be Claire Huxtable.

And when these wives realized, rather quickly after the kids came along, that TV show images were just that, most seemed to resign, buckle down, and get on with the task of getting babies raised and keeping a family in order. All that partnership stuff they expected? Even the best-intentioned husbands seemed to be good at “helping,” for which they are commended by their wives’ more traditional female friends, suggesting they not be taken for granted. These husbands were, after all, a good step more progressive than Ward Cleaver.

But 25 years down the track, it doesn’t seem to be enough. One thing these divorcing women friends of mine have in common is years spent begging their husbands for help in improving things. To listen to them. To divide duties and manage details. To summon empathy. To support their goals and passions. To take them seriously.

In virtually every case I’ve observed, when a woman finally files for divorce she believes she has exhausted all other possibilities for a life of meaning and satisfaction. By this point, her desire to save her marriage is over. She’s already moved on, when her husband is at long last just waking up, slammed out of inertia by this utterly unexpected step – even when she’s raised or threatened it before.

“I want a divorce” falls on male ears as inscrutably as if she had been speaking Estonian or Swahili.

Tien, who like Loh has reaped plenty of criticism for seeming to advocate leaving perfectly good, well-intended husbands, has this to say:

As one girlfriend remarked, it’s the age of rage — a period of high irritation that lasts roughly one to two decades. As a colleague e-mailed me, it’s the simmering underbelly of resentment, the 600-pound mosquito in the room…

In the beginning, we felt obliged to join the race to have it all; being married was an integral part of the contest and heaven forbid we should be disqualified. Flash-forward to 10 years later, when we discover that we can get it all but whose harebrained scheme was this anyway? We can get jobs, get pregnant, get it done. We can try — with varying levels of success — to get sleep, get fit, get control, and get those important Me-moments where one keeps a journal with thought-provoking lists that go ‘I’m a woman first, a mother second, a laundress third.’ We get upset, we get over it. What we don’t always get is: Why.

Conventional wisdom decrees that marriage takes work, but it doesn’t take work, it is work. It’s a job — intermittently fulfilling and annoying, with not enough vacation days. Divorce is a job too (with even fewer vacation days). It’s a matter of weighing your options.

For more and more women, it seems the option of chucking the drudgery of ‘tried and true’ for untried potential is a risk worth taking. Life isn’t over for women at 40 or 50 anymore; as Tien remarks, “We are still visually tolerable if not downright irresistible when we’re 30 or 35 or 40. If you believe the fashion magazines — which I devoutly do — even 50- and 60-year-olds are…pretty hot tickets.”

What worries me, though, is what sort of social legacy will be left by this growing heap of crumbled marriages. There is the inevitable splitting up of holidays at multiple parents’ and stepparents’ and then grandparents’ homes (for some kids – as was my case – parents don’t stop at just one divorce). There is the financial fallout. For every divorce, you’ve got families trying to get by on half (or less) of the resources that were once there, and almost twice the energy and environmental impact generated by dividing those material essentials into two households.

One of two things has to happen, I think, for marriage to revitalize its future and become appealing to women again. Either a current generation of young people needs to get in synch with their respective expectations for gender roles in a marriage, or marriage needs to be rethought and redefined, as Loh provocatively contends, to permit more autonomy and less demand for fidelity, if we’re talking how to sustain a 60- or even 70-year commitment.

As a mother of a 15-year-old son and 11-year-old daughter, I am comfortably situated in one of those ‘stable, utilitarian’ marriages.  I worry about what lies ahead for my kids as they consider such a commitment one day. While I’d like to think my son will be a different sort of husband – a genuine partner, a true equal in all things domestic and relational – he is nonetheless being influenced by parents who fit the generalities I’ve outlined above: an aspiring, frustrated mom and a decent, hard-working, well-intentioned dad who nonetheless strives against the apron strings of his own traditional upbringing.

It distresses me that young men today still have visions of that gratifying lifestyle in which they go off to a great job and come home to a doting wife who makes their domestic realm an oasis. Researcher Barbara Kerr, who studies gender differences in gifted students, observed in a 2000 speech called Gender and Genius that most young people, even those with superior intelligence and higher goals, succumb to society’s conventional image of what constitutes achievement.

Kerr cites responses to a study she did on gifted students’ “perfect future day” fantasies, a favorite vision of what they might be doing in 10 years. I will quote her at length because the results are telling, and disconcerting:

A typical college male’s fantasy goes something like this: I wake up and get in my car — a really nice rebuilt ‘67 Mustang– and then I go to work, I think I’m some kind of a manager of a computer firm, and then I go home and when I get there, my wife is there at the door (she has a really nice figure) she has a drink for me, and she’s made a great meal. We watch TV or maybe play with the kids.’ Here is the typical college female’s fantasy: ‘I wake up and my husband and I get in our twin Jettas and I go to the law firm where I work, then after work, I go home and he’s pulling up in the driveway at the same time. We go in and have a glass of wine and we make an omelet together and eat by candlelight. Then the nanny brings the children in and we play with them till bedtime.’ What’s wrong with this picture?

