The Silenced Majority

I know I often conjecture about the disparity of concerns between the media and the American people, often without any evidence save the nagging sense that the D.C. media's preoccupation with reporting on the trivialities of political strategy has indirectly contributed to the series of giant pickles we now find ourselves facing as a nation. The Andrea Mitchells and Chris Matthews are the Neros of our time, fiddling as the world--in some cases literally--burns.

There was a great article in a Times blog about the disconnect between the Washington media and the general populace and it manifests itself every time a public figure is badgered to explain himself after criticizing Bush and his administration. As this Times piece points out, the recent upbraidal of Jimmy Carter seemed to be a case of D.C. media imposing cocktail party decorum:

Something seems a little out of whack between the mainstream media and the American people. Take the arguments of the past few days over former President Jimmy Carter's remarks about the Bush administration and the consequences of its particular brand of foreign policy. Carter didn't attack President Bush personally, but said that "as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history," which can't really be too far out of line with what many Americans think.
In coverage typical of much of the media, however, NBC Nightly News asked whether Carter had broken "an unwritten rule when commenting on the current president," and portrayed Carter's words - unfairly it seems- as a personal attack on President Bush. Fox News called it "unprecedented." Yet as an article in this newspaper <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/washington/22carter.html> on Tuesday pointed out, "presidential scholars roll their eyes at the notion that former presidents do not speak ill of current ones."

This guy is absolutely right. I'm no presidential scholar, but I seem to recall reading many times of Teddy Roosevelt's vocieferous criticism of William Howard Taft's leadership. Anyway, getting in a tizzy over whether an ex-president criticizes a sitting president sanctions the office as a regal post where all former officeholders are loyal to the myth of the office, which runs counter to the fundmanetal tenets of this lower-case republican nation.

The recent acceding of the Democrats to the timetable-free Bush war funding bill is a prime example of the party being influenced by the popular though incorrect wisdom that their original war funding bill would be viewed as taking resources away from frontline troops. The writer offers a plausible exegis on the source of the Democrats dissonance and the resulting contrition it provokes on their part to the supremely unpopular Bush administration.

I wonder whether this media distortion also persists because it doesn't meet with enough criticism, and if that's partially because many Americans think that what they see in the major political media reflects what most other Americans really think - when actually it often doesn't.

Psychologists coined the term "pluralistic ignorance" in the 1930s to refer to this type of misperception - more a social than an individual phenomenon - to which even smart people might fall victim.
[...]
In pluralistic ignorance, as described by researchers Hubert O'Gorman and Stephen Garry in a 1976 paper published in Public Opinion Quarterly, "moral principles with relatively little popular support may exert considerable influence because they are mistakenly thought to represent the views of the majority, while normative imperatives actually favored by the majority may carry less weight because they are erroneously attributed to a minority." What is especially disturbing about the process is that it lends itself to control by the noisiest and most visible.
[...]
Think of the proposal to put a timetable on the withdrawal of troops from Iraq, supported, the latest poll says, by 60 percent of Americans <http://pewresearch.org/pubs/473/closeness-to-troops-boosts-support-for-war-but-not-by-much> , but dropped Tuesday from the latest war funding bill <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/23/washington/23cong.html> .

As the title suggests, there is as much a silent majority today as there was back when Nixon first uttered the powerful phrase at the height of the Vietnam War, but this majority is even more silenced by the D.C. media's insistence upon what concerns the "average American." If you've listened to members of the mainstream media over the years, the average American has not been too concerned with the Downing Street Memo, the Abramoff scandal, the Libby conviction, the U.S. Attorneys firings, ad infinitum. Using this logic, some members of the media fail to report on any of these incidents in a meaningful way and instead analyze the culpabilty of the players as a question of how well they spin their innocence. As a result, the media has shirked its duty to bring attention to the plagues to a democratic society--venality and autocracy--by claiming unjustifiably that the American people are too stupid to care.

In San Francisco

I'm at my friend Steph's in San Francisco and have been up for almost 24-hours, though I did take some naps on the plane. My inclination when I visit new places is to make generalizations about the people who live there. When I walk into a coffee shop or store, I categorize everyone as a San Franciscan and view their actions as reflecting upon the vibe of their city. The crazy man who yelled at the clerk at Green Apple Books in Inner Richmond about how he "controls his own money" and "wants to be respected" (yeah, this guy was nuts--he was even carrying a rain stick!) is an emblem of the zany tendencies of some of the San Fran residents. The kind people who smiled at me when I moved my bags out of the way for them on the bus are imbued with a California calm that allows them to be much more considerate and thoughtful than the people out East. Today a car almost hit me making a right turn when I had the right of way, but rather than speeding through the turn or glaring at me, the driver actually waved apologetically. It's nice that people have some remorse for their unintended recklessness. Is this San Franciscan, though? Is speeding like a frazzled, over-caffeinated a-hole Distrcit of Columbian? Why is it so tempting to generalize about a locale, anyway?

Breaking down what we broadly refer to as feminism

One of the greatest triumphs for a historian is to convincingly argue that a conventionally accepted account of a time period or event is incorrect or at the very least, simplistic. To realize that a common conception of the past is flawed or shallow is jolting and transformational. It revises how we analyze current problems and what we identify as their root causes.

Over the course of the last several years, I came to understand that my view of the 1960s and 1970s was formed by an overbroad paradigm: that during that short period of time, society and culture as a whole progressed. While I think certain events during the time period represented progress--women gaining admittance to college and pre-professional programs at greater rates, the end of state-enforced segregation--I realize that, as in so many eras, these are specific achievements that do not necessarily endorse other accomplishments of the time even if they lie within the same realm of "women's issues," achievements like the so-called sexual revolution. Nonetheless, people often conflate every achievement in the realm of women's issues into one great big movement towards Progress and Enlightenment. Others wholly vilify the entire era as the end of institutions' moral authority. I think that this recent era, like so many others, brought changes that should be examined free of these two opposing dialectics that so often hijack our conversation about them.

Take the women's movement and its legacies today. There is good and bad. The bad, in my opinion, is embodied by the "hook-up culture." I recently got into a pretty intense argument with some co-workers about whether such a culture exists and whether it is problematic. I think there have been some recent developments, the confluence of which make a hook-up culture more practicable than it would have been in the past. Here are a few: (relatively) easy and legal availability of birth control, a view that dating and going steady are the chaste activities of a bygone era, the equating of men's needs and women's needs, the trend of disassociating sex from emotion (and the idea that emotions are burdensome), to name a few. I'm not saying I find all of these developments problematic, but I think they are valid explanations for today's hook-up culture, a term which, when searched in google, yields a plethora of interesting articles and conversation; world like "perils" and "misery" immediately catch one's attention.

