Anno Catulorum

They were down three games to one. Of course they had to go down three to one. Of course they'd have to come back to tie the series only to blow a 5-1 lead late in Game 7. Of course once it was tied, the rains would begin to fall, delaying extra innings (a phenomenon already observed by a time-traveler). And of course the Cubs would have to escape a 10th inning rally by the skin of their teeth to... yes, we can say it now... win the World Series. The baseball gods wouldn't allow them to win any other way. Nor would they allow Cleveland to lose any other way. They consider cruelty a virtue.

I envy baseball fans who had no rooting interest in this World Series. It must've been a blast. I aged two years in a week. And it was worth it.

If this World Series had been done as a movie, everyone would walk out because it would be insulting and obnoxious. The screenwriter would be a hack. The director would be a treacle-addled fluff-merchant. Joe Maddon would be played by Eddie Redmayne. It would be terrible. This is why sports are better than movies. But, some time in the next few years, this will be turned into a fantastic documentary (it'll probably be a 30 for 30). I will watch that documentary and I will cry-laugh. Again.

Next year was this year. And, baseball gods help us, next year will also be next year. This is a great young team that will mostly be intact, just a couple of pieces gone: Grandpa Rossy (enjoy your retirement, old man, you've earned it); maybe Fowler (get paid, dude, you deserve it); Chapman (good). But they'll get Kyle Schwarber (Bambino Mark III) back full-time. They'll have a hopefully refurbished J-Hey (dare we dream of having 2015 Heyward on this squad?). And a whole crew of young guns who have been to the mountaintop. The physical gifts of youth paired with the mental fortitude granted by having won: imagine the fear that a mature Javier Baez could strike in opposing teams and fans alike. This team is going to continue being very, very good. They'll need to be.

The Dodgers are still very good. The Nationals are hungry--and ready. The Mets are a decent trainer away from being a threat. And the Cardinals... the Cardinals. Meanwhile, over in the AL, Cleveland will be healthy and angry and terrifying.

But for now, the Cubs are world champions. So celebrate, family. Laugh. Cry. Toast those who didn't get to see this.

Next year, we go for another.

Go Cubs Go.

Now You're Just Making Crap Up, Part II

A while back, I asked if any members of my generation had experienced the fabled scoreless youth sporting event, the kind that were supposed to have ruined us for the real world. I'll get to those momentarily.

To start, Google turned up this from The Western Center For Journalism (I don't know, either) whose motto is, "Informing And Equipping Americans Who Love Freedom." No, really. This obviously well-oiled news organization links to a piece from Glenn Beck's The Blaze (at this point, we'll pretend we buy every word--fragile egos, you see) about a youth football league in California fining teams $200 when winning by 35 points or more. The fine is overkill, sure, but as discussed in my previous post, a simple skill imbalance and the easily-flustered nature of children could easily produce a four-touchdown deficit. How many youth coaches would feel good about themselves nabbing another TD at that stage? What's to prove? It would be considered classless even in the NFL. And this still doesn't exactly fit the "scoreless" bill. But both articles run on the assumption that these sorts of things are becoming "more and more prevalent," while providing no evidence outside of this particular anecdote.

A similar presumption is made in this overlong piece in the Boston Globe, which at least has the courtesy to acknowledge the complicity of gutless parents.

So we're back to nothing on this. On the whole, no one I heard from was familiar with these leagues. A few seconded my memory of mercy rules, but nothing quite like the neutered, feelings-oriented farces that we've heard tell about. One aspect I hadn't thought of, though: memorabilia--the ribbons and trophies commemorating participation. Yes, the famous 'participation trophies,' shiny harbingers of millennials' presumed entitlement. There might be something there: years of receiving physical manifestations of the most basic commitment to a youth sports team. Didn't matter if you were a star or a benchwarmer. How is that not supposed to spoil children and warp their expectations of success?

To start, kids know what those baubles are. They see every other kid get one, regardless the merit, and they know. I was crap at most youth sports. I played badly and got frustrated. Or I got bored. Either way, I usually ended up following through because my parents wouldn't let me quit I was afraid of letting someone down. I learned to ride the bench. Sitting was a better fat kid sport, anyway. Except for that one year of youth basketball when all the other kids came up to my shoulder--I grabbed every rebound without having to jump. Those were good times.

In all other cases, though--baseball, football, two weeks of soccer--I knew I hadn't earned those ribbons, didn't deserve those trophies. They were reminders of a mandated charity of which I was the recipient. They didn't make me feel good and some part of me knew I couldn't expect that to go on forever. I won't say the trophies lit a fire in me, or prodded me to work harder for future trophies. But they did teach me which achievements meant something and which didn't. I'll take your trophy (refusing would be a dick move). But I know what matters to me. I still regard that as a pretty good lesson.