Women dream of dual career bliss, while men still seem to nourish the hope that they might find a woman who wants to stay home and take care of them and the children. Despite extraordinary changes in the career expectations of women, many college men have yet to acknowledge the changes in gender roles that women’s expectations imply.

Kerr adds that “it is likely that even more men who publicly endorse equity in relationships secretly wish for a more traditional lifestyle. On the other hand, college women have as their goals romantic yet egalitarian relationships for which they have no roadmaps.” Just as their mothers did, who are now driving into a new wild blue yonder with no GPS.

How do we, as a culture, create these new roadmaps?  How do I teach my teenage son what it looks like to be a partner with women — and more importantly, to want to be?

Loh suggests we need to contemplate entirely new avenues, some that may verge into French (and other) territory in which the ideal of lifelong fidelity is put out to pasture to accommodate the vicissitudes of long relationships and the realities of day-to-day life that simply cannot sustain the romantic — and utterly unrealistic — demands we place on it.

One thing seems certain amidst all this uncertainty: now that women have a choice, marriage is going to have start adapting if it is going to survive.

J.D. Salinger is dead.

If you want to know about his lousy life or how he treated his kids or his ex-wives and girlfriends, or any of that other People Magazine crap, look somewhere else. I just don’t feel like going into it. Too many jerks spend all their time reading that shit anyway, and it’s just not worth recounting it when you could read it all at TMZ or some place like that and besides Salinger himself was pretty touchy about people talking about him and he’d probably sue from the grave. I mean, the guy sued every goddamn body who ever said boo to him for the last 50 years or so.

Some stuff just isn’t worth the trouble.

So I’ll just talk about driving to town last night….See, I was driving into town tonight after I’d read about Salinger dying and listening to satellite radio and the station played Johnny Winter’s cover of “Let It Bleed” which  somehow tied into hearing about Salinger’s death: we all need someone we can lean on. And thinking about Salinger being dead started me thinking about how Salinger would write about it. I wondered then if maybe he’d had a ball glove that he’d written snatches of poetry on so he’d have something to read during the lulls in a ball game. But then I was listening again to Winter’s cover of the song by The Rolling Stones, so that made me think of that snatch of poetry attributed to Brian Jones (and to Gertrude Stein and to many an 18th century girl’s sampler) that’s on one of the early greatest hits collections, Through the Past Darkly:

When this you see, remember me/And bear me in your mind/Let all the world say as they will/Speak of me as you find….

I like to think Salinger would like that, but I can’t say. You can’t speak for other people.

R.E.M. came on the radio next – “Driver 8″:

And the train conductor says/Take a break, Driver 8/Driver 8, take a break/We can reach our destination – but we’re still a ways away….

I wrote a letter to Salinger back in the early ’80’s when he was appearing in the news with some regularity for suing people for talking/writing/thinking about him – or so it seemed. Reconstructing the letter took my mind off R.E.M. momentarily:

Dear Mr. Salinger,

I know you won’t answer this letter but I thought I’d write anyway. I don’t blame you for suing people who try to drag you (or at least your life) out into the public eye when you want to be left alone.  I’m a novelist myself (as yet unpublished) and I have some ambivalence about success myself. I thought you explained your position on this pretty well at the end of  Catcher in the Rye. Maybe people should be satisfied with that….

That isn’t the entire letter, but it’s the gist of it. I got a terse reply in return from a literary agency in New York that acknowledged that I’d written their client. I like to think Salinger told them to write me because he felt a kindred spirit.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters.

Maybe all Salinger needed was to take a break. Then, when he got through with his break, he didn’t know how to come back.  Maybe he didn’t know how to explain that he needed to take a break, and maybe he didn’t know how to explain that he wanted to come back. Telling people what you really feel is hard.

Overcoat weather again, you know?

So I did my errand in town and headed for home – and what should come out of the radio but David Bowie’s “Fame”?

…bully for you/chilly for me/ Got to get a rain check on…pain….

I thought of Salinger – and of how lonely his life must have been – alienated from not just all the people he loved but from the public, too, simply because he didn’t want fame. His fame brought him in the end – pain and little else….

And I remembered that famous line I referred to in my letter, that line from his magnum opus. I wondered if he took the advice of his most famous character, Holden Caulfield:

Don’t ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody….

We certainly hear examples of businesses getting it right with new media, but in truth these cases represent a painfully small minority. With the advent of each new electronic tool we see a familiar pattern playing out.