Of course, the bad always comes with the good, which means the sexual revolution should not be treated as a bogeyman, but it should not be treated as a natural outgrowth of feminism either. On the contrary, it can be vigorously debated without jeopardizing the achievements of women in other areas.

An argument between letter writers on Salon has broken out over the question of whether college women who participate in a "Tennis Pros and Hos" party are revelling healthily in their sexuality or demeaning themselves. Many of the letter writers seem tethered to the paradigms of the 1960s and 1970s, namely, new feminism and hostility towards older generations.

One premise of the writers who found no problem with the "Hos" party that troubled me is the idea that women should not be subjected to double standard-fueled scorn for simply acting like men. This then inherently sanctions the behavior of men as the standard. I don't understand why it is such a problem for women not to act like men or not flaunt their sexuality for men (anyone who thinks "Girls Gone Wild" is a feminist exercise is deluded) and instead try and assert a new standard, one that does not conform to the hyper-sexualized media-driven absurdity of our current age.

Furthermore, those writers who place full faith in the judgement of 21-year olds and scorn the opinions of their parents are entirely possessed by the 60s/70s generation gap frame. They are jettisoning practical thinking, which is, why shouldn't a parent worry about their child, especially if she appears to be making poor decisions?

Oprah and a Lottery Culture

Peter Birkenhead at Salon has an excellent article today about Oprah's enthusiastic campaign on behalf of a self-help book called The Secret, by Australian talk show host Rhonda Byrne. According to Birkenhead, The Secret is social darwinism preached with a treacly, new age spin. It espouses such wisdom as this: "The only reason any person does not have enough money is because they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts." As Birkenhead says, Oprah's endorsement of this book calls into question her newest philanthropy project, the opening of an all girls school called the Leadership Academy in South Africa:

On the special, Oprah talked far more about what the school would do for the girls' self-esteem and material lives than what it would do for their intellects -- sometimes sounding as if she was reading directly from "The Secret." And in discussing what she was looking for in prospective students, she didn't talk about finding the next Eleanor Roosevelt or Sally Ride or Jane Smiley. Instead she used "Entertainment Tonight" language like "It Girl" to describe her ideal candidate. She praised the girls for their spirit, for how much they "shined" and "glowed," but never for their ideas or insights. Oprah puts a lot of energy and money into aesthetics -- on her show, in her magazine, at her school. The publishers of "The Secret" have learned well from their sponsor and are just as visually savvy.

Shouldn't we be grateful that Oprah is doing good, one might retort, what does it matter how she chooses to do it? The problem with Oprah's brand of altruism is two-pronged: it's fundamentally narcissitic, and it knows only lavishness--it is never applied in moderation. Oprah's shows are all about Oprah and her reactions. We need to find her jokes hilarious, think her life story a model, and sit in wait until she reveals who she's supporting for president. We need to awe at her beneficence as she showers her audience with big ticket gifts like cars and homes. I am compelled at this point to think of the Jewish scholar Maimonedes' eight levels of tzedakah, of giving, where the lowest levels are those where the recipient and giver both know each other's identities. Oprah never rises above the lowest levels. She requires that her beneficence be broadcast, that her identity be known to the beneficiary, that her imprint of luxury be made upon all that she gives.

As Birkenhead points out, her philantrhopy is unfailingly television-savvy:

Oprah's TV special about the Leadership Academy, essentially an hour long infomercial, was just as well-coiffed and "visuals"-heavy. In fact, when Oprah was choosing her students, her important criteria must have included their television interview skills. On-camera interviews with the girls were the centerpiece of the special, but as one spunky, telegenic candidate after another
beamed her smile at the camera, I couldn't help wondering how Joyce Carol Oates or Gertrude Stein or Madame Curie would have fared -- would they have "shined"
and "glowed," or more likely talked in non-sound-bite-friendly paragraphs and maybe even, God forbid, the sometimes "dark" tones of authentic people, and been
rejected. Sadly, the girls themselves (and who can blame them, desperate 12-year-olds trying to flatter their potential benefactor) parroted banal Oprah-isms, like "I want to be the best me I can be," and "Be a leader not a follower" and "Don't blend in, blend out," with smiley gusto.

This form of beneficence, in which the benefactor TV personality acts as savior to the destitute is lottery-style philanthropy. One must hope to win the attention of an Oprah to have his story aired on television and his life changed by a TV crew. "Extreme Makeover: Home Edition," hosted by Trading Spaces' Ty Pennington is another television show that promotes the hosts' altruism and a win-the-lottery approach to life by lavishing a Sharper Image store's worth of the newest in home entertainment upon the homeowner. It seems that Oprah and Ty Pennington cannot bestow anything less than the best (or biggest) upon their beneficiary. As Birkenhead puts it:

One of Oprah's signature gimmicks has been giving stuff away to her audience ("giving" here means announcing the passing of stuff from corporate sponsors to audience members), most notably in a popular segment called "My Favorite Things." These bits have revealed an Oprah who truly revels in consumer culture, and who can seem astonishingly oblivious to the way most people live and what they can afford. She seems to celebrate every event and milestone with extravagant stuff, indeed to not know how to celebrate without it.

While one person or 350 young woman have won the lottery by winning Ty's or Oprah's fleeting interest, one wonders whether such abundance of resources could be spread out more evenly. While it's better that "Extreme Makeover" focus its energies on refurbishing a park hit by Hurricane Katrina and a soup kitchen hit by Hurricane Wilma than on revamping the home of a well-healed yuppy, it is worrisome that one has to hope for the attentions of a television show or else remain forgotten. After all, "Extreme Makeover"'s crew cannot possibly rehab all of the destitute areas of the country, every New Orleans or Appalachia or South Bronx, especially if it feels the need to include plasma televisions and Sub-zero refrigerators in each home. Nor can Oprah be expected to educate millions of children in Africa. In a society where people look to "Extreme Makeover" to do what this government cannot do, one has to hope to be one of the chosen few.

I Love this Guy

I have recently begun to avidly follow the column of Salon's Cary Tennis. Tennis has been in the job for awhile, but I think the tone and subjects of the column topics seem more relevant to me now that I have been catapulted out of college and into the so-called real world, where choices are not prescribed or easy. Tennis's column is a veritable display of the human condition: it features people who have pursued their dream and people who haven't, people who have been crushed by over-ambition and those who have been crushed by ennui. What it impacts upon me is that old saying that the grass always appears greener on the other side, a thought that actually can become somewhat freeing if one's life has been monopolized by investing so much in a future, in getting to that other side.