Finally, and slightly more interestingly, even if those trophies had imparted entitlement issues upon myself and my generation (and I'm sure they overinflated some poor kid's head), who was handing them out so recklessly? Did we ask for them? Possibly, after we saw other kids get trophies. Kids always crave what other kids have, even if they don't actually want it. 

However. Aren't these the occasions to explain to your stupid son or daughter that they hadn't earned a trophy? That they needed to work harder next time and maybe the trophy would be theirs? Or was it easier to throw a hunk of metal at the brat and get on with your day? The same goes for the presumptive scoreless games.

I've said before that I don't believe in generation blaming. It's entirely dependent upon a myopic single lane perspective, it creates needless division, and it gets us nowhere. But let's recognize our own faults, shall we? Take a serious look at what we're bringing to the table before we huff at somebody we don't know for being conceived thirty years before or after we were? Because we have real problems to contend with.

And there are no points for making shit up.

Now You're Just Making Crap Up

In the middle of an already fantastic article, Adam Weinstein pens one of the most phenomenal paragraphs I've read recently:

But there's nothing for us to suck up, really. As a rule, our parents did end up much more dedicated to their careers than we have. But as a rule, they were laid off less. They didn't intern or work as independent contractors. They got full medical. They were occasionally permitted to adopt magical unicorn-like money-granting creatures called "pensions." Or, barring that, they accumulated a huger 401K to cash out before the Great Recession, because they saved more. And they saved more because the costs of college, of kid care, of health care, of doing business and staying alive and buying groceries and staying connected, were far less than they are today. They could raise a family on one salary if necessary.

Go ahead and read the rest. I'll wait.

Good, right? There's a lot to say here (and I've already said some of it) but Weinstein does it well enough and there's something else I want to focus on.

Now, if you're like me, you're stupid and therefore scrolled down to the comments section after reading the article. There, you found that the first comment was a real piece of work, painfully oblivious to everything Weinstein had just said and writes him off as a coddled, entitled Gen Y-whiner (I refuse to turn that into an easy portmanteau). Weinstein rebuts him beautifully, and it's cathartic, but something sticks out in "shootingfan's" tone deaf, self-serving reply. He leads off--leads off, mind you--with this:

A generation that grew up with soccer games that weren't scored because we wanted everyone to feel like a winner.

Okay, stop. I've heard this canard before. You probably have, too: youth sports leagues eliminating competition, thereby turning kids soft, thereby leaving them unprepared for the real world, thereby something-something off-my-lawn. You're probably even aware of the recent satire of this phenomenon that too many people assumed to be legitimate because confirmation bias is a bastard. Problem is, I'm not aware of any specific examples of this kind of thing. I'm not saying they don't exist--though I seriously wonder--but in casual polling of friends and acquaintances my age, I've not heard of them experiencing such things.

The closest I've come to this is my own experience. My youth baseball league instituted a slaughter rule: if one team scored five runs in an inning, the inning ended and the game moved on. This seems to me (looking back) to be more about practical matters regarding baseball. No clock means a game could go on forever and if one team tacks on five runs in one inning in youth baseball, we may be dealing with a skill imbalance or a perpetual momentum situation and a game could go on for hours. Understand: the game didn't end when a team scored five runs, we just moved on (and I definitely remember playing on at least one team that saw the merciful side of the slaughter rule). Because our games went six innings, a game could still end 30-0 and a tally-mark would still be added to the loss column: not exactly a coddling of the young if things got that far.

For now, I'll ignore the question of who is responsible for such rules (a point I've touched on before), until we can establish whether they exist and how pervasive they are and what impact they've had on us. What I'm looking for is evidence, anecdotal though it may be, of people of my generation who remember these rules. If you were born in the roughly 1980-1995 window--kids for whom the coddling is assumed to have been in the ascendant and who are now aging into college, the workforce, etc--do you have memories of scoreless games? Of activities that were more feel-good-oriented than learning-oriented or even fun-oriented (subject for another time: kids mostly don't give a shit about scores, they're just fine having fun until another kid or some sad, lonely adult insists on inserting hyper-competitiveness)?

Or is it all bitter horseshit, spewed by people too alienated and desperate for self-affirmation to admit that some gripes--like Weinstein's--are legitimate?

Still Drowning

Imagine a movement that urged former students striving to pay off their student loans to just stop. Don't make the payments, dry up the coffers, and force an overhaul of the system that many of us are drowning in. Sounds fun. And it would probably open up some funds for a Playstation 4.

Two problems spring to mind, though. One, it's hard to imagine the agitators of this hypothetical movement not getting taken down on some kind of criminal conspiracy charge. This would need to be an overwhelming movement with a lot of visibility and a central leadership to keep this borderline-extortionist movement steady. If the point is to send a shock to the system, we need everybody. Which leads us to problem number two: if even a third of former students continue paying up, those of us opting out are sunk: still in debt, and now also defaulting on our debt, with no message being sent and little leverage to be had. I'm pulling that "one-third" number out of my ass, but you see my point.