• First phase: nobody gets it. Despite the fact that X represents obvious potential for a wide range of businesses, uptake is slow, primarily because these technologies tend to be driven initially by either the young or technophiles (or both).
• Second, a few agencies begin integrating X into their offerings, although all too often what they’re selling is the fad. Still, they’ll hook a client or two and “do” a pilot project. Since X is new and unproven, this “doing” is frequently conducted in a vacuum – that is, the “campaign” is implemented outside the scope of the company’s larger strategic planning. Everyone wants to see if it works before committing to it. The problem is that some of these approaches only work if they’re fully integrated. Take mobile/SMS marketing, for instance. There’s simply no way for it to work as a standalone because the nature of the technology and the carrier practices governing it make push tactics impossible. It can work beautifully if integrated with Web, print and point-of-sale, however. The result, in cases like this, is that the pilot underperforms the hype, thereby “proving” that it doesn’t work. Lesson learned – sadly, it’s the wrong lesson.
• Eventually we reach a period where everyone, even the company’s senior execs, have heard of it, and this marks a tipping point – X is no longer mysterious and obscure by virtue of its sheer newness. At this point, more businesses may begin implementing X. However, having heard of something isn’t the same as understanding it, and this is the phase where we sometimes see companies implementing programs that aren’t really suited to them. SMS marketing campaigns, for instance, are great for some contexts and an utter waste of resources in others. Blogging can be an incredibly powerful tool, but it requires a significant level of internal commitment and an audience that’s accustomed to searching for (and acting on) product, service and business insight on the Web. Twitter can be very effective once it’s understood that it isn’t the thing itself, but is instead a tool for pushing people to the thing (often Web content).

And so on. In a nutshell, business use of new media technologies and practices has been slow to mature. It’s probably safe to say that a vast majority of companies that could be productively using various strategies either aren’t doing so at all or are doing so in a way that fails to maximize the business potential of the tool.

Corporate Ambivalence and the Tipping Point

Which raises an obvious question: why? There’s plenty of expertise in the marketplace (and many companies probably have more expertise inside their own walls than they know how to tap). Not only that, but the tools themselves are getting far more sophisticated. Witness the recent New York Times story on Sentiment Analysis, a technology that seeks to mine the Web and social networks for valuable indications about the consumer’s emotional state. Then there’s Predictive Markets, which function like stock markets and are designed to help users do a better job of predicting the behavior in various systems.

A recent report from Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law sheds some light on the issues surrounding social media adoption, and in doing so perhaps provides even broader insight on electronic media diffusion generally. According to the report:

…confidence exists in social networking as viable communication outreach, but so do worries about the potential liabilities. Concerns regarding social media use were acknowledged by some eight in 10 businesses participating in a recent national study undertaken by Russell Herder and Ethos Business Law. Fifty-one percent of senior management, marketing and human resources executives fear social media could be detrimental to employee productivity, while almost half (49%) assert that using social media could damage company reputation.

Other concerns include “confidentiality or security issues (40%)” and “simply not knowing enough about it (51%).” Despite these reservations,

• 81% believe social media can enhance relationships with customers/clients
• 81% agree it can build brand reputation
• 69% feel such networking can be valuable in recruitment
• 64% see it as a customer service tool
• 46% think it can be used to enhance employee morale

To my point earlier about new media not being integrated into the business’s strategic planning, the study notes that:

• “…only one in 10 executives say they have staff who spend more than 50 percent of their time on such efforts – perhaps somewhat surprising given that half of the organizations surveyed employ over 1,000 people.”
• “…only 13 percent have included social media in their organizations’ crisis communications plans.”
• “Only one in three businesses surveyed has a policy in place to govern social media use, and only 10 percent said they have conducted relevant employee training.”

Want more ambivalence? “40 percent of companies technically block their employees from accessing social media while at work. At the same time, 26% of companies use social media to further corporate objectives and 70% said they plan to increase the use of these new opportunities.”

At this point it seems clear that while businesses are generally intrigued by the potential, fear and uncertainty are still winning the war.

My comments on the tipping point above refer mainly to the transition from one type of dysfunction to another. However, with each passing day we inch a little closer to a moment where organizations are finally capable of a mature evaluation of new research, marketing and communication tools. In this innovation-savvy near future, emerging technologies and practices will be quickly assessed and implemented in accordance with the company’s strategic goals. How will we know when this moment is approaching? The clue lies in this critically important observation:

Much of senior management’s direct experience with social media appears to be reactive versus proactive, an interesting fact given the confidence they express in these new mediums. The majority (72%) of executives say that they, personally, visit social media sites at least weekly to read what customers may be saying about their company (52%), and to routinely monitor a competitors’ use of social networking (47%). One in three search social media sites to see what their employees are sharing (36%); or check the background of a prospective employee (25%). (Emphasis added.)

There it is: reactive vs. proactive. Social media remains something to keep an eye on, but these executives have not yet reached a point where they’re comfortable integrating it into their overall plan for addressing the marketplace.

Once upon a time there was probably a period where business leaders kept a wary eye on that newfangled printing press, for the time being choosing to rely on their tried-and-true army of scribes for important publishing tasks. Perhaps in the late 19th Century there were companies that eschewed the telephone, instead building their communications practices and policies around the established telegraph. And perhaps I’m being unduly snarky. But the point is that we’re clearly in the general vicinity of a tipping point, and to some of us the cautious behavior of many corporate leaders seems a little like having a grandmother who’s afraid to try programming a digital alarm clock.

Strategy to Execution: Bridging the Gulf

A big part of the lag we’re experiencing between innovation and implementation (and strategic integration) derives from the insane pace of technological advance over the past few years. If we consider that state of marketing and communication in, say, 1970, things were much as they had been in 1960 and 1950 and so on. Sure, there had been incremental advances in things like publishing technology, but a senior exec, 30 years removed from his first job in the trenches (and senior execs were pretty much all “hims” at that point), could sit in the C suite and consider strategy and tactical approaches from a position of knowledge. The IBM Selectric was a big step up from the old manual typewriter that he used right out of college, but it was still a typewriter, and if you set it on the desk in front of him he could quickly figure it out.