Tennis's effectiveness comes in his authenticity. He acknowledges that he hasn't figured it all out and lacks the condescension that is common among career advice givers which makes him far superior to the Ask Amys and Dr. Phils of this world. His writers tend to be very thoughtful people as well: what many among them seem to be looking for is someone who can reason with them--perhaps dispel as irrational their worst fears--without looking down upon them. He tends not to give straight advice but rather to expound on the writer's quandry with a mix of life experience and general reflectiveness. In yesterday's column, he responded to a creative writing student who, in pursuing her dream, had become fundamentally discouraged of her writing abilities and of her old definition of success. This is where Tennis's column becomes therapy--though hopefully not schadenfreude--for me: in seeing that others are also reckoning with past decisions and trying to make new ones and are feeling a little shaky and unsatisfied all the while. In all of this, it is so valuable that Tennis does not blithely and reliably say "follow your dream" on the one hand or "don't risk it" on the other, that he does not proffer a right answer. Instead, he talks about his experience. His answer to the paralyzed MFA student:

Thank you for writing. I am glad you are going to finish the program. No matter what you decide to do later, it is good to finish the program and get your degree.

I went to graduate school in creative writing as an egotistical person. I was concerned with whether people thought I was brilliant.

This brilliance was a brittle thing, a bright, cold shell I had made in junior high to wear to school and around town like a gown of dazzling and invisible power to keep predators at bay; it was a fast-thinking thing, a mean, clever thing, a way to stay aloft and aloof. I took it with me when I left home. I used it to not learn anything.

But you get older and defeat forces you to learn things you didn't think you needed to know, or didn't want to learn or didn't think were important, or thought were beneath you.

Here is the big main thing I learned: My writing is not here to support me. I am here to support my writing.

How it came about was I endured some failure as a writer trying to make money as a writer, and had to work at other things for five years. During that time I wrote but not for money. I wrote on the subway, alone, in a notebook, sitting by myself in the crowd. I wrote to save myself.

It turned out that writing to save myself was the best way to write. Here is why, I think: Our writing is the voice of a person who is innocent, powerless and in need of protection; our writing is the voice of a person who needs to be heard as he or she really is. It is deep stuff is what I mean. And shocking as it is to say, the person who is writing this -- the person I am today -- is the kind of person toward whom I once would have leveled pitiless scorn.

Yikes, I'm glad I'm not a pre-adolescent

Part of the pathos here should simply be chalked up to this being Long Island, but sheesh:

They writhe and strut, shake their bottoms, splay their legs, thrust their chests out and in and out again. Some straddle empty chairs, like lap dancers without laps. They don’t smile much. Their faces are locked from grim exertion, from all that leaping up and lying down without poles to hold onto. “Don’t stop don’t stop,” sings Janet Jackson, all whispery. “Jerk it like you’re making it choke. ...Ohh. I’m so stimulated. Feel so X-rated.” The girls spend a lot of time lying on the floor. They are in the sixth, seventh and eighth grades.

As each routine ends, parents and siblings cheer, whistle and applaud. I just sit there, not fully comprehending. It’s my first suburban Long Island middle school talent show.

There is something wrong with our culture and its nonexistent standards when relatives are cheering at this like fools. Kind of makes you wonder whether adolescence was worth defining as a stage of life and whether the sexual revolution has been taken to its most absurd end.

Top Ten Cool Things of the Year (in the U.S.)

This wasn't such a great year. The situation in Iraq deteriorated even more, and yet OJ Simpson's absurd book seemed to generate more outrage among some--namely the over employed entertainment media. So, what was great about 2006? Not a whole lot. Doing my best to remember what on earth happened this year, I'll try to extract the few cool things that did happen, in no particular order:

1. Stephen Colbert at the Annual White House Correspondents Dinner: In May, Colbert helped draw attention to an event that usually serves as a bad inside joke for a few hundred people by humorously critcizing the president's famous ego. He mocked Bush's supposed steely resolve--"Events can change; this man's beliefs never will"--cutting it down to the publicity stunt it is:

I stand by this man. I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers, and rubble, and recently flooded city squares. And that sends a strong message: that no matter what happens to America, she will always rebound—with the most powerfully staged photo ops in the world.

Not only was Colbert's bit itself hilarious, but it became a watershed media event. YouTube, 2006's ubiquitous website, proved especially useful in the days after the event, allowing people to access what really went down at the dinner rather than taking the mainstream media's word for it. Their word was often non-existent, because many outlets initially determined the event not newsworthy--including The New York Times and The Chicago Tribune--despite the ramifications of the event: one of the country's most clever comedians had pointedly skewered one of the most insulated of modern presidents, who was sitting just a few feet away. It should be no surprise then that the second target of Colbert's routine was the lackadaisical media--many in attendance at the dinner--who have so often failed to vigorously question George W. Bush about his agenda:

Over the last five years, you people were so good—over tax cuts, WMD intelligence, the effect of global warming. We Americans didn't want to know, and you had the courtesy not to try to find out. ... And then you write, 'Oh, they're just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic.' First of all, that is a terrible metaphor. This administration is not sinking. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg!

The event was remarkable for fusing politics and entertainment for constructive good, for being accessibile to a mass audience, and for serving as a jumping off point for debate about the usefulness of the media. The Colbert performance at the White House Correspondents' Dinner is perhaps the emblematic event of a year of consumer participation in newsmaking.

2. The Democratic Victory in the 2006 Congressional Elections: One can easily imagine the media narrative that would have persisted had the Republicans maintained control of Congress after the November 2006 elections: that Americans were satisfied with the direction of the War in Iraq despite visible reservations, that the economy wasn't bad enough to require a renewed focus on growing inequity--like the recent cuts in student aid and the failure to increase the minimum wage--and that, in general, Americans were satisfied with the Republican social agenda. A wisdom that had prevailed for years changed on November 7.

Up against a gerrymandered Congress, the Democrats still won big in the House. They also managed to eke out victory in the Senate, knocking out some formidable incumbents like George Allen of Virginia and Conrad Burns of Montana. Furthermore, they won with great help from the so-called "liberal bloggers," whose fundraising, organizing, and message generating did justice to the term netroots. The Democrats in 2006 were not the Democrats of 1996, who relied upon the contributions of moneyed coffers and directed most of their energies to retaining the presidency rather than making inroads in Congress.

The new Congress is focusing on a different course in Iraq--though it is still up to the intransigent President to assume one--and on economic issues that were ignored under one-party rule. Plus, the 2006 election was also a victory against apathy, with the number of voters up in the usually less participatory midterm elections. Especially encouraging: 24 percent of Americans 18-30 voted, the largest percentage in 20 years.