As Matt Taibbi's recent Rolling Stone piece, "The College-Loan Scandal," makes painfully clear, the only thing worse than owing the government for that diploma of yours is defaulting on what you owe and watching your $38,000 debt balloon to $100,000. That's the actual story of Alan Collinge, one of several cases that Taibbi highlights in his investigation of the government's surprisingly well-run student loans racket.

Taibbi is most interested in these cases of default, the mob-like tactics of the creditors--whose returns on defaults are stunning (see 'Collinge' above)--and why no one in government is willing to do anything about it (in short: Democrats like to brag about sending people to college and Republicans don't care about anyone who isn't them). The defaulters provide dramatic examples; students paying off their crippling debts is less dramatic because it's more commonplace. It's commonplace because these debts are, well, necessary. Taibbi mentions the New York Times article from earlier this year about how a bachelor's degree is what a high school degree used to be and writes,

"If they don't have the degree, then they have no chance at all. So if they even want a clerking job, they must dive face-first into the debt muck and take their chances that they won't end up watching the federal government take bites out of disability checks while their law degree gathers dust downstairs somewhere. So, yes, a college education is a great thing, and you probably need one now more than ever – the problem is that it may very well be mandatory, may have less of a chance of ever getting you a job, and you may still be paying for it on your deathbed no matter what."

And there's the rub. College is no longer a status symbol for the manor-born. Those still-spiking tuitions are the entry fee to adulthood for people my age.

I've sung this song before. I piled on debt (fairly light compared to my peers) mostly obliviously because I was a goddamn teenager. Now, I can live with that. But, in order to have the career I want in the field I want, I'm going back, knowing it'll fling me further into debt on the chance that it gets me where I want to go. That's the gamble I'm taking and while I'm not exactly forced into it, neither am I doing it entirely willingly. If you don't understand the difference, you may not be ready for this debate.

A final note: in the next lane over from myself and my cohorts are all the teenagers choosing not to go, as enrollment continues to fall. Opting-out in a different way. I don't know whether this will be a wake up call to schools to reassess tuition rates (I suspect not) or how these people will fare in a job market still not inclined to let go of its degree requirements (well, I hope). But perhaps it's a start. It might at least get some heads out of the sand.

The Student Loans Grotesque

There's nothing like starting the week in a boiling rage over this country's surrealistic student loans situation. For me, it actually started last week, when a friend of mine posted this Seattle Times article to Facebook, describing how, once upon a time, summer jobs could pay for college because college costs were stunningly low. And how that experience taught an entire generation--the awesomely responsible people who are in charge today--that hard work and elbow grease were the ticket out of debt, so they can comfortably look the other way on the debt their children have incurred. They graduated debt-free (or debt-negligible, anyway) and then shut the door behind them. As Danny Westneat writes,

[L]ast week The Seattle Times featured a crop of harried UW students looking rueful and broke. The story said skeptical state legislators often say how “they worked their way through college. And then they ask: Why don’t students do that today?”

Of all our delusions, we old farts cling to this bootstrap one the most. We worked our way up on sweat and chicken grease, we say. Can’t this generation? What’s wrong with them?

What’s wrong is that after we got ours, we cut it off for them.

And then this morning, Salon's Joan Walsh explores the toxic student loan culture, aided and abetted by, yep, Congress, those lovable scamps. On one end of the Hill, we have a Senate that apparently refuses to stop the coming student loan interest rate hike from 3.4% to 6.8% (which goes into effect today). On the other end, the House has a bill that introduces market based reforms. This is presumably the same market that's going to take a staggering blow when an entire generation can't buy houses or cars, or generally engage in the "consumer economy" market-obsessed wonks think about when they masturbate.

Walsh links to this piece by David Dayen, who describes how student debts are lot more like indentured servitude than traditional debts. They can't be altered, refinanced, or even forfeit via bankruptcy. Even those who don't graduate end up paying their tab, which would be a reasonable rule, if not for the fact that we're taking about 17- and 18-year olds doing what they're told to do and signing on for ballooning tuition costs. Dayen, after highlighting various congressional proposals, says that "this entire system must be overhauled," which is a terrifying revelation in our current problem-solving climate.

I ended up lucky among some of my fellow private school alums, amassing merely $16,000 in debt. And my wife didn't have any. But now she's just finished grad school and I'm going to start in the fall (at an in-state public school this time). When all is done, she and I could be looking at six figures of debt and can anticipate paying that off for the next thirty years--or longer, if interest rates rise again. And why the hell shouldn't we expect that?

If you want to tell us that the problem is ours, just for having gone to school, you can--politely--fuck right off. We live in a part of the country that all but requires post-graduate degrees, particularly for people whose career prospects have dwindled in a stagnant economy that crippled our generation's prospects before we even entered into it. Maybe we can blame ourselves for buying too much into the allure of education as the silver bullet, and for (speaking only for myself here) not taking school as seriously as I should've. But even those admissions are distractions, shouted into the maelstrom in an effort to downplay the very real concerns about spiraling costs and an economy that still demands college diplomas. The conversation is driven into the quagmire of lazy talking points, from which no problem emerges solved.

