Boomers in retirement

That doesn't look like gelato.

Anyone who is over fifty years of age, which I am, receives the monthly AARP Bulletin. The piece in the November issue on the financial journalist Jane Bryant Quinn, who is retiring and moving to Rome, got me to thinking about why younger folks really hate us old ones. It's probably best not to advertise too widely how well we older Boomers are doing. Jane writes about her coming retirement:

"My husband retired last year, and ... we are going to follow a dream and live in Rome for a year. Art. Music. Gelato! After Rome, my calendar is a blank. Like every other new retiree, I'll have to invent a life for myself. ... So much has changed in the world since the day I launched as a baby financial reporter in 1963. When it comes to what to do with our money, we have tons of options that didn't exist back then. So which should we choose?"

I have nothing against JBQ, but these comments made me again aware of why I hate my own generation so much. There is so much "entitlement" in them. Not that JBQ and many Boomers are not entitled to the rewards of having worked hard in their lives and the choices now before them. And not because I am in agreement with a growing sense among younger Americans that the Boomers are becoming a burden. A piece in the online forum Medium addressed the issue in this way: "What the Hell Are We Going to Do About the Boomers? Nothing has prepared us for the baby boomers' return to infancy." As that title suggests, the article is about the demands that elderly people make not only on the healthcare system but also on their younger family and other relatives.

Boomers, according to the article, grew up with practically free college education (at state universities like the one I attended) and good infrastructure, but have since then hollowed out the benefits they enjoyed,  not to forget locking "their own health care money into place -- through state and company pensions and Medicare -- and then slashed it for everyone else."

The author of the piece, one Bernie Bleske, waxes positively when it comes to the contributions the Boomers made to fighting "the sins and demons their parents never fully conquered — racism, sexism, disease, and poverty" — but he is incensed that they would prefer to pass on their inheritance to charities rather "than to their own children or government institutions or into future savings. Fifty-seven percent said each generation should earn their own (damn) money (thank you very much). More than half thought it was more important to invest in children than adults, though heaven forbid that investment applies to schools."

While it is true that infrastructure has gone to hell -- a subject to which Donald Trump has drawn attention -- trillions of dollars that might have gone to infrastructure were instead diverted to transfer payments that have deincentivized standing on your own two feet. This has affected not only what was once known as the underclass; great numbers of Americans have grown up in middle-class homes and are whining babies.

The problem, however, does lie with the Boomer generation. We came of age in the austere 1950s, when options were limited and when we were drilled into habits and attitudes, by parents and teachers alike, that would make us successful. Those of that generation like myself who first went to school in the 1950s learned to read, write, and compute, and absorbed the ability to sit quietly at our desks for long periods, all without Ritalin. These habits were also instilled in us by the surrounding society, which disapproved of failure. Back then we said "broken marriage," not the nonjudgmental "single parent." Back then there was no safety net for the ordinary, garden-variety failures of life, no welfare, not to mention no Parents without Partners, no therapy in which to talk your problems to death. Unless you wished to exist on the fringes of the social order, you were forced to take responsibility for the choices you had made, to do what was called the right thing.

Those habits served us well when we left high school or went to college as the economy took off in the 1960s. We were the first beneficiaries. And the first thing we did was to institutionalize indulgence. In 1973, the Boomers began to preside over a vast spending spree: the Great Society. Year by year, a many-tentacled octopus produced a national attitude and an accompanying bureaucracy of programs and entitlements designed to prevent people from … well, from feeling hurt, from having to face the consequences of bad choices, of failures. Half a century later, unlike in the 1950s, if you make mistakes, you are supposed to turn to the government to bail your out, to allow someone else to pay for your shortcomings. If you become fat, it's not from overindulgence, but from a medical condition. If you can't read beyond third-grade level after eight years in school, you move on to high school anyway. Parents can no longer spank their own children, teachers can't fail them, and everyone agrees that competition is bad for the psyche. And don’t forget the foremost legal victory of my generation, Roe v. Wade. Whatever the effect on the nation’s psyche of this 1973 legal decision, it spawned a huge bureaucratic network, one promoting indulgence, lack of personal responsibility, and a loss of inner starch.

So, by all means, blame the Boomers, but blame them for having turned the U.S. into an "entitlement" society. And then grow up and try to change the direction of things.

Discrimination, or the lack thereof

Is it "discrimination" to find tattoos repellent, especially on young women? At the gym I go to, I encounter female bodies with tattoos spread over the shoulders and back and even down the legs. My reaction: why do you want to disfigure what is otherwise a beautiful body? -- for some of the young women are very attractive. It is not a question I am going to find an answer to. I did a lot of stupid things in my twenties and even thirties. Thank God that tattoos were not "popular." I am sure that some of these young women will wonder one day what possessed them to spend so much money -- the same goes for smoking -- on these unsightly scribbles. After searching the internet for a tattoo image to include in this post, I found many disturbing ones and purposely selected a moderate one.

My initial question, however, comes down to the issue of "discrimination." Discrimination suggests making a judgment -- in my case, finding something repellent. What I am really saying, however, is that tattoos are not simply ugly but also a sign of downward social mobility. I am making a moral judgment -- and it is bad these days to make such judgments. Thus, in a public place like the gym, no one says out loud anything about the ugliness of tattoos. Like a lot of contemporary tendencies, the tattoo regime is ignored. It's as if people don't see it.

This issue of seeing is important. If we did not see, we would not be able to discriminate. Discrimination is regarded as bad, as in sexual or racial discrimination that considers certain humans as less than human. But the women in my gym with tattoos are not less than human; they are fully human. But IMHO they have made bad decisions. And what people don't want to admit publicly today is that some people have made bad decisions. Again, I have made bad decisions in my life, so one must resist thinking that others are "bad" people for doing what I might have done in the same circumstances.