Then, the world didn’t change appreciably over the span of 20 years. Now, though… Imagine if you’d put that same exec in suspended animation in 1989 and you thawed him out today. Unless he were just naturally comfortable with technology that he’d never seen, you might as well have propelled him a hundred years into the future. The basic tech of today’s workplace would be massively confusing, and this is before you ever asked him about developing a social media policy.

There is significant social media know-how in the company, however. Probably every employee under the age of 50 has a Facebook page, a Twitter account and/or a LinkedIn profile. Many of them read blogs and a good number of them (especially the ones with children over the age of 10) text. Most have visited YouTube. Most have consulted various online forums when considering purchases. The younger employees live and breathe social media, and in that particular segment of the population lies a huge amount of knowledge about how new media work.

However, since they’re younger, they lack the kind of broad experience needed to run organizations. Precocious or not, very few 20-somethings are ready for the C suite.

The problem, then, is that the company has seasoned senior-level strategic expertise and it has vast knowledge about social media. And never the twain shall meet. These two things, which need to be fused if a business is to develop a truly effective new media footing, lie at opposite ends of the corporate spectrum.

The solution: these organizations must develop bridge mechanisms. The most logical source lies in between, with the middle-level directors and managers who routinely touch both senior leadership and the front lines. They likely have a good measure of first-hand new media experience, and many of them are strategically capable. (Some are tracking toward C-level positions, in fact.) And given the generational character of the average company (if we might over-generalize for a moment), we’re probably talking about a cohort that brings a healthy entrepreneurial bent to their work. They’re comfortable trying new things, they’re comfortable with innovation, and most importantly, they’re accustomed to dealing with leaders who don’t quite get what they’re up to half the time.

In an environment like this, a senior leadership that’s willing to embrace new media marketing and communication tools can vest this junior leadership/middle management layer with the resources and stroke necessary to fully integrate emerging tech and best practices into how the company does business.

There will come a time – maybe soon – when emerging marketing and communications tools will be treated the same way that conventional advertising and PR are treated today. First, though, leadership must embrace the potential and empower those in their organizations who are positioned to drive success. Once businesses accept that this is about when, not if, social media strategy becomes an imperative, not an option.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What have others seen when they’ve read it?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But What Does It Mean?

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

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

Why do we care?

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

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

So it’s all good…right?

Loss of Affect

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

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

“It Doesn’t Matter Anymore.”

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

Virtual V. Reality

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

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

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

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

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

That’s the reality. Nothing virtual about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The most disturbing part for me was this:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yup.

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

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

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

Running and writing may be polar opposite activities.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Readers will find it a comfortable jog.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why should I help you embarrass me?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

photo credits:

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

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

I don’t have pet peeves. I have major, psychotic hatreds.

— George Carlin, who died early this week at age 71; June 23

At this very moment, as we sit here, women around the world are giving birth, raising children, cooking meals, washing clothes, cleaning houses, planting crops, working on assembly lines, running companies, and running countries. Women also are dying from diseases that should have been prevented or treated. They are watching their children succumb to malnutrition caused by poverty and economic deprivation. They are being denied the right to go to school by their own fathers and brothers. They are being forced into prostitution, and they are being barred from the bank lending offices and banned from the ballot box.

— excerpt from Hillary Rodham Clinton’s address to the U.N. 4th World Conference on Women in Beijing, China; Sept. 5, 1995.

Democrats never agree on anything, that’s why they’re Democrats. If they agreed with each other, they would be Republicans.

— Will Rogers

Sen. Specter: In our initial conversation, you talked about the stability and humility in the law. Would you agree with those articulations of the principles of stare decisis, as you had contemplated them, as you said you looked for stability in the law?

Judge Roberts: Yes, Mr. Chairman, I would. I would point out that the principle goes back even farther than Cardozo and Frankfurter. Hamilton, in Federalist No. 78, said that, To avoid an arbitrary discretion in the judges, they need to be bound down by rules and precedents. So, even that far back, the founders appreciated the role of precedent in promoting evenhandedness, predictability, stability, adherence of integrity in the judicial process.

— exchange between Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., then-chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and John Roberts during confirmation hearings on Judge Roberts’ nomination to be chief justice of the United States; Sept. 13, 2005.

Since our decision in Miller, hundreds of judges have relied on the view of the Amendment we endorsed there; we ourselves affirmed it in 1980.

— from Justice John Paul Stevens’ dissent in District of Columbia v. Heller, in which the U.S. Supreme Court, in throwing out a D.C. ordinance against handguns, ruled that the Constitution protects an individual’s right to have a gun; Miller was a 1939 case that directly addressed the Second Amendment; June 26; emphasis added.

You guys are great on ‘Beat the Clock.’

