Good-bye, cruel world, I'm a baby boomer

I bookmarked this article a while back, thinking it might be worth a few lines, then forgot about it until I found it among the electronic detritus on my hard drive today.

Our reporter, Tara Bahrampour, covers religion (or as her Washington Post bio refers to it, "immigration").  

Last spring, Frank Turkaly tried to kill himself. ... In one grim respect he is far from alone: He is part of an alarming trend among baby boomers, whose suicide rates shot up precipitously between 1999 and 2010.

Let's agree that suicide in most cases signals a human tragedy -- not necessarily the suicide itself, but the despair and often physical pain that lead to it. While I question some of the assumptions quoted in the piece, I am not criticizing  or making fun of those who have chosen their exit.

Instead this is a look at how the article is cliché-ridden and soaked in false ideas.

To begin, take that "alarming trend." Every time I read "trend" (or that hack-writer standby, "growing trend") in a newspaper article, I flash back to a scene in Calvin Trillin's novel Floater. In an editorial meeting, one of the reporters remarks idly about having read of several people recently who drowned in their own backyard swimming pools. The managing editor snaps to attention: "Is that a trend?"

As youths, boomers had higher suicide rates than earlier generations; the confluence of that with the fact that they are now beginning to grow old, when the risk traditionally goes up, has experts worried. 

Ms. Bahrampour belongs to a different generation, one that takes note of a phenomenon when "experts" give us permission to worry about it.

To those growing up in the 1950s and ’60s, America seemed to promise a limitless array of possibilities. The Great Depression and World War II were over; medical innovations such as the polio vaccine and antibiotics appeared to wipe out disease and disability; the birth-control pill sparked a sexual revolution. The economy was thriving, and as they came of age, boomers embraced new ways of living — as civil rights activists, as hippies, as feminists, as war protesters.

Judging from this paragraph, I would place the reporter's age in her 20s. She has a superficial notion of the '50s and '60s, and that based on left-wing ideology -- the '50s were a terrible time of racism and conformity, but at least there were some promising developments in medicine. Then came The Pill and things were looking up. Finally the new dawn opened with civil rights activists, hippies, feminists, and war protesters.

Exacerbating boomers’ anxiety is a sense that the world is more treacherous than when they were young, he said. Then, the communist threat and the atom bomb loomed large, but they were distant and abstract; attacks like the ones on the World Trade Center and the Boston Marathon have changed this paradigm.

“These events used to happen 6,000 miles away; now they happen here,” Arbore [another expert] said.

Distant? A few hundred miles from the coast of Florida, World War III nearly started. It was so close during the Cuban missile crisis that the American secretary of state, Dean Rusk, said later: "We [and the Soviet Union] were eyeball to eyeball." In New York, at the United Nations, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev promised us, "We will bury you."

Abstract? I can still remember the front page of the New York Daily News following a test explosion in the Pacific of a hydrogen bomb. With a photo of a towering mushroom cloud, the headline said in huge type:

HELL
BOMB

Yeah, not treacherous like the world the baby boomers have to deal with now. Back then a piece of cake, a doddle, a Disney fairy tale.

This ignorant young reporter probably has no place in her "narrative" for the Soviet Union and mutual assured destruction. Communism was a phantom, the source of "anti-Communist hysteria."  But to Ms. Bahrampour, it was the best of times, with hippies, feminists, etc.

Growing up in a post-Freudian society, [baby boomers] were raised with a new vocabulary of emotional awareness and an emphasis on self-actualization. But that did not necessarily translate into an increased ability to cope with difficult emotions — especially among men. Women tend to be better connected socially and share their feelings more freely — protective factors when looking at their risk for suicide. And African Americans and Hispanics tend to have lower rates of suicide than whites, possibly because of stronger community connections, or because of different expectations.

Yup, there you have the obligatory male bashing and fawning over "persons of color." White men can't cope with "difficult" emotions. They're pigs and they know it. No wonder they're suicidal.

 

1968 and all that

Tom Brokaw, hosting the two-hour History Channel program "1968," remembers the year. So do I. He remembers it as a TV reporter doing a stand-up at Haight and Ashbury Streets in San Francisco, reporting on the hippie subculture (shown in an old tape). I lived in Berkeley then but often spent time in the Haight, which contrary to the impression Brokaw gave in the History Channel documentary, was well past its love-in prime and had become a magnet for copycat freaks, hard dopers, and lost, runaway teenagers.

I'm so leery of TV documentaries about anything having to do with the sociology or politics of the post-World War II era that I rarely give them my time. A couple of promos for "1968" caught my attention because they included clips of Pat Buchanan and Dorothy Rabinowitz, the excellent TV columnist for The Wall Street Journal. Balance, maybe? And whatever the sins of the NBC network he worked for, I'd found Brokaw at least tolerable as the anchor for the evening news.