3. Harvard, then Princeton and UVA, End Early Decision: In September, Harvard and then Princeton and the University of Virginia moved to end the early admission option, deciding that it favored savvier applicants from more advantaged backgrounds. Although other top schools do not yet see the need to eliminate early decision, Harvard at least brought to attention the need for universities to be attentive to the disparate sophistication of prospective students with the college application process. Although some schools, like my Alma mater Northwestern, have made some reasonable points on why early decision still suits them, it is good for universities to publicly discuss institutional inequities. Hopefully, Harvard and its peers will figure out how better to assist both low income and middle class students with the costs of their education.

4. TV Programming Continues to Improve: Although there is still drek on television--there always will be--some TV programming continues to delight. While I think some of the critics favorite shows, particularly "Weeds" and "Scrubs" are overrated, "The Office," "The Colbert Report," "The Daily Show," and HBO programming continue to shine. "The Office" was rightfully awarded an Emmy for its fantastic ability to find humor in the mundane and for the genuine performances put forth by its cast. After a reportedly bumpy first year, "The Office" figured out how to adeptly adapt the British version to reflect the nature of the American workplace in year two. (Now, there is a French and German version of "The Office," showing that the workplace is a universal source of humor, though not necessarily the same humor). Office romances, career dissatisfaction, narrow-mindedness, and the American work ethic are depicted realistically and hilariously. To think, 10 years ago, the only good things going on network TV were "Frasier," "Friends" (meh) and "Seinfeld," and the sitcom (shudder) reigned supreme. Hopefully, the cool event of 2007 will be that cable companies lose their regional monopolies and prices decrease (I wish).

5. Some Bad People Went to Prison: This year, Jack Abramoff and Jeffrey Skilling, two men who enjoyed far too much power in the 1990s, were convicted to formidable prison terms. Abramoff was convicted of conspiracy to bribe a public official, defrauding a client, and tax evasion, and was sentenced to the minimum of 10-years, in anticipation that he will cooperate with investigations of other corruption cases. He and his lobbying firm contributed to the excess of Republican-controlled Washington. Abramoff was intimately involved with disgraced former majority leader Tom DeLay, who his lobbying firm treated to trips to the North Mariana Islands, and Abramoff himself secretly funded the trips of other Republican Representatives. Abramoff's corruption is too extensive to document here, but concurrent to his demise went the careers of a lot of disgraceful people, including DeLay, Randall "Duke" Cunningham, and Robert Ney.

Jeff Skilling, former CEO of the defunct Enron Corporation might be the person most single-handedly responsible for the California electricity crisis of 2000-2001, in which the state's recently deregulated electricty grid allowed for Enron employees to manipulate the energy markets in there, causing prices to spike and supply to be unevenly distributed. Too bad Skilling can't provide redress for all of the pension plans that were decimated by the Enron collapse as well as for the electricty bills and costs incurred by the state of California during the energy crisis.

6. Immigrant Rallies Across the Nation: Often defined by their demagogic opposition, tens of thousands of immigrants and those in favor of immigrant interests rallied across the nation in April, drawing attention to their contributions and advertising their presence to Congress, which was then considering immigration reform. For a group that fills mostly the least desirable jobs in the country, immigrants get a lot of flack, despite that the United States is a nation of immigrants. A typical complaint against illegal immigrants is that they use up public services, but wouldn't pushing for legalization and thereby getting them to pay into the system be a good way to prevent this? Of course, this would have to be accompanied by pay approximating a living wage...

7. FDA Approves HPV Vaccine and Plan B OTC: The current administration has not wholly succeeded in stymieing progress of its agencies. The FDA approved the Human papillomavirus vaccine and over the counter (OTC) Plan B contraception. Though religious zealots will probably tell you otherwise, there is never anything wrong with vaccinating against a sexually transmitted disease. The idea that it encourages unprotected sex or sex in general is like saying that a flu vaccine encourages not washing one's hands. The approval of Plan B also generated controversy, but it will make an unpleasant process easier to handle for many people.

8. An Inconvenient Truth Brings More Attention to Global Warming: In a year of erratic temperatures and a hostile climate, Al Gore used his influence and celebrity for good, bringing attention to the force behind climate fluctuations. It is amazing that the existence of global warming needs such a forceful defense, even though it is not in scientific dispute, but that is why Gore's contribution was so constructive. Though of course not as watchable as a movie like Casino Royale, Gore does an admirable job of meticulously deconstructing the arguments against global warming and detailing those for it. If parts of our country are submerged under water in the not too distant future, Al Gore can (somberly) say I told you so.

9. Google Buys YouTube: In an acquisition that didn't reek of evil, the search engine giant bought out the user-generated content giant. Not only does YouTube's searchable video content model seem commensurate with Google's model, but Google appears to be an encouraging parent corporation, managing to maintain the integrity and while innovating its other acquisitions, like this here software I'm using. (Meanwhile, the telecom market is consolidated by another dispiriting merger, as AT&T's absorption of Bell South Corp. is approved by the FCC).

10. Bob Woodward's State of Denial Released: The tipping point of popular opinion against George W. Bush must surely have been reached when Bob Woodward--establishment journalist and former Bush administration cheerleader--released State of Denial: Bush at War, Part III. Woodward's book seemed to cement the view that the War in Iraq was a mistake, and that its execution was poorly managed at best, providing an indictment of all of the key actors in the administration who consistently lied and misled over the years to save face.

This was a pretty difficult list to come up with, because this was a pretty difficult year, but I know I'm forgetting things. Please comment with any additional suggestions or any recommended subtractions.

The blogging landscape of 2006

Bloggers were the targets of many verbal floggings this year. The view towards the act of blogging became more hostile and more mocking, hostile towards those who would deign themselves worthy enough to express opinions on that which they are not experts, mocking of those who feel the need to publish the mundane events of their daily lives to make them available to the world.

As political bloggers on the center-left became more influential this election year, they were derided by professional columnists like David Broder and David Brooks. Broder accused them of vituperation and general ineffectiveness back in June when the YearlyKos convention was taking place. "Thus, we have blogger Jerome Armstrong, a Kos partner, arguing for mounting campaigns everywhere, no matter the odds," he chided then. And yet, some of the most unlikely success stories of the Democratic upset were those supported by the bloggers, and some of the most stunning defeats were those picked by the establishment. Thus emerged Senators-elect Jon Tester and Jim Webb. Thus languished Tammy Duckworth and Harold Ford, Jr.

Still, bloggers did not catch a break in 2006. Instead, establishment writers took it upon themselves to drown out the cacophony. Bloggers became representative of an advent of "narcissim," as another professional columnist, George Will put it. "So much of what is done on the web is people getting on there and writing their diaries as though everyone ought to care about everyone’s inner turmoils. I mean, it’s extraordinary," Will lamented earlier this month. Why all of this fulminating over the massification of writing? Broder, Brooks, and Will imply that writing is for an elite, and when the masses do it, it becomes incendiary, uncivil, and artless. Expressing one's opinion through blog channels is an act of narcissim (never mind that Will does it every week in his column for the Washington Post).