— an exasperated Rep. Steve Cohen, D-Tenn., as members of the House Judiciary Committee questioned David Addington, chief of staff to Vice President Dick Cheney, and John Yoo, formerly of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, on definitions of torture and executive authority; June 27.

Cities routinely build in the flood plain. That’s not an act of God; that’s an act of City Council.

— Kamyar Enshayan, a professor and director of an environmental center at the University of Northern Iowa and a Cedar Falls, Iowa, City Council member, explaining that recent Midwest flooding has more to do with human nature than nature; June 19.

The congressman’s appropriations projects are carefully vetted to ensure they are consistent with the needs and interests of his constituency, and there is no connection between his fundraising efforts and his work in Congress.

— Vincent Perez, spokesman for Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, explaining that no connection exists between a $4 million earmark for Digital Fusion and $18,000 in campaign contributions from Digital Fusion executives; The Washington Post’s Robert O’Harrow Jr. reports that “[m]ore than a year after Congress pledged to curb pork barrel funding known as earmarks, lawmakers are gearing up for another spending binge, directing billions toward organizations and companies in their home districts”; June 13.

This legislation will bring unprecedented transparency to lobbyists’ activities. On the first day of the 110th Congress, we passed a landmark rules package, and this is another important step to strengthen accountability and public trust.

.
— from a July 31, 2007, press release on the Senate Web site of Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas, in which he announced his vote supporting the final House-Senate agreement on the Honest Leadership, Open Government Act of 2007, an act that, according to his release, would “[s]trengthen Senate Ethics Rules, similar to already enacted House Reforms: Includes a variety of changes to Senate rules, including a ban on gift and travel by lobbyists and full disclosure of earmarks.” [emphasis added]

This is a con job. It’s a diversion. These guys ought to be given a Mandrake the Magician permanent title, for pretending that this has anything to do with solving gas prices today.

— Rep. David R. Obey, D-Wisc., chairman of the Appropriations Committee, after adjourning a hearing in which, according to a story by David M. Herszenhorn of The New York Times, “he was ambushed by Republicans with an amendment to allow drilling on the outer continental shelf off both coasts”; June 27.

A two-page “survival guide” issued in 2007 to interns in Rep. Don Young’s (R–AK) office lists nine transportation lobbyists as “The A Team” and informs interns that “[t]hese people can talk to whomever they want” when phoning the office. Phone calls from other Members of Congress, however, must be directed to two Young staffers, according to the memorandum. The document is titled “The 2111″, a reference to Rep. Young’s Rayburn Office Number.

— from a report on the Web site of Taxpayers for Common Sense; June 18.

When you see a 15 percent yearly increase, that is an epidemic that is out of control. And yet we don’t see a response that recognizes it is an epidemic out of control.

— Phill Wilson, head of the Black AIDS Institute in Los Angeles, in a Washington Post story by David Brown reporting that “[t]he number of young homosexual men being newly diagnosed with HIV infection is rising by 12 percent a year, with the steepest upward trend in young black men” according to a report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; June 27.

Years ago, when there was an accident or an injury, neighbors would usually come and help each other. Nowadays, there are fewer family farms and fewer children on those farms, and it’s just not as easy for neighbors to help one another anymore.

— UPS pilot Bill Gross, whose non-profit group Farm Rescue helps farmers who have suffered a major illness, injury or natural disaster; June 27.

President Bush has set forth a clear and detailed plan for making our public schools excellent, so that every child in this country can have access to a quality education. He has included in that plan not only the objectives, but the support and the flexibility that states and school districts and schools and parents need in order to reach the objective.

President Bush has assumed this as his mission — the mission that no child will be left behind. He’s made it clear that he sees the urgency involved in making our classrooms safer and equipping every child with reading and math skills, and closing the inexcusable achievement gap that exists among students attending public schools across this country — primarily among minority students and economically disadvantaged students.

— from remarks by Dr. Roderick Paige during his swearing-in as Secretary of Education; Jan. 21, 2001.

Q: Has the President ever considered an executive order that would ban torture specifically? There’s a letter out now from a bipartisan group of former Secretaries of State, including Secretary of State George Shultz, with whom the President was a couple of weeks ago, and former Defense Secretaries and military officials saying that there should be an executive order with the force of law saying that torture is unacceptable.

MS. PERINO: Well, we certainly respect the views of George Shultz. And one thing I would point to is that we have a set of laws that have been passed during this administration, and an executive order, in fact. There was the Detainee Treatment Act, there was the Military Commissions Act, and then there was the President’s executive order interpreting Common Article 3.

So we feel like we have taken steps to address that issue. And I would also point out that we face a very different enemy today than America has ever faced before. We face an enemy that respects no borders, respects no uniforms, and certainly has no regard for civilians, especially innocent women and children and the elderly. So we take his position seriously, but we do think that we have the mechanisms in place to address the issue.

— exchange between reporter and press secretary Dana Perino at a White House press briefing; June 25.

I am shocked. I think all this is a provocation. If I get punished, I’ll quit training and do something else.

— Bulgarian weightlifter Ivan Stoitsov, who took two gold medals at last year’s world championships, after he and 10 teammates — seven men and three women — tested positive for the banned anabolic substance methandienon; Bulgaria withdrew its weightlifting team from the Olympics; June 27.