This is the problem with issues that affect other people. In the future. As long as the media has aberrational Joe Mihalic figures to point to, student debt will never seem severe enough and it will never garner the attention it deserves. Never mind the fact that it deeply affects a rising generation that has enough problems averting lost generation status, with belittlement and patronization flying at us from newsstands. Student loans will, by extension, impact everyone in the not too distant future. But we can't deign to fix these problems, to examine why college is so expensive, to reinvest in public education, perhaps even to explore debt forgiveness. We can't do those things.

Because... money, I guess.

I'm not even entirely joking when I say that global warming and a post-apocalyptic future suddenly don't sound so bad. As I stalk the wastelands, fending off the hungry fangs of the über-mutants, hoarding the half-gallon of fuel that I wrested from the stiff fingers of a small child--my only currency save my poor, worn out asshole--I will take significant solace in the knowledge that no one will be left to extract student loan payments from me.

The Supreme Court Like Gay Marriage. Good For Them.

Anybody else remember this vain, tone-deaf exercise in poorly-written victimization? 

That happened. So did DOMA. I don't know what either of those were about. And neither will future generations.

Maggie Gallagher wants not to be lumped in with the segregationists of the mid-20th Century. Her best tack would've been to not hop on the discrimination train in the first place (I imagine it looking like the armored train from Goldeneye: archaic, paranoid, shuttered windows, and while impervious to bullets is extremely vulnerable to Court-triggered explosions). She can wring her hands all she wants now. Forty years down the road, she's Bull Connor without the dogs.

It's probably classless to stick the knife in like this.

.@ChickfilA Any specials today?
— rob delaney (@robdelaney) June 26, 2013

If it's hard not to, it's because there are still 36 states that have outlawed gay marriage. 6 more only allow marriage lite. Until those are fixed, this isn't over.

Time Dings Millennials, Awaits Sweet Death

Time magazine's cover story this month is entitled "Millennials: The Me Me Me Generation." As the title subtly suggests, millennials have turned out to be shallow, narcissistic, entitled little shits who are tragically destined to wrest control of the world from their wise, patient, sexy elders. Millennials have also achieved some good things, probably, but mostly they have those smartphones and communicate electronically, and that is just the worst. It's author is Joel Stein, an X-er who has been called "a god to people in their twenties and thirties" by boomer and Time editor Richard Stengel. Stein has statistics and studies to back up his claims, so you know he's on the level. And in case you were beginning to think that Time doesn't understand millennials deeper than is necessary to exploit the subscription money out of an aging generation's natural suspicion of everything that will replace it, they made it even more enticing for young people by pay-walling the article; we can't resist paying for content.

If you ask Time why print is dying, they'll stare at you blankly before asking if they can "have money now."

Stein's already been reamed pretty good. Elspeth Reeve pokes some holes in the statistics before digging up a century's worth of exposes on the ever-pending horror of "self-obsessed little monsters," a story originally scooped, I believe, by Socrates.

Marc Tracy takes Stein nearly point for point, concluding:

Right now, older generations are in the process of slowly bequeathing millennials a society more “in debt” than ever before: “in debt” in the sense of living on borrowed time, with only future, merely hypothetical promises as collateral—“in debt” ecologically, financially, politically, culturally. At this moment, Time has decided to focus on the millennials, and to tar them as “entitled” for not feeling totally okay about all of this.

Piling on with Tracy--though actually pre-dating the Time article--Annie Lowrey points out that, whatever millennials' faults, we haven't exactly been given much to work with, observing that "even though the recession is over, this generation is not looking to gorge; instead, they are the kind of hungry that cannot stop thinking about food."

And over at Salon, Daniel D'Addario addresses the media's love affair with our love affair with attention, two phenomenons that would appear to be servicing each other in some kind of accidental circle-jerk. Lowrey and D'Addario's pieces are like better-researched, better-written takes on my own post from last year about millennial self-obsession conflicting with grim socio-economic reality and boomers' tendencies toward self-congratulation. As I wrote (yes, a millennial is about to quote himself; try not to swoon):

Remember: we did not set up the lavish high school graduation ceremonies--ostensibly for our benefit--during which self-important prigs like McCulloch tell us that we actually kinda suck.  Even when not used for the purposes of insulting us, what kind of attitudes do you expect these farces to instill in us?  To say nothing of the middle school, elementary school, and kindergarten graduations that I took part in growing up.  If our achievements are so banal, why throw the parties? 