Little-acknowledged in all of the commentary about blogs and bloggers is what to make of the phenomenon it evidences: that millions of people across the world are driven to write in their free time. Writing, which we feared a dying skill, mauled by the allure of cognitive disengagement encouraged by visual media, particularly the television, and the laziness of the current vernacular, is enjoyable to millions. Sure, the instantaneousness of blogging does not promote revision, but it does not hinder it either. Though Time's person of the year might have been lame, I find it amazing and gratifying that those without access to the establishment channels of communication--television, newspapers--are embracing the Internet and yes, writing, and it is worth celebrating, not excoriating.

The endless D.C. argument

Commenting of mass proportions broke out on the blog DCist yesterday over a Portland, Oregon-based band's negative review of their experience at music venue DC9 in the Shaw-U Street-Howard neighborhood. (Oh, for your own edification, if you even care, every D.C. neighborhood has at least three names kind of going on. For instance, my office is located in Federal Triangle and just south of Gallery Place-Chinatown-Penn Quarter. Oh, and not too far from Capitol Hill. Yeah. Nutty!). Anyway, here's the start of the blog entry:

A recent tip from Dave at Indiefolkforever lead us to a rather unflattering portrait of our fair city. Norfolk & Western, a Portland band that visited D.C. last month, apparently didn't have a very nice time playing DC9 or visiting the U street/Shaw neighborhood in Northwest D.C. As part of a tour journal posted on Local Cut, the
band wrote:

Washington DC proved to be a less pleasant experience for all of us. DC is not the safest city in the world to begin with, and according to my sources, the club we played at was located in a particularly bad area.

I have mixed, convoluted feelings about this band's experience, the discussion that ensued on DCist, and the larger implications of this type of discussion, all of which I will try to explain.

So anyhow, this band appears to have had a bad time in our fair city, and many commenters are taking personal offense. Really, though, who's fair city is it? Not mine. I still consider myself a Chicagoan (or Chicago suburbanite), and I'm guessing most of those commenting have only been in D.C. for a couple years at most, so let's just establish that few of us are authorities on authentic D.C. (which also happens to be an oxymoron).

Anyway, the perennial argument in D.C. ever since hipsters settled the Northwest (NW D.C., this time, not the Pacific Northwest) and continued to move East, centers around how transplants/upper and middle income/white people feel discomfort towards the "real" D.C. People who come to D.C. are viewed with a skeptical eye, with everyone from suburbanites to bands from the Pacific Northwest at risk for getting slammed for not accepting D.C. as it is. Here's one comment on that blog entry that expresses such a sentiment:

[The band's] comment [on their experience at DC9] is unfortunately typical of quite a few other people I have met from the Pacific NW, and also from other crunchy "liberal" places like Vermont and Minneapolis (where I'm from). They think they're all tolerant and progressive, but aren't comfortable with actual diversity. I'm sure they thought U Street is a particularly bad neighborhood, because like 1/2 the people on the street are black.

It is true that a lot of people habor a mental map of the District that redlines most of Northeast, Southeast, Southwest, and even some of Northwest (east of 16th Street). DuPont and Georgetown are great, Adams-Morgan is fine if you stay on the main strip, and U Street is "sketchy." Seriously, someone said that last thing to me this weekend. People like that don't make it too far out of Georgetown, which is a shame, because Georgetown nightlife sucks.

Lately though, I've been thinking that it's silly to deride such people for their insulairty. For one, we're all insular to some degree, preferring to stay in places where we're comfortable. Furthermore,do hipsters really want frequenters of Georgetown bars invading U Street? U Street establishments are busy enough as it is. Still, much of the dismissive remarks made about D.C. neighborhoods are ridiculous. I've always hated the word "sketchy," part of the lexicon of the self-sheltered urban dweller because what people often mean when they apply that word is that a neighborhood is different to them, lacking in sports bars, Banana Republics, and yuppy condos.

Still, I can understand the worry about being mugged and think the derision of those who are worried about walking alone on a dark street is unfounded. Some commenters acted like the band was lucky not to get mugged:

As far as their "gang experience", sounds like the guys were just pushing their buttons. I agree it would be intimidating, but come on. They didn't get robbed or anything while they were here.

I've never gotten mugged (*big knock on wood*), but the D.C. residents who try to prove their street cred by deriding anyone who's not comfortable with the idea of winding up in a situation where they are handing their wallet to a scary man whose gun is pointed at them have either never gotten mugged either or are bloviating. No one wants to get mugged, and it should not be acceptable to get mugged. I don't care if you're in the poorest neighborhood in the city; I don't think any decent person --no matter their socio-economic situation--should be accustomed to being mugged. Too often the assumption around here is that in poor or non-white neighborhoods, crime is part of the landscape. Even if those conditions predict higher crime rates, no neighborhood prides itself on high crime, and no neighborhood wants high crime. There is this idea, not just in D.C. but all over, that urban authenticity is predicated on one's exposure to crime. It's unfortunate that crime gets elevated to a character-building experience.

Finally, and this is slightly separate from this particular incident, I get a little fed up when hipsters act as if their conception of D.C. is more authentic than anyone else's. Nothing about the modern conception of the city is authentic. For a long time, city streets were home to cesspools of waste because of inadequate sanitation systems, urban residents lived on top of each other in ramshackle dwellings, and the young and old alike labored long hours in the industrial sector with little time for leisure activities like hanging out at the local music joint. The notion that a city is a place for enlightenment and creativity is relatively recent. I always find it especially condescending when people look down on suburbanites for not living in the city and supposing it is because they are afraid of diversity and creativity. These people forget that for a long time, the American dream was to get out of the city. Only recently is the dream to move back, and it is an increasingly hard dream to attain if one's target is a city like Boston, San Francisco, New York, or even D.C. (That's why Chicago is where it's at, but anyway...).

Perspective from a Century of Living

Today the Washington Post's Express has a feature [PDF Link] about a 104-year-old Kansan, Waldo McBurney, who still continues to work. McBurney is full of wisdom. Plus, his name is Waldo. It's nice to see coverage of someone who espouses values of humility and simplicity amidst news of excess and hunger for power. Here's McBurney:

We're living in a faster age and we think too much about money and leisure. Our morals have gone downward. There's always hope, but it's hard to see how the good is going to come.

Even though McBurney has known hard work all his life, he indicates that he lived free of the stress that characterizes modern, urban living, where we operate under the idea that productivity is the result of long hours and high pressure. Again, here's McBurney:

McBurney grew up on a farm at a time when neighbors helped neighbors without asking, when life was more about work than worry. "I expect people worry now more than then. Worry is killer," he said.