The ability to discriminate, however, is at the core of aesthetic judgments and of judgments of taste, both of which concerned 18th-century philosophers, including Hume and Kant. We make distinctions between the works of Leonardo and Jeff Koons. It strikes me that the contemporary aversion to making judgments has affected our sense of beauty, to the detriment of our public spaces. Something like that must has been at the core of the objections several decades ago to the unsightly (to my eyes) structure of Richard Serra in downtown Manhattan. Most of the time we are forced to turn our eyes away from what we find repellent, to keep our judgments to ourselves, but there comes a time, as with Serra's "work," when something is so repellent that the objections overcome the argument that ugliness is something we must put up with.

Why the Jews didn't resist

The opening pages of a short story by the writer Edgardo Cozarinsky has caused me to think about a question people occasionally ask: Why were the Jews so passive? Why did they not rise up and defend themselves against the Nazis, especially in the camps where they outnumbered their guards? This question overlooks the fact that the majority of Jews in Germany were ordinary people, ordinary Germans.

The story, "Emigré Hotel," opens with the departure of a Greek-registered steamship from Lisbon for New York in October 1940. Among the passengers, feeling "a sense of loss and foreboding," were Alfred Döblin, Heinrich Mann, and Hertha Pauli. Others who had already left from the port of Lisbon were Franz Werfel, Leon Feuchtwanger, Alfred Polgar (according to Wikipedia: "one of the most renowned intellectuals of the Vienna coffeehouses"),  Heinrich and Golo Mann, and Friderike Zweig (first wife of Stefan). On the ship, according to Cozarinksy, they lived in forced seclusion because of their status -- they had "sufficient funds to pay the extravagant price of a berth on this modest vessel" -- and played "the role of the last scions, emissaries, or survivors of European culture."

Instead of asking why the Jews were passive, I wonder why no one has ever asked this question: why did all the prominent people, whose opposition might have been crucial in combating the Nazis, turn tail and run? Why didn't they stay and resist? If they had, the Jews, too, would certainly have joined them. It was the intellectuals and artists and important people who were passive.

Since I wasn't alive in those terrible days and can't say that I would have behaved any better, I probably should not be criticizing those who went into exile. But the absence in Germany of intellectual opposition to the Nazis must have had an effect on the demoralization of the population, Jewish and otherwise.

Picture credit: The Paris Review

Academia's "extinction event"

The event referred to in the title of this post comes form a very long, logorrheic piece in the Chronicle Review of the Chronicle of Higher Education. Because there was no opportunity to post comments on the site, I am going to vent here concerning the pitiful self-laceration of the would-be academic, Andrew Kay by name, a freelance writer living in Madison, Wisconsin, who gained a Ph.D. some years back with a dissertation on 19th-century English poetry.

Kay was one of the losers in the academic job search, and his attendance and report of the annual MLA conference held at the beginning of this year were for "closure," as he puts it. Even after several years, he continues to long for the intellectual community he imagines that academia represents, such a community now being in the throes of extinction because of the decimation of departments of language and literature throughout the American realm. Nowhere in his overly long piece does it seem to occur to him that it was the so-called intellectual community that put itself out of business, beginning with deconstruction and all the other theoretical B.S. that invaded the profession in the 1970s.

When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, it was the era of "Criticism,” which consisted of critiquing the writings of past authors, especially male ones, “deconstructing” them, which meant exposing the hidden or submerged ideology of power, racism, misogyny, repression, and so on that was hidden below the overt surface of a novel or of poetry. Literary scholarship itself went about institutionalizing the rejection of the literary heritage. The deconstructive temper extended right down to the students, even if most of them could not have identified Jacques Derrida. The lesson the kids absorbed from their professors was that the values of the past, whether literary or historical, but especially of America, stank.

Such professors seemed to have forgotten that kids of eighteen and nineteen are idealistic. The humanities can reach them, if you can touch their idealism. But kill that idealism -- which deconstruction did -- and the kids ran away in droves. It didn't take Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, cutting the educational budget in that state to extinguish the humanities. The departments of literature, especially those of foreign languages, were no longer attracting buyers. The best and brightest students simply do not see the relevance of the humanities. Why should they when their professors seem so dismissive of the subjects they teach? Instead of teaching the "great" writers, there has been, among others things, the continuous imposition of an ideological agenda, best encapsulated in the second and third rate female writers that take up so much space in curricula. The current crop of students ventilates their idealism in phony political issues like climate change, a subject on which in academia there is ZERO debate. It is all "97 percent of scientists" all the time.

The academic community, the leading voices of which came of age in the 1970s, now sees a crisis in the humanities and bemoans the shift among students toward disciplines like economics, business, statistics. "Academic extinction" is not the right term for describing what happened. It is more like the sinking of the Titanic, a great pleasure boat that was supposed to offer a never-ending party for the lucky few who had managed to board.

Kay brings on the head of the MLA itself, Anne Ruggles Gere, a professor in the English department at the University of Michigan, who mentions the drop from 1,000 English majors to 200 during the previous eight years. She believes, however, that the profession is on a course correction, in the functioning of the MLA itself. "I think we need to do a lot more educating of faculty, and of English departments, about how to rethink what they’re doing. But I think it’s possible. We’re talking about smart people.” So smart. Why didn't the MLA point out the problem twenty-plus years ago, when it was obvious that literature had become secondary to ideology?

Image credit: Times Higher Education