I don't know how much of this sort of infantilizing castigation is spurred by a feeling of "how dare attention be lavished on people who aren't us; we're still here" (someone recently pointed out to me that Forrest Gump ends in the mid-80s, just about the time that the X-ers started moving in on the sort of culture-shaping that the film celebrates as the birthright of the boomers). But I suspect we can look forward to a few more, increasingly irritating years of this sort of thing. And by then we'll be chastising our own kids for spending so much time on the HoloNet having sex with space aliens, when they should be watching us Google ourselves.

This I can say with some certainty: generations that are given access to social networks can at least provide their own self-love, rather than having to demand that reverence from others.

"And The War Came"

This month marks the tenth anniversary of the beginning of the Iraq War. Remember the Iraq War? No? Well, it happened. Anyway, in observance of the aluminum jubilee, former pro-war hardliner Andrew Sullivan has been doing a retrospective, featuring reflections on the legacy of the war and an examination of his own evolved views regarding it.

Among the more trenchant portions of the thread is the focus on the war's opposition. "Opposition" here, of course, means the protestors; all the important Washington honchos of the time were behind the invasion, as Sullivan's thread notes repeatedly. As a result, visible opposition was generally limited to the street kind, which included a decent number of sensible people... and several less-sensible people. And, as we re-learn from time to time, those less-sensible people are more media-friendly (they're loud, they're colorful, they're easy to strawman, and thus end up on Fox News as the self-defeating faces of their own movement).

A lot of this is to be expected. If the question is what does an effective antiwar movement look like, the answer is that it doesn't. A pro-peace position is hard to shove into a powerful soundbite, even in clear-headed times. In the culture of swirling fear and anger that had persisted since 9/11, it was impossible. The only difference between pro-war emotionalism and anti-war emotionalism at times seemed to be that one side did its hyperventilating while wearing a suit. 

Of course it turns out that the poorly dressed anti-war loonies were, well, right. Yeah, awkward. There were no WMD's, Iraq was spiraling out of anyone's control, war crimes mounted, and it turned out we had no idea what we were doing because freedom can't be planned, apparently. The good news was that, by then, no one cared about the war and we were so entrenched in a country we had so thoroughly shattered that no one could really suggest that we should just leave. The bad news was that the war remained a really bad fucking idea.

I was about sixteen/seventeen at the time. And I was then living in a fairly backwoods part of Virginia that was firm Bush territory. Tractor Pulls were significant social events. The Confederate flag was on my high school's logo. One of the government teachers at that high school insisted totally straight-faced that socialism and communism were basically synonyms and he wouldn't hear any different because he had a bachelor's degree in Political Science and we didn't (I do now, and he's still wrong). So, being seventeen and a natural contrarian living in what I saw as a Faulknerian hellscape, you can see how I approached the various issues of the day.

In the end, I was right about the war by default; I chose to be against the side that was wrong. There were many sober, adult-type people who stood firm in their opposition based on the facts and have every right to gloat. But I wasn't one of them. I thought of myself as a part of the more respectable crew, but probably looked and sounded, by most standards, like the drum circlers and other white guys with dreadlocks. I just despised the man that had pushed for the thing.

I never understood Bush's appeal--even discounting the swagger and privilege. I shouldn't want to have a beer with the president. I know the people I drink with: I don't want them being president. Then there was the dichotomy of a Manichean-headed executive promoting vague goals built on abstract concepts. "War On Terror." "Freedom Agenda." Meaningless, borderline Orwellian phrases aimed at "the gut," because that was the decision-making organ in those years. In his most cynical maneuver, all opposition was preemptively decried as unpatriotic. Those of us who disagreed were made to feel alien in our own home, something I very much felt in rural Virginia. And this from a heterosexual, whose prospect for recognized love wasn't put to a referendum scheduled to help a president secure reelection. Bush was not the despot that many in the anti-war movement claimed, but damned if his divide-and-conquer techniques didn't reek of dusty totalitarian playbooks. I think I wrote a book about that. 

I softened in college, becoming generally disgusted with the whole bloody mess of politics. And though my early views were founded on a contrarian's fickle whims, some of the hard-wiring remains. My political consciousness was booted up during the rush to war, at which time George W. Bush taught to me to be a liberal. And his party's continuing unwillingness to cop to that administration's myriad blunders ensure that the Republican Party will have to work a lot harder for my vote than the Democrats ever will (no, a sudden interest in deficits and civil rights now that a Democrat is in office doesn't quite cut it). And I know I'm not the only member of my generation who feels that way.

Pundit historians will cite Obama and gay marriage and any number of other things as our reasons for our general reluctance to support the Republican Party. And those all fit. But it began with Bush. And his war. 

Ain't None of Us Special

This Open Letter From a Millennial is making the rounds.  And, as far as these things go, it's a damn good read.  Especially when read in response to the recent high school graduation commencement by David McCulloch, a speech which has, thus far, garnered significantly more attention than this Letter has, a trend which will likely continue.  I'll get to the speech in a bit. 