This guy couldn't be more right. However, there is one pearl of McBurney wisdom that left me a little...confused:

A lot of the poulation thinks the biggest thing they can do is kill somebody they don't agree with.

They do? I think you lost me there, Mr. McBurney.

Top ten Thanksgiving table conversations of 2006

...And the clichés that accompanied them:

(1) the recall of O.J. Simpson's book and interview
"I wonder how those jurors feel now, acquitting a cold-blooded murderer."
"I'm glad the media finally had some sense."
"That man will do anything to make a buck."
"The poor Brown and Goldman families."

(2) the Michael Richards racist outburst
"Kramer really is crazy!"
"The media and the politically correct police are at it again, making Kramer look bad."
"He should have apologized for being an awful stand up comic while he was at it!"

(3) Wii versus PS3
"Boy, the lines are going to be long tomorrow, huh!"
"Mom, can I get a PS3/Wii/Xbox" ad infinitum
(4) College football
"It really should be Michigan versus Ohio this year in the NCAA football championship; it's too bad they're both in the Big Ten."
"Boy [fill in the blank team] sucks this year."

(5) Professional football
Nothing interesting

(6) Traveling
"It was a zoo at the airport this year!"
"I hate flying, what with the security checkpoints and the long lines."
"It was a zoo on the expressway this year!"
"I hate driving, what with the tolls and traffic."

(7) Thanksgiving food and how it makes you full
"Boy, I'm not going to be able to move after this tasty meal."
"This is the best stuffing I've ever had."
"You've outdone yourself with the pie."
"Well, I know what I'm going to be having for dinner for the next week [pause for effect] turkey!"
"Time to loosen the belt buckle a notch or two."

(8) The weather
"You missed some great weather we had last week, Aunt Bertha."
"Boy, I guess I chose the wrong week to come to Chicago. It sure is cold here!"
"Why, I think this is the most beautiful Thanksgiving we've ever had."

(9) The new Congressional majority
something that inevitably makes things awkward between guests of opposing political loyalties

(10) What the younger dinner guests are going to do after high school/college/work/graduate school
"So, you have your colleges picked out yet?"
"So, you know what you're going to do after college?"
"You're an English major: what are you planning on doing with that?"

Please feel free to comment with other typical Thanksgiving dinner conversations.

Marriage in France: Passé

The Post featured a surprisingly complex and well-reported article today about the decline of marriage in France. Marriage rates in the Western world have been on a decline for awhile and even more in parts of Europe. The declining marriage rate in northern Europe is seen as a rejection of those institutions that promulgated marriage--the Catholic Church, the traditional family, the closed society--no more so than in France.

In 2004, the most recent year for which figures are available, the marriage rate in France was 4.3 per 1,000 people, compared with 5.1 in the United Kingdom and 7.8 in the United States. The only European countries with rates lower than France's were Belgium, at 4.1, and Slovenia, with 3.3.

The knee-jerk response in some American quarters will of course be that the French are "godless," "socialist," and "relativist." However, the consequences of the marriage decline has not been chaos, broken homes, or rampant polygamy:

Contrary to predictions three decades ago, when the marital downslide began, French family social structures have not disintegrated. Instead, society has accepted and embraced changing attitudes. French law stopped distinguishing between children born in or out of wedlock more than 30 years ago.

A willingness to believe that the marriage decline stems from a dissolution of morals would be too eager to ascribe moral failings to a people, and it misses what is so fascinating about this trend: there are neither the same incentives nor influences to get married as there used to be:

The tax breaks the French government offers married couples, which are not as substantial as U.S. marriage tax reductions, are not enough to persuade most cohabitating couples to formalize their relationships. In France, the greatest financial and tax incentives target the number of children a couple has rather than the parents' marital status.

The couple that is profiled in the story did not see a reason to get married, but they have two children and have cohabitated for many years. It is tempting to compare the U.S. and France, but because of the different populations and sizes between the two countries, it would be difficult to draw conclusions . It is fair to say though that marriage in the U.S. has become a racket. When so many weddings devolve into a game of keeping up with the Jones', it's no wonder that some people would just assume avoid the game. Can a society that marvels at the "huge rock" on a woman's finger and fawns at million-dollar weddings really judge one that does not consummate as many such affairs?

Ségolène Royal, who last week won the Socialist Party nomination for president in next year's election, and Francois Hollande, the party's leader, have had four children during their 25 years of cohabitation. French Defense Minister Michèle Alliot-Marie, another possible presidential contender, has spent nearly 22 unmarried years living with Patrick Ollier, a member of the National Assembly.

"We never had time to get married," Alliot-Marie said in a recent interview. Royal has expressed distaste for the notion, once calling marriage a "bourgeois institution."

"I don't see how marriage would bring any more to our union as a couple," [Sandrine] Folet said. "It doesn't take away anything, it doesn't bring anything."

Like anything else, institutions that no longer seem functional may be deemed irrelevant. France and its neighbors may be headed towards total secularism, but that does not mean that they are valueless and rudderless.

Enough NoVa v. RoVa

One thing that annoys me to no end are tired, hackneyed, red state versus blue state stereotyping. New York Times columnist David Brooks is especially good at this predictable routine of tarring cityfolk with charges of NPR listening and foreign film watching while framing countryfolk as old-fashioned, hunting outdoorsmen who also happen to have embraced American bix box chains like Wal-mart and Home Depot, unlike their elitist neighbors to the North.

The Washington Post takes part in this Brooksian exercise in today's paper, comparing Northern Virginia or NoVa to RoVa, or Rest of Virginia. According to recent polls, NoVa is more liberal than the rest of Virginia, which is not a surprise; however, the Post's writers equate this automatically with certain consumer preferences and behaviors that are more indicative of this particular writer's sense of the economic and socio-cultural differences between people who live in the two regions than any true reflection of NoVa's liberal or RoVa's conservative disposition. For instance, how does having Cracker Barrel rather than Crate & Barrel make RoVa less liberal? How does reading Lord Alfred Tennyson--"In RoVa, they like freshly killed venison. In NoVa, they like Alfred, Lord Tennyson"--make NoVa less conservative?

Yes, this article is merely supposed to be funny, and though it fails to do that, it also propogates a more insidious and just plain cliched strain of political analysis that groups liberals as well-off, sophisticated city people who have gone too far astray from the respectable simplicities of a life in the country to view it as anything less than uncivillized. Never mind that rural areas of this country are rarely the pastoral farm towns of yore that people--usually city folk like Brooks and this WaPo writer--imagine.