It could hardly be expected that Brokaw and I would have the same perspective on the "year that everything changed," as the show's subtitle called it. He was in an opposite "space" (as the slang of that year would have put it) from me, I being part of the counterculture — you didn't get more countercultural than being a young Berkeley freak — and Brokaw no doubt a supporter of antidisestablishmentarianism. (I've done it! I've actually managed to use that word legitimately in a sentence for the first time!)

Any hopes I'd harbored for a responsible look at 1968, which I agree was an important and symbolic one, were disappointed when I watched the program. Essentially it was the Official History of the time defined by liberal baby boomers, plus a few lessons — class, put down your iPods for a minute and pay attention! — directed at any Gen X or Y or Z viewers who tuned in (jolly few, I suspect).

Brokaw and the show's writers and producers obviously had no idea that the counterculture was anything other than a few rock bands and, above all, political demonstrators against the Vietnam War. (I won't try to explain here what else it was, except to say that it involved a whole constellation of values and visions that weren't necessarily political, nor could they be summarized as sex-and-drugs-and-rock-and-roll.)

So we got a lot of footage of Vietnam battles and casualties, student protests, etc. The visual style was very MTV, quick impressionistic cuts, slowing only for interviews with famous names that were considered generational representatives. Arlo Guthrie, for instance, who is still apparently up there in Vermont or wherever on his commune, looking the way a parodist in the '60s would have pictured a hippie 40 years later.

Naturally many tear-stained minutes were devoted to the assassinations of Saint Bobby and Saint Martin. There was a dry eye in my house. Robert Kennedy, had he lived, would surely have become just another underachieving, drug-addled spouter of empty rhetoric like his late brother, or a quisling like his brother Ted.

Martin Luther King, on the other hand, still impresses in some ways: I hadn't heard that organ-pipe voice and stately speaking rhythm for a while, and it was powerful. Moreover, although he was hardly a saint, King was on balance a good role model for American blacks, far better than anyone equally well known now. So yes, his murder was a genuine tragedy that left a vacuum in black culture later to be abysmally filled by Black Power and, eventually, rap and hip-hop.

But "1968" was the Liberal Establishment's take on history, so the raised fists of Black Power segued right into the story line as part of Civil Rights. Then — what was really egregious — we got clips of the protesters marching for the Jena 6, a bunch of thugs who beat a white boy nearly to death in a hate crime this year. One typical quick cut showed a little girl with her hand raised in the Black Power salute.

The lesson (all liberal history is a lesson, there's no such thing as quote objective unquote history) was that any black protest — and, by extension, any ethnic group protest — is part of a continuum with the 1960s Civil Rights movement, the Spirit of MLK moving upon the waters.

Brokaw has acquired a stern Old Testament visage, his years of reading a teleprompter without stumbling having anointed him, in his own estimation, a Deep Thinker. Looking like the preacher about to pronounce "ashes to ashes, dust to dust," he interviewed a born-again liberal with the incredible name of Tom Turnipseed, a South Carolina lawyer who turned from segregationist to Civil Rights cheerleader. When Turnipseed quoted — making sure, with legalistic precision, to emphasize he was quoting — a segregationist from the ancient past who used the word "nigger," the N word was bleeped out on the soundtrack. So the word couldn't even be used to exemplify the bigotry in some quarters during the year supposedly being examined.

That's the liberal mentality for you: people can't be trusted to make their own judgments and draw their own conclusions. They are racists to the bone, ready to run amok unless the information they receive is carefully filtered by their betters in the media. If ordinary Americans even heard the N word in a quotation from the past, they might reach for their rifles and check out Barack Obama's travel schedule. The media must censor the past, preach to the present, and draw the future for the audience.

"1968" also drew explicit parallels between the Vietnam War and Iraq. I don't disagree that there are similarities. What I disagree with is using airtime supposedly intended to cast light on the past to editorialize about the present. Good historians aren't without opinions, but they try to understand the period they study on its own terms, not as just a prelude.

Oh, yes, about Pat Buchanan and Dorothy Rabinowitz. Pat got a fair amount of talking-head time, but only to reminisce about 1968 in general terms and about his role in the Nixon campaign. If he made any conservative-sounding political statements, they were swept up with the rest of the outtakes from the editing room floor. Rabinowitz was allowed to say that the '60s generation was the most irresponsible and self-centered ever, then her 10 seconds were up. I don't entirely agree with her, but she should have been allowed to make her case.

Derrière garde

Ever since I added the City Journal web site to my blogroll, my description alongside the link has been "the best political magazine in America." (Peggy Noonan is prominently quoted on the site claiming that it is "the best magazine in America," period.)

I haven't withdrawn that pat on the back because I actually don't know of a better print magazine/web site on politics and sociology, and there is still a fair amount of trenchant commentary to be found there. Other than the ideological dunce Tamar Jacoby with her commonplace open borders spiel — doing the jobs Americans won't do and all the rest of the usual sophistry — the writers are pretty sound as a rule.