[W]e are making broad and dramatic progress against corporate fraud in America. We’re defending our free enterprise system against corruption and crime. And we’re beginning a new era of corporate integrity. Corporate responsibility is essential to America. It’s essential to shareholders. It is essential to investors.

— President Bush, unveiling a Corporate Fraud Task Force at the White House-sponsored Corporate Fraud Conference on Sept. 26, 2002.

That was a complete victory for the defendants. The judicial system has become more conservative and more sensitive to economic rights and business interests. This is one of many cases that has restricted the scope of investor recovery.

— Georgetown University law professor Donald C. Langevoort, commenting on the Supreme Court’s decision in Stoneridge Investment Partners v. Scientific-Atlanta that “strictly limited the ability of investors who lost money through corporate fraud to sue other businesses that may have helped facilitate the crime”; Jan. 16.

There isn’t a lot of latitude these days to indulge controversy or ideas in fashion, and so even Miuccia Prada in her strong collection seemed far less intent than usual on engaging in what Carlo Antonelli, the editor of Italian Rolling Stone, termed “the discourse about gender.” In other words, Prada ditched the peplums and other feminizing elements of her last, determinedly noncommercial collection and sent out a tightly organized presentation that combined elements of sports and formal wear and that eroticized men without rendering them drones.

— from a review of the Milan Fashion Week by Guy Trebay of The New York Times; June 26.

I have a million children.

— Kermit Love, the creator of many “Sesame Street” characters including Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch, who died this week at 91; June 26.

photo credits:

• George Carlin: HBO promotional photo via Associated Press
• Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack O’Bama at “unity” rally: Jim Bourg, Reuters

• Rep. Silvestre Reyes: Rep. Reyes’ Senate Web site
• male model at Milan Fashion Week: Matteo Bazzi, EPA

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cheers! Tears!! I’m here!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

— from “Cocaine” by the Grateful Dead.

art, photo credits:

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

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

Exxon Mobil is acting like a dinosaur now, not adopting to a changing environment.

— Stephen Viederman, a New York shareholder, after “Exxon Mobil’s chairman and chief executive, Rex W. Tillerson, defeated a shareholder effort … to take away one of his jobs at an annual meeting punctuated by a debate of the company’s policy toward renewable energy and global warming”; May 28.

Despite significant challenges in the U.S. market, we continue to reshape our business for long-term success. This attrition program gives us an opportunity to restructure our U.S. work force through the entry-level wage and benefit structure for new hourly employees.

— from a statement by Troy A. Clarke, the president of G.M.’s North American operations, announcing that “19,000 hourly workers — a quarter of a unionized work force that already has been drastically pared down — have accepted buyouts“; up to 16,000 of these $28-an-hour workers may be replaced by “entry-level” non-assembly workers making $14 an hour; May 30; emphasis added.

The years of keeping Saddam in a box were coming to a close. The international consensus that he be kept isolated and unarmed had eroded to the point that many critics of military action had decided the time had come again to do business with Saddam, despite his near daily attacks on our pilots, and his refusal, until his last day in power, to allow the unrestricted inspection of his arsenal. Our choice wasn’t between a benign status quo and the bloodshed of war. It was between war and a graver threat.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Not — Not our political opponents. Certainly not a disingenuous filmmaker who would — who would have us believe, my friends, who would have us believe that Saddam’s Iraq was an oasis of peace when in fact — when in fact it was a place of indescribable cruelty, torture chambers, mass graves, and prisons that destroyed the lives of the small children inside their walls.

— presidential candidate John McCain, from his address at the 2004 Republican National Convention.

World leaders are in a state of denial but their failure to act has a high cost. As Iraq and Afghanistan show, human rights problems are not isolated tragedies, but are like viruses that can infect and spread rapidly, endangering all of us.

— Irene Khan, the secretary general of Amnesty International, in a statement accompanying a report that “singled out for criticism China, the United States, and Russia and accused the European Union of complicity in the rendition of terrorism suspects”; May 28.

We cannot have a fair prosperity in isolation from a fair society. So I will continue to stand for a national health insurance. We must — We must not surrender — We must not surrender to the relentless medical inflation that can bankrupt almost anyone and that may soon break the budgets of government at every level. Let us insist on real controls over what doctors and hospitals can charge, and let us resolve that the state of a family’s health shall never depend on the size of a family’s wealth.

— Sen. Ted Kennedy, addressing the 1980 Democratic National Convention.

The economy has been taken hostage by people that took some very bad decisions. The answer is to pay as little ransom as possible to the least ill-deserving people we can find.

— Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., chair of the House Financial Services Committee, whose “housing rescue plan, which has passed the House and is being massaged by the Senate Banking Committee, would let the Federal Housing Administration refinance distressed borrowers into government-guaranteed loans worth up to $300 billion”; May 19.

What we want to achieve in the health system is a higher individual responsibility, making the consumers more responsible for what they consume.

— Peter Pazitny, executive director and one of the founding partners at the Health Policy Institute in Bratislava, Slovakia, and formerly the principal adviser to the minister of health, defending the government’s decision to charge modest health-care fees; other Central European nations may follow suit; May 27.