This article comes on the same day that the Washington Post endorsed Democrat Jim Webb for U.S. Senate, for several good reasons, one being the belief that he will pay more attention to Virginia--Northern Virginia--than has George Allen. Allen, a native Californian, has decided that his political posture relies upon him seeming like an ol' Southern Virginia boy and therefore has frozen out the economically important North. As the Post says:

Mr. Allen has accomplished little for his state's most dynamic region, Northern Virginia. Other Republican members of Virginia's congressional delegation -- Sen. John W. Warner and Reps. Thomas M. Davis III and Frank R. Wolf -- have played vital roles in advancing transit and other priorities while Mr. Allen was busy grooming himself for a possible 2008 presidential race.

This is useful commentary about NoVa.

Facebook Profile Candidates

Now that it's a little chillier here in D.C. (if the low 50s can really be referred to as chilly), it is most decidedly election season. In this city, everyone seems to know the latest in election-related news, but with such wacky and bizarre incidents as the Foley Scandal and the Allen Gaffes, the rest of the nation seems to have become interested as well. However, it should be noted that with many voters saying Iraq is one of the most important issues to them in the upcoming elections, it appears that people aren't simply paying attention due to a salacious (and also troubling) scandal.

With this in mind, I have to give Facebook a thumbs up for having candidate profiles. It really augments their Web 2.0 cred, allowing Facebook users--mostly college students, recent college grads, and high school students--to connect with their favored candidated. Some candidates have taken advantage of this platform to come off as personable and relatable. Democratic Senatorial Candidate Jim Webb of Virginia actually lists his favorite music--Johnny Cash and Tom Petty--and favorite movies--Cool Hand Luke and Year of Living Dangerously. Perhaps Webb's tastes are too well matched with the campaign persona--or maybe the campaign persona comes from the rugged tastes. Webb also has updated his Facebook status, a feature that was introduced earlier this year that resembles an away message. Currently "Jim is very disappointed, but supportive of Mark Warner’s decision not to run in 2008."

The candidates who are actively participating with Facebook are reaching out to younger voters, an often ignored constituency because of their perceived and real apathy. The activity on many of the candidates' message boards suggest that us young people are interested--as we should be--and that reaching out through Web 2.0 technology is a great way to harness that interest. I'll be interested to see if it results in an increase in 18-24 year olds' voting.

Noise Pollution

This weekend, I paid a visit to Philadelphia. I took a bus through one of the bus companies that serves Chinatowns of various East Coast cities, namely, Boston, Philadelphia, D.C., and New York (and probably others). Any of these bus companies are referred to as "the Chinatown Bus," though there must be half a dozen to a dozen in D.C. alone. I used the New Century Travel bus line because other than a company called Apex, it is the only Chinatown bus that goes straight from D.C. to Philadelphia.

I was pleasantly surprised with the ease and comfort of the ride except for one major annoyance, and it had nothing to do with the bus, the driver, or the heavy traffic (which, on a Friday afternoon outbound from D.C. is to be expected). Sure, there was a somewhat random stop outside a gas station and truck plaza in Baltimore on the way back at New Century's makeshift bus station out there (i.e. a parking lot), but that took five minutes.

Again, the only real problem that I encountered had nothing to do with the bus itself but rather with the two people sitting behind me: both college-aged, one male, one female. They were basically making small talk, which is annoying enough in an of itself. It's one thing to engage in a little empty conversation when you meet someone in passing, but I have never understood those people who make it their sole purpose on a flight, train ride, or bus ride, to engage their seatmate in inane conversation. A few pleasntries are fine, you know, "where are you from?" "what brings you to [fill in the blank city]?" Full-fledged conversations are another animal. To me, the great thing about traveling is that you have a few hours to yourself to just read and listen to music. How often in our day-to-day routine are we afforded such luxury? How can people squander that precious time by talking to someone about how bad their commute is, etc?

That is exactly what the two people behind me chose to do, for three and a half hours. They talked about college, they talked about "funny" movies like 40 Year Old Virgin, they talked about TV shows. Why do I know what they were talking about? Because when someone told the girl how to project back when she was younger, she took it to heart. She spoke loud, and she laughed even louder. Plus, her laugh was unpleasant. It was the point on the laugh spectrum where a cackle meets a guffaw. She laughed more frequently than an SNL audience at an old Eddie Murphy skit. And yet, nothing she was laughing at was truly funny. I would have taken a baby crying over that sound.

In view of this experience, my question is, am I allowed to ask this person to be quiet? I sat their stewing in the fact that had I been in another society--oh, say Paris--this disruptive conversation would be looked down upon entirely. The conversationalists' fellow passengers would stare them down to a point where they became mute out of fear. All I could so was turn up my music and try to fall asleep, pondering why our country must be one of loud talkers, of people walking down the streets speaking their cell phone conversations into the air. We may be protective of our personal space, but we are disturbingly open about our supposedly personal conversations. Worst of all, some of us are loud. I love the D.C. Metro right now, because it has definitions of bad train etiquette, such as blocking the left side of the escalator and talking loudly on a cell phone in the car. I hope the loud people will take it to heart, but I'm sure they won't. They're too busy yelling into their phones.

One little breach of etiquette isn't a big deal, whether it be what I refer to as noise pollution or escalator path obstruction, and I suppose I should calm down a little, but I guess I start writhing with anger at such ignorance because of the principle behind it: inconsiderate people. People who do not care how they inconvenience others. This is an ever-growing trend in our country, and little measures like signs in the subway are a good first step. A good second step would be a general valuing of those periods of time we have to ourselves, whether it be on a speeding Chinatown bus or a crowded train.

Deciphering the Tune-etic Code

I don't know how or why, but there are certain types of songs I think each of us like that span the genres to some degree but retain certain qualities. It is for this reason that I searched Napster persistently after I first heard a song called "Walk on By" played on a rural Michigan oldies station in the summer of 2000 and for this reason that my brother--who is all too familiar with my unfortunate habit of playing songs I've latched onto repetiviely for a couple of days--knew exactly which song I would like on the newest Flaming Lips CD ("The Sound of Failure," if you're interested). Dionne Warwick and the Flaming Lips do not seem similar, and I have such little knowledge of music that I could not begin to ascertain a connection between them, but in spite of this, I have a sense that there is something that connects them.

This sense is what drives a website called Pandora Internet Radio, which merely asks that you type in a treasured song or singer and goes to work finding songs whose elements are similar. A search of Marvin Gaye yielded me "These Eyes" by the Spinners, which I enjoyed. Pandora calls this process the music genome project but admits that it may not have understood exactly what you like about your original song or singer choice by allowing you to declare your dislike for a song they offer you. Like decoding a human genome, we are limited in understanding how the pieces define the whole, where in the human genome, the pieces are protein and in the music genome, they are things such as meandering melodic phrasing and acoustic sonority. If I hadn't quit piano in the sixth grade, I could probably tell you what that all means.