Detractors of the Letter will likely say that there's some projection coming from the writer, "Sierra," toward her own parents.  And that there's a tinge of rambling, barely focused frustration going on.  To the first point: possibly--no one could prove it either way.  To the second: yeah, maybe a little, but who can blame her?  And in either event, is she wrong?

I don't go in much for blaming parents for the problems of their children.  Even in cases where the parent clearly is to blame--which can be often--I feel that it's also a case of "nothing to be done now."  We can blame everything around us and, however right we may be, it solves very few problems.  But the least I think a generation can ask is a little sympathy and an understanding that no generation is perfect (some far from it); the thing about giving the "you're not special" speech or writing the "you're not special" article/book is that, to retain any high ground, you also have to admit that you yourself are not so special.  Our problems may be our own to solve, but when you waltz onto a stage and belch your righteous hand-washing in our faces, it reminds us why we've always sensed an air of anger and resentment hanging about the world you're preparing to give us.  As you rebelled against your own parents for not meeting the standards you set, now you blame us for not meeting other, slightly different standards.  It's always some other generation and not an issue of human nature itself being annoying.  Convenient, eh? 

Sierra covers most of the big points, from the expectations that were so high that we were assumed to need a hand-holding that crippled us more than helped us, to a shifting of the playing fields that has left us with disadvantages only pre-WWII generations can rightly scoff at.  Part of the reason I don't go in for generation-blaming is that once you start, you can do it forever, but if Sierra failed at anything (she didn't), it was leaving some more specific grievances off the table. 

For starters: we get called the tech-generation, and not as a compliment to our relative savvy with technologies that are more and more defining our economies and societies, but as an insult--slurring our unceasing connection to and with video games/smart phones/Facebook/Twitter/whatever else older generations refuse to simply ignore.  And this is fair, to a point.  We do, in a frighteningly unquestioning manner, embrace means of communication and entertainment that can both enhance and undermine our abilities to function and interact with others.  But it begs twin questions: who gave us these devices?  And why?  If a parent gives their child a video game system, the parent should assume the odds that the child may become addicted to a machine that provides instant gratification and reward for fairly little effort or slightly more reward for a lot (and I mean, a lot) of time and effort.  That's called "entrapment."  And so when our early attachment to these machines helps foster an attachment to electronic entertainment and connectivity more generally--and when similar devices continue to be pumped out through our formative years and beyond, by companies that our generation does not yet run--is it any wonder that we have such reliance on the machines? 

Ours was the generation that inherited the fear engendered by the viewing habits of older generations.  The A Current Affair-type programs that dominated early-mid 90s television coincided with our childhoods.  The first major world events that I remember getting pounded into my head over and over again from middle school through high school are, in order: The Columbine Massacre and its aftermath in our schools, the Lewinsky scandal, the Y2K scare, the 2000 Election debacle, and 9/11.  Every generation has its horrifying and stupefying episodes to endure and I don't want to take away from the generation that experienced My Lai, Kent State, and Watergate.  But wouldn't it be more helpful to acknowledge that our baggage is as legitimate as your own, and guide us through shit like that (when you can't stop it happening) with the knowledge you've gained, rather than simply dismissing us? 

Remember: we did not set up the lavish high school graduation ceremonies--ostensibly for our benefit--during which self-important prigs like McCulloch tell us that we actually kinda suck.  Even when not used for the purposes of insulting us, what kind of attitudes do you expect these farces to instill in us?  To say nothing of the middle school, elementary school, and kindergarten graduations that I took part in growing up.  If our achievements are so banal, why throw the parties? 

We then went to overpriced colleges (I'll let you off the hook for this one and not ask "who made them so overpriced in the first place?") that you told us were necessary.  An amazing gambit, that.  You tell us we need college, so we all go, and suddenly, with so many degrees floating about, it really is necessary!  Those degrees are so necessary, in fact, that a mere bachelor's won't do it in some parts of the country anymore.  We have to go back for advanced degrees, deepening our debt and, in many cases, keeping us away for that much longer from the jobs and real world experience that employers also crave. 

We then graduate into a shitty economy that we, again, had no hand in making.  We have to inherit a debt that previous generations are politically incapable of paying off; the entitlements and tax-cuts that they cannot sacrifice even a portion of become our burdens.  We have to watch while Boomers refuse to retire, either because they can't or won't, and watch once reliable industries go abroad because we literally cannot lower our standard of living to the levels that China and India have done.  I mean, we could try, but where would that leave us in your eyes?  As the generation that let America slip to third world status because we had to eat?

And you wonder why we hide ourselves in video games and Internet message boards.  

Much of my generation is intolerable and self-involved and in dire need of an attitude readjustment.  You won't hear an argument from me there.  The good news is, we're getting that readjustment.  We get it every time we apply for fifty more jobs we're not going to get call backs for.  We get it every time we receive another notice about overdue student loans.  We get it every time our exceedingly patient parents can't quite stifle the eye roll when we have to ask to stay with them a while longer.

