Present Laughter

The title of this post concerns, first of all, the Noel Coward play I saw last evening at the Saint James Theater in Manhattan. Kevin Kline was brilliant. I didn't realize that I wasn't the only person who loves him. The theater was packed. I wish I had enough money to go every night for the rest of the run and sit in the front row. The play was a piece of puff, but there was so much to see that I could not take it all in.

Afterward I went out with my new pals Rena and Andie. While I wasn't paying attention, I saw that the theater district has come to life in recent years: tons of restaurants and hotels. We ended up at a Brazilian place on 46th Street. A glass of white wine and calamari took off the edge after concentration on the theater piece. Rena, whose late husband was in real estate, said that "retail is dead." Malls will soon be rebuilt as office spaces and apartment complexes. All over the Upper West Side, it is true, the stores are closing. Storefronts stand empty, with FOR RENT signs in the windows.

I thought of this situation this morning as I was walking near where the old Coliseum Book Store used to be, just south of Columbus Circle. Checking the internet, I discovered that it closed in 2006, over a decade ago already. A way of life -- bookstores -- was on its way out. Who would have imagined that when I arrived in New York in 1980?

Can one use the term "present laughter" to refer to the ridiculous op-ed in the New York Times by Ulrich Baer, professor in NYU's German department? (The link here is to Jonathan Chait's response in New York magazine to such “illiberal” attacks on free speech. The piece includes a link to the NYT op-ed.)

On the one hand, it is amusing to consider what most readers of the New York Times might have made of the postmodernist jargon of the op-ed. It was as convoluted as the writings of Jean-Francois Lyotard, the French “literary theorist” who is Baer's authority on the issue of free speech. Baer identifies himself as “a college professor and university administrator with over two decades of direct experience of campus politics.” Clearly, he has spent too much time around twenty-year-olds. On the other hand, his defense of recent university protests against conservative speakers disguises the fact that students today are simply acting out the cynical ideals of Baer's academic cohort.

Most of the liberal free speech advocates, such as Chait, are tearing out their hair now, asserting that it is important to listen to all views, even “hateful” ones, “bigoted” ones, and so on. But why would anyone want to listen to hateful or bigoted views? I don’t want to. I don’t listen to the views of Holocaust deniers, for instance.

But are the views of Ann Coulter, Charles Murray, and Condoleezza Rice (another uninvited speaker) “hateful”? Or are they simply offensive to a portion of the population that has its own fixed views?

Besides illustrating what happens to an intelligent person when he spends too much time with young people, Ulrich Baer is exhibit no. 1 of why academics should stick with their area of expertise. (He writes books with titles like Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma.) If someone thinks that I am wading outside of mine, let me remind you that I have actually done work in this area and edited a book on the subject.

Photo credit: Marilyn K. Yee/The New York Times

Back-up Parents

"The Other Side" by Toby Morris

By the title of this post I don't mean "back-up parents" in the sense of, say, you are a child and your parents are drug users or other low lives and you have no models or no refuge when things go bad. In such cases, you may be fortunate to have some adult folks in your environment that serve as substitutes for parents. Indeed, for some of us, teachers once fulfilled that function, or at least they did back in the old, old days of the so-called terrible 1950s.

I come to the term "back-up parents" by my observations of parents in my milieu, the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Some of these are Sixties veterans, like myself, and others are younger, but we came of age at a good time, in the sense, that we transitioned from youth to adulthood with a good education, good jobs, and, for many of us now, great retirement plans. If the economy sucks for many Americans, not for us. To be fair, we often worked very hard.

The kids in this milieu, however, are of a different substance. Even if they went to privileged schools, they, like all other American kids, have experienced a certain dumbing down. Thus, their parents have done everything in their power to make sure that their own kids make the same transition to adulthood. When I have conversations with these parents -- usually the mothers in the locker room at the health club -- I learn that their children are now on the verge of adulthood and are contemplating careers. They have studied anthropology or women's studies or art history in college. They may have enjoyed a "gap year," during which they lived in Kenya and worked in "urban planning." Now it is time to make a career choice going forward, and it is generally of a feel-good sort, say, working for a non-profit. Whatever the merit of these jobs, they will not be exceedingly high paying, especially since the jobs -- with their outward show of trendiness -- are highly coveted. Lots of young, bright people with B.A.s in art history, for instance, gravitate to the glamour of museum jobs or art galleries. The salaries there, however, are not high paying. In other words, these children will probably not make as much in their own lifetimes as their parents or grandparents did.

That's where I come to the term back-up parents. The parents are there to back up their children financially as they enter adult life, for instance, to pay off their college loans or to lay down the money for their kids' first apartment. We are clearly entering a world of class distinctions, which have arisen since the Sixties generations assumed the reins of powers over the institutions of the U.S.

In contrast to such privileged kids, an ordinary American graduating from college with a degree in physical therapy -- a real profession, by the way -- will be paying $600 a month for the rest of her life (like my own physical therapist) and unable to buy her own personal computer (ditto). Her own parents are among those Americans who keep a roof over their head and expect their kids to work and do likewise.

The cartoon selection above is from the artist Toby Morris, who manages to put in a few pictures what I have less elegantly put into words.