We also said we shared the pain of the Chinese people and earthquake victims in Sichuan.

— a spokesman for Dior in Paris, who asked not to be identified because of company policy, on a Dior announcement that it would stop using actor Sharon Stone in its advertising in China after Ms. Stone’s comment that recent earthquakes in Sichuan Province were karmic retribution for Beijing’s treatment of Tibet; May 29.

[T]he public enemy of all mankind.

— description of Sharon Stone in an editorial by Xinhua, the state-run Chinese news agency; May 29.

Scott, we now know, is disgruntled about his experience at the White House. For those of us who fully supported him, before, during and after he was press secretary, we are puzzled. It is sad. This is not the Scott we knew.

— White House press secretary Dana Perino, commenting on former press secretary Scott McClellan’s claims, about to be published in a book, that President Bush engaged in “self-deception,” and committed a “serious strategic blunder” in invading Iraq and decided to “to turn away from candor and honesty when those qualities were most needed”; May 28; emphasis added.

This does not sound like Scott; it really doesn’t.

— former White House aide Karl Rove on Scott McClellan’s new book; May 29; emphasis added.

You’ve heard the way Scott briefed — it doesn’t sound like him.

It would be an inglorious conclusion to something that has survived wars and man’s other follies. But that is the scenario we are facing: the end of guano.

— biologist Uriel de la Torre on news that the “worldwide boom in commodities … is shifting attention to guano, an organic fertilizer once found in abundance on this island and more than 20 others off the coast of Peru”; “Guano in Peru sells for about $250 a ton while fetching $500 a ton when exported to France, Israel and the United States”; May 30.

We demand that the government severely punish the killers who caused the collapse of the school building. Please, everyone sign the petition so we can find out the truth.

— Liu Lifu, a quarry worker in in Dujiangyan, China, after he grabbed the microphone at an informal gathering of parents at Juyuan Middle School and began calling for justice; his 15-year-old daughter, Liu Li, was killed along with her entire class during a biology lesson in the earthquake in Sichuan Province; May 28.

If I could just get a warm room. I could take it from there.

— Ronald Gardner, 54, an H.I.V.-positive man who said he had never before slept on the streets until Hurricane Katrina; “a survey by advocacy groups in February showed that 86 percent were from the New Orleans area. Sixty percent said they were homeless because of Hurricane Katrina, and about 30 percent said they had received rental assistance at one time from the Federal Emergency Management Agency”; May 28.

People don’t seem to realize that political committees are big businesses that are raising significant sums of money without traditional accounting and business oversight. In politics, no one wants to be a bean counter.

— Jan Baran, an election expert at the law firm Wiley Rein in Washington, in a story about a $1 million forensic audit of the National Republican Congressional Committee following the disclosure that hundreds of thousands of dollars were missing and presumed stolen by its treasurer; May 27.

One has to assume anyone buried there had some good credentials.

— Dr. Parker Pearson, a British archeologist, on research that says Stonehenge was used as a cemetery from 3,000 B. C. well into its zenith around 2,500 B.C. with up to 240 people buried there; May 29.

This is the message of the Beatles, the Dylans of the world. [Ron Paul’s message of freedom and peace is] an ancient message — it inspired people in the 60s and 70s. I want to bring back that era of magic.

— Marc Scibilia, a 21-year-old songwriter from Buffalo, N.Y., who posted a video of his Ron Paul-themed song, “Hope Anthem,” on YouTube, and this summer will lead a 28-city “Freedom Tour” featuring other musicians; May 27.

Rwanda’s economy has risen up from the genocide and prospered greatly on the backs of our women. Bringing women out of the home and fields has been essential to our rebuilding. In that process, Rwanda has changed forever. … We are becoming a nation that understands that there are huge financial benefits to equality.

— Agnes Matilda Kalibata, minister of state in charge of agriculture in Rwanda, on the revival of the nation’s economy since the genocide of 14 years ago, when 800,000 people were killed in three months; May 16.

After two days I woke up. Birds were eating my dead children. This was too much for me. I wanted to be killed. … I felt as if I was dead, too. I did not want to go on.

— Jeanette Nyirabaganwa, 39, a minority Tutsi in Rwanda; she is now “employing eight laborers, she is growing three times as much coffee as her father and husband did. They sold their poorer-quality beans for local consumption. Her finer grade is largely for export, roasted overseas and sold in coffee shops and specialty stores in cities including London, New York, Chicago and New Orleans”; May 16.

No one likes to hear that people are using their mobile phone records. It gives one the sense that Big Brother can watch you and hear you.

— Lutz Hachmeister, director of the Institute for Media Policy in Berlin, “after an admission by Deutsche Telekom that it had surreptitiously tracked thousands of phone calls to identify the source of leaks to the news media about its internal affairs”; May 27.

Presidential candidate Obama’s speech may be formulated as follows: hunger for the nation, remittances as charitable handouts and visits to Cuba as propaganda for consumerism and the unsustainable way of life behind it. I am not questioning Obama’s great intelligence, his debating skills or his work ethic. [But] I am obliged to raise a number of delicate questions.