The bad news is that every time we try to pick ourselves back up, there's a small and irrationally bitter person like McCulloch, standing there, telling us how bad we are at getting up.  You think speeches like that do a goddamned thing for inter-generational relations?  Or encourages us to engage with you on your terms and your terms only?  How did your generation respond when your own parents grumbled about your lack of respect and initiative?  Are our values inherently less important than yours?  If they aren't, if our concerns as inhabitants of the same rock are equally valid, then surely you can find a better way, as the older and more experienced generation, to encourage us to push ourselves through a harsh world that you had your own hand in shaping.  Something that doesn't involve insulting us.

But if I'm wrong there, and you do believe that your generation's values are more worthy of addressing than ours, then, simply put: you ain't so fucking special yourselves.

CNN, Tone-Deaf

So as my time-off wound to a close, I happened to catch this story on CNN.  You can watch it yourself, but a quick summation: Harvard MBA grad Joe Mihalic racks up $90,000 in student debt and pays it off in about seven months.  Impressive by most any standard.

But.

The thing about getting into a Harvard master's program is that someone who does is likely to have relatively significant means in the first place.  And even someone who had to take advantage of every scholarship they could find under every rock they could hoist is likely to come out of it with advantages that students from non-Ivy's don't usually have.  Mihalic says on his site that he "started a job with a modest income (relative to my banking and consulting peers) in the tech industry of Austin."  You may have noticed the use of "relative" there.  Mihalic admits to spending $1,300/month on "entertainment" before he got his act together.  He bought a house, furniture for the house, two cars, and a motorcycle.  His worries were that he wouldn't be able to start a family, or a business, or acquire a business and turn it around.  This was two years out of school.  Mihalic may have had a lot of student debt (more than the average student), but anyone who thinks he had anything else in common with the average student is fooling themselves. 

In the nation of Horatio Alger there's always someone eager to intentionally miss the point of any argument and change the discussion by playing the "stop belittling the successful" card.  But this is not about Mihalic.  Sure, he had means and resources most students could only dream of, but he responsibly put them to good use (eventually) and dragged himself out of the debt he acquired.  I truly mean when I say: good for him.

No, this is about CNN and it's pre-commercial break teaser about "learning a lesson or two" from Mihalic (and following up with a pithy "good lesson for us all" at the end of the interview--who is "us all" and how do I join them?).  Just a day or so before launching their hours-long Jubilee flogging (hosted by outdated British caricature Richard Quest and possible accessory to illegal phone-hacking Piers Morgan), CNN's midday programming deigned to tell soon-to-be and recent graduates that all they need to do is buckle down and acquire the resources of a Joe Mihalic.  No wait, they couldn't even be that honest.  Instead, they set up an insulting chart with five recommendations for reducing debt, based on Mihalic's plan:

• Got a roommate (I may be out of touch, but isn't this standard for most college and post-college students?)
• Didn't go out to eat (one I admittedly don't follow as much as I should, but given how much Mihalic says he was doing this after grad school, I have to imagine that he racked up more significant food bills than most)
• Took a second job (sure, right after I nab that first job)
• Sold unnecessary items (can I keep one of my cars and my motorcycle?)
• Planned free dates (see the thing about going out to eat)

In fact, some of Mihalic's strategies sound decent: dump the 401K, forget about savings (by the way, he had apparently accumulated some $30K in savings--just like all other recent college grads).  These might be extreme methods, but remember that in your twenties, student debt is rather more daunting than retirement planning.  More importantly for CNN: these suggestions wouldn't look so nice and inoffensive on the graphic.  It is Saturday afternoon, after all, can't do anything too heavy.  And heaven forbid they examine why college is so expensive in the first place or why debt amnesty pushes never seem to go anywhere.  No, just show them a clean cut kid who did the implausible and gloss over the privileges he had to both earn and inherit first--that'll let us tell those brats that "it can be done so they should stop complaining."

Young people aren't watching anyway, right?  Yeah, fuck 'em.

2030: The Real Story of What Happens To America

One of my favorite anecdotes involves a young comedian running into comedy legend Albert Brooks outside a grocery store.  The young comedian stands in amazement and says, "I'm sorry to bother you, but I love your work."  Brooks replies, "Do you?  That's wonderful!  Here, have all of my change!" 

Albert Brooks' novel 2030: The Real Story of What Happens To America is not as funny as that.  It never tries to be.  What it does try to do is examine the debt crisis from the perspective of--you guessed it--the year 2030.  Brooks establishes that not only has the debt crisis has not been solved by this point, it's actually gotten much worse.  True to life, people have spent the intervening decades complaining about the debt, and making political hay out of complaining about the debt, but nothing's gotten done, aside from create a government where literally nothing can get done anymore.  I mean, really nothing getting done, not even rebuilding Los Angeles after it gets leveled by a 9.1-magnitude earthquake.  In 2030, people at first can't believe that the federal government can't do anything.  Then they remember why that is.