Still, experimenting with Pandora has allowed me to get a hold on what traits I find appealing in a song. I seem to have a penchant for orchestral arranging, major key tonality and a subtle use of vocal harmony. Alice Cooper I am not.

Any Two Schmucks

So, this post and its possible futility might well negate the seriousness I hoped to impart with the prior entry, but I was just thinking about how in life, people have talking points, and often times, these are talking points that they have unknowingly and unintentionally co-opted from others. After talking to a friend about a wedding, I thought about how the usual reaction among my age group when friends are getting married is a sense that we are getting older, that it's hard to believe friends are getting married, etc. This reaction is viral, so that when one is about 21, s/he is bound to express it. I too have reflexively agreed with this sentiment in the past, but tonight I thought about this milestone in a new light: Any pair of schmucks can get married. There are people who get married for the right reasons and people who get married for the wrong reasons, and considering we are told that half of marriages end in divorce, I wouldn't use weddings among my age group as a barometer of having Figured Life Out. I'm not saying I have it figured out but thinking that a wedding or a mortgage or an investment portfolio is a sign of growing up is as foolish as thinking that adults don't make mistakes. So if I am talking with friends about marriage, I herein vow to advance my talking point that any two schmucks can get married, unless of course I run the risk of sounding like a total kiljoy, in which case I'll just play along.

A New Gender Gap in Education

The New York Times features a pretty fascinating article today about a growing achievement gap between male and female students at institutions of higher learning, be they two-year or four year colleges. This isn't a futile Lawrence Summers-style parlor game of who's better at certain subjects but rather an account of statistics, from number of honors students to a university's ratio of males to females that evidences greater committment to learning, better grades, and more productivity in studying among college women than their male counterparts. Why this disparity?

Men were significantly more likely than women to say they spent at least 11 hours a week relaxing or socializing, while women were more likely to say they spent at least that much time preparing for class. More men also said they frequently came to class unprepared.

Using data from U.C.L.A.'s Higher Education Research Institute annual studies, [Associate Professor of education Linda Sax] found that men were more likely than women to skip classes, not complete their homework and not turn it in on time.

One woman from American University who was interviewed called such tendencies "a male entitlement thing," saying that "they think they can sit back and relax and when they graduate, they'll still get a good job. They seem to think that if they have a firm handshake and speak properly, they'll be fine." As my Dad pointed out, in our country today, such an attitude makes one Presidential material.

Furthermore, effort in scholastic achievement is often looked down upon, chided, even in a university setting. As the article points out, men tend to scoff at the amount of effort some female students put forth to achieve good grades (and learn). The practice of bragging about how little time it required for one to do well or at least decently on an exam or paper has probably been witnessed by almost every college student alive and is an outgrowth of the devaluing of effort.

For instance, I remember hearing stories about people who started writing their thesis the weekend before it was due. In such an atmosphere, mentioning that you started the quarter before it was due is actually less impressive. What people who brag about putting forth little effort for decent performance don't realize is that (1) work and especially in academic work truly shines as a result of consistency in effort and longterm planning (2) one is much more likely to absorb a subject through an incremental approach to studying than to cramming, which so often turns into dull memorization exercises.

This article is a useful read, with recognizable behaviors and some interesting analysis. What I hope doesn't happen out of it is anxiety about males being somehow deprived of their essential manliness at college, an almost reflexive reaction among some conservatives over the last 30-years, who view such things as Ritalin as a sign that a masculine instinct is being squelched by the education system. As the article says,

But some scholars say the new emphasis on young men's problems — recent magazine covers and talk shows describing a "boy crisis" — is misguided in a world where men still dominate the math-science axis, earn more money and wield more power than women.

Hard work is something that both genders are capable of, as long as there are incentives behind it. If men come by jobs more easily than women, however, men will under-perform. This is why there should be increasing efforts to equalize women's ability to attain and advance in a professional environment as well as aid to people seeking unpaid internships and better financial aid for students who otherwise have to work longer hours to fund their college education (a predicament of both men and women in an environment of decreased prioritizing by the Republican Congress of education funding).

Millenials? Validity of Generational Generalization

An article in the recent issue of the Northwestern Magazine describes the current demographic of young people (bounded by the years 1982-2000) as comprising a generation called the Millenials (unfortunately, this article is not currently online). Just as Generation X before us and the Baby Boomers before them, we supposedly share in certain traits, behaviors, and lifestyle that define us as a generation. Accordingly, there is something about us that makes us millenial: we are driven, multi-tasking, rules-oriented, self-motivated individuals. At the same time, our parents "coddle" us non-stop, from writing our college application essays to driving us to and from many activities to doing our laundry and cleaning our rooms. When we go to college, we talk with them multiple times a day and rely on them to buy us the latest high-tech item. Current six-to-twenty-four year-olds, does this sound like you?

To be honest, I am suspicious of generational labeling. Sure, there are certain things that unite many of us, and I think people whose demographics are quite similar (i.e. age, race, class, education) have experienced a general similarity in lifestyle. Of course, all of the aged 6-24 year olds in the United States have not experienced the same lifestyle; in fact, the growing gap between rich and poor has, as John Edwards has pointed out, created two Americas. The Millenial generation that the NU magazine describes is mostly comprised of the rich half of America (though, of course, a lot less than half of Americans are rich).

The other thing that I personally resent about being lumped in this generation is that I couldn't really identify with those described in the article. I don't get a mere 4-5 hours of sleep per night, I don't think one needs to over-committ themselves during college to get a job (and most people who are over-committed usually do a bad job at their various positions because they don't have enough time), I don't play video games while watching TV while reading while writing a paper while talking on my cell phone. I didn't need constant parental reminders to do my homework (which can be seen as nerdiness, but I like to think of it as just being independent), and I was pretty familiar with some of the most unthankful of chores while growing up (not that I didn't complain while completing them). Nevertheless, many people in this Millenial demographic (I think it's more a demographic than it is a generation) didn't have to do many chores as children (they had maids and parents), did get help with college essays, did do well on standardized tests like the SATs (after taking classes to prepare for them), do take up multiple activities, and are law-abiding, rules-oriented individuals who tend to get jobs in lucrative but unexciting industries like banking and consulting after college.

Still, I don't think it very useful to publish articles that write of a generation as if it were some sort of a phenomenon that came from a star one night down to earth and spread across an age group. Rather, I think whatever circumstances and behaviors a certain demographic--or generation--has in common is the result of many variables coming together--values, societal norms, income distribution, politics--that influence the way in which we think, act, and live our lives.