— former president of Cuba Fidel Castro, 81, in a column he wrote for Cuban newspapers; May 26.

I really want to know how my guests view their lives, their jobs, their friends. Are they content? What are their dreams?

— Natascha Kampusch, who spent 8 1/2 years trapped in an underground cell in the home of Austrian kidnapper Wolfgang Priklopil, on her new career as a talk-show host; May 29.

I created this site as a thank you, to you, for sharing the journey with me and to invite you to continue to explore what the future will bring.

— a message from actor Tom Cruise on his newly created Web site celebrating the 25th anniversary of the film “Risky Business”; May 29.

Really, a T-shirt with your name on it? Is it so you remember or we never forget? Maybe it should be spelled backwards because we suspect that every time she looks in the mirror there’s a split second when she wonders, “Wait, who’s Sirap?”

— Elizabeth Spiridakis in her “Very” fashion column for The New York Times; May 22.

photo credits:
• Sharon Stone: The Guardian
• Patrick Pugh and Clara Gomez outside their tent at a homeless encampment under a highway overpass in New Orleans: Lee Celano, The New York Times
• Stonehenge: Ken Geiger, National Geographic
• Paris Hilton: Beretta/Sims/Karius/RexUSA

Quotabull is a weekly feature of Scholars & Rogues.

Jean Luc Godard’s 1968 epic WeekEnd closes with the following end title:

END OF CINEMA

Leonard Lopate of WNYC has a terrific interview with Richard Brody, film critic for The New Yorker and author of a new book on the cinema icon – Everything is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean Luc Godard. You can hear the interview below.

As Lopate archly notes and Brody diplomatically tries to refute, for the vast majority of cinema aficionados, Godard’s end title was prophetic.

After WeekEnd, Godard chose politics over film making – and while he’s occasionally been provocative and interesting, he’s never been relevant in the way he was during his artistic peak in the 1960’s.

When Godard burst upon world cinema in 1959 with his breakthrough film À Bout de Souffle (Breathless), his appearance completed the emergence of the triumvirate of France’s Nouvelle Vague in film making: Claude Chabrol, Francois Truffaut, and Godard. While both Chabrol and Truffaut went on to have careers that eventually led them into French mainstream cinema (and earned Godard’s scorn as a result even as they raised the quality of that cinema considerably), Godard stayed his radical course throughout his career, delivering masterpiece after masterpiece throughout the 1960’s – A Woman is a Woman, Contempt, Les Carabiniers, Masculin/Feminin, Alphaville, Pierrot le Fou, and, to me, his magnum opus, WeekEnd. It is an amazing, varied and impressive series of films. If he had stopped making films after WeekEnd, his place in the pantheon of great film makers would be secure.

But he didn’t.

Instead Godard, once a political conservative who gradually became enamored of Marxism, became a radical Maoist. And that political conversion, as it came to dominate his film making aesthetic, had a deleterious effect on Godard’s work. One might liken Godard’s imposing on himself the same sort of repression and restriction of his artistic impulses in service of a political imperative to Stalin’s meddling with the work of Sergei Eisenstein. In Eisenstein’s case, that the Russian director could produce great cinema such as Battleship Potemkin, October, and Ivan IV (Part 1) is a testament to his ability to use his genius to overcome the double thinking required in a political climate like Stalinist Russia. That Godard chose to impose such a mental burden on himself, while it may speak positively to his commitment to his political ideals, it speaks also to an artistic misstep from which Jean Luc Cinema Godard, as he once proclaimed himself, was never to recover.

Godard’s work has always carried political messages - Masculin/Feminin explores the awkwardness of men and women trying to fit both political and cultural ideals; Les Carabiniers is an indictment of war’s pointlessness and false promises to its soldiers; WeekEnd is Godard’s brilliant evisceration of a society that even in 1967 seemed to him to be amusing itself to death with consumerism and bourgeois conventionality. But after his avowed conversion to Maoism, his film making – which had always been more liberated – and liberating – from cinematic convention than perhaps any other major director, became more and more polemic in the worst sort of way: the cinematic art was too often subordinated to political diatribe. Even the best works after his post-sixties peak – Tout Va Bien, Je Vous Salue, Marie (Hail Mary) – have been discussed more for their political statements than for their cinematic innovations.

Artists always face danger when they allow any element – even the most sincere political conviction – to circumscribe or change their creative visions. Godard’s commitment to Maoism led him down a path that took him from the most vital, provocative, admirable film maker in the cinema to the isolated, embittered old man he seems to be now. As Godard proved in his work from the sixties, an artist can make powerful political statements while at the same time maintaining his art as his first priority. It is only when one’s art is (consciously or unconsciously) subsumed by other passions that the art suffers.

Godard’s most recent work is elegiac in content – JLG/JLG Autoportrait de Décembre and Histoire(s) du Cinéma both represent Godard’s best efforts to understand and perhaps explain what happened to cinema – and to Jean Luc Cinema Godard – over the last half of the 20th century. Even as thoughtful and insightful as these works are, one must wonder if Godard is haunted by his own words:

Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world.