Brooks gets a few heartstring tugs out of the devastation, usually centering on property loss and the resulting personal debt many face, particularly the older members of the population.  Debt seems unavoidable and omnipresent at all levels, except for those lucky individuals who earned enough billions to no longer have to care, or inherited enough millions that it no longer impacts them, though they might pretend it does. 

Brooks mentions that President Matthew Bernstein, the steward and likely victim of these impossible crises, was born in the 1980s.  That makes him my age, to within half a decade, and gives him a perspective on the problems of debt and never-ending end-of-life care that are somewhere between the older generations' insistence on holding on to all they can, and younger generations' much more extreme bitterness over the fact.  And then there are the political considerations, dragging Bernstein this way and that in the resources' tug of war, while he has several other things he'd rather attend to. 


The word "boomer" is used twice in the book, once in the context of a generation soaking up resources as a matter of course while living seemingly forever, and that in a brief, emotion-driven dialogue piece.  This is one of a few minor points where Brooks ignores a serious cause for the debt problem.  Much of the potential insolvency of earned entitlements in the real world is due to the Boomers.  Not in their refusal to die (no generation can claim that desire as their own), but in their size.  Between the Greatest Generations' apparent disdain for contraceptives and new technologies keeping people alive longer, the Boomers attained--and have maintained--the prized status of demographic anomaly.  They'll brag about all that was accomplished during the sixties, forgetting that it's a lot easier to make an impact through dropping out and protesting when you and your cohorts make up that much of the population.  And their grip on power is not diminishing, as Brooks makes clear in 2030.  He satisfyingly casts the AARP as a semi-major obstacle in most attempts to alleviate the crisis; their constituency being so vast by the year 2030 that its collective eyebrow raising is understandably terrifying for democratic leaders. 

Of course, no resource is finite and that means there's a younger population getting screwed as "the olds" live longer and longer (among other things, cancer's been cured).  Given that, one could see why the younger generation would be but resentful, except to the olds, who refuse to sympathize even at the expense of their own children and grandchildren, as Brooks explicitly writes at one point (and I'd be lying if I said this kind of childish refusal to understand the plight of those born into the situation didn't strike a chord).  What starts with unconnected assaults on the olds soon grows into organized movements, requiring only leadership.  It was impossible for me not to notice the similarities between 2030's Max Leonard and Nos Populus' James Reso.  While Brooks' radical firebrand and my own do seem to share some DNA, they differ in a few key areas.  James, of course, plays a much larger role in my book than Leonard does in 2030, and they have very different motivators, though a comparable devotion to their respective work.  Leonard's radicalism is present nearly from the beginning, while James' bubbles up over time, after years of frustration.  Finally, negotiations with their presidents is better planned-for by Leonard, but ultimately handled (marginally) better by James.  Nevertheless, they share some very similar fates and resulting legacies. 

It's a testament to Brooks' fair observation of the situation (he himself is a first wave Boomer) that he never anoints a hero.  When the young refuse to engage or instead engage through terrorism, they lose any moral or practical grounds to improve their situation.  Self-serving and overpowering though the olds are, they cannot be entirely blamed if the young are not organized and reasonable in their response, which the young of 2030 are not.  In this way, 2030 reminded me of Christopher Buckley's excellent Boomsday in its depiction of an America so divided--not by ideology but by age--that the best hope of solving our problems are zany or terrifying strategies that sound effective but may never match our expectations. 

The resulting inability for anyone to do anything about the debt means that when Los Angeles is destroyed, not even China is willing to help anymore, unless the U.S. is open to a somewhat radical new arrangement.  And if you've ever heard a government official grouse about crippling debt (and you have), you can imagine the sorts of things that the government would be open to doing.  Honestly, the deal that's made with the Chinese is intriguing to me at least on an aesthetic level, even if it does seem to cement the olds' untouchable status.  And among Brooks' more potentially prescient moments (aside from a dozen or so consumer electronics he invents) is China's increasingly weary attitude toward its largest debtor giving rise to a previously unthinkable--though not necessarily offensive--outcome. 

Brooks wisely does not attempt to solve the debt crisis.  By the end of the book, with attention divided between L.A.'s rebuilding and the fallout from Max Leonard's mad scheme, the debt that had dominated the consciousnesses of everyone in the book has taken a backseat, while never truly being done away with.  At least, the conditions that created it are still present, and a new president appears ready to double-down on some of them.  The country cannot, will not shake itself free of its commitments and its debt.  Maybe by 2050. 

Grade: B+

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Afterword: On the off chance that Albert Brooks ever reads this review: Hi.  I know that I'm posting this almost exactly one year after the publication of 2030.  I'm sorry.  In my defense, I've only had this blog for about six weeks.  Also, can I have all of your change?