But I'm starting to find the publication annoying. It seems to rattle on about the same few themes issue after issue: affirmative action, threats to free speech, ethnic balkanization, Theodore Dalrymple's latest installment on the dissolution of morality as a social value. All important issues, sure. But that word "issues" suggests why City Journal bothers me more and more — it's about issues, but in a hermetic, intellectualized style that seems aimed at persuasion rather than therapeutic action. As debate fodder, the magazine's content is impressive, but it rarely acknowledges that a 2,500-year tradition of civilization is under immediate threat and that we are called on to decide what to do, not just what to think.

Lawrence Auster has been much exercised lately about putatively conservative commentators who warn us in season and out about the dangers to the West from Islam, but who never get around to suggesting such common-sense defensive measures as stopping Muslim immigration and encouraging Muslims to remove themselves from our midst. I find a lot of the same kind of solemn, inconclusive point-making at City Journal. And the points have already been made countless times. After the fifth or eighth piece bashing sneaky college administrators for bringing racial favoritism in through the back door after a plebiscite or court decision has barred it from entering via the front door, what more is there to say? You either acknowledge that we have a social civil war on our hands, or you View With Alarm one more time. City Journal chooses door no. 2.

Currently up on the City Journal web site is a confession of sorts from Victor Davis Hanson, who acknowledges that the Mexican Invasion "has made things worse than I foresaw" when he first wrote about "Mexifornia" in 2002. I can remember that original article: he had grown up in central California with Mexicans, but now he had Doubts, albeit of a rather high-toned, academic sort. Today the scales have fallen from his eyes. We all know the joke about a conservative being a liberal who has just been mugged — well, boo hoo, friend:

Ever since the influx of illegals into our quiet valley became a flood, I have had five drivers leave the road, plow into my vineyard, and abandon their cars, without evidence of either registration or insurance. On each occasion, I have seen them simply walk or run away from the scene of thousands of dollars in damage. Similarly, an intoxicated driver who ran a stop sign hit my car broadside and then fled the scene. Our farmhouse in the Central Valley has been broken into three times. We used to have an open yard; now it is walled, with steel gates on the driveway.

His piece includes many good arguments against our paper national borders, although his jaunty assurance that "the controversy over illegal immigration [has] moved so markedly to the right" is far too optimistic, in my opinion. Yet even now, he can't bring himself to say much about what to do to stop illegal immigration and repatriate the immigrant criminals who are already here. He hides behind the skirts of public opinion, the "growing national discomfort over illegal immigration." And while he says that "we forget how numbers are at the crux of the entire debate over illegal immigration [my emphasis]," he ignores the numbers that are at the crux of the debate about immigration. For a man of his intellectual attainments (he is a distinguished classical scholar), Hanson is playing the naif by pretending we're all hung up over documents — after all, as I and many others have said till we're blue in the face, if the problem is only that we have lots of illegals coming in, we can take care of that by swallowing the bait from Ted Kennedy & Co. and handing them citizenship forthwith.

Both Victor Davis Hanson and the editors at City Journal need to let go of their above-the-battle attitude and get their silk breeches dirty, or settle for remaining spectators in the drama that will determine whether there is a future for the civilization whose ancient history Hanson has chronicled.

Warning: Unfiltered information

We bloggers are really getting under the skin of the journalistic priesthood. I was on about this just the other day, and here's another viewing-with-alarm newspaper column about how the little minds out in the Republic are in danger from "unfiltered" information — unfiltered, of course, meaning "stuff that journalists can't control." Ben Bova writes:

Anybody can write anything he or she wants to and post it on a blog or a Web site, or send it out as an e-mail message to anyone and everyone the writer knows. Anyone can read as much material as he or she wants to. There are no filters, no fact-checkers, no arbiters of taste or manners, no one to object to abusive language or foul words or just plain lies. …

In earlier eras, communications generally went through filters. There were almost always editors in the loop whose job it was to make certain that the writing — or broadcast, in the case of radio and television — was understandable, factually accurate, and in good taste.

If all editors did was what he says, he might have a point. Actually, few media even bother with such reasonable steps today. How many newspapers or broadcasters actually have "fact checkers"? The game is about getting the story out before the opposition; at most, a newspaper or TV producer might run a story through the legal department if there is any question of libel. Did the "respectable" New York Times check Jayson Blair's stories datelined from places far from where he actually was? Did CBS fact check Dan Rather's phony National Guard document?

But Bova's weaseling goes further. He confuses two completely different functions, copy editing (checking spelling, grammar, following the house style guide, etc.) versus the real "filtering" that goes on in the legacy media: the editors and publishers in corner offices who decide what is legitimate news or opinion that the public is entitled to see, and what is to be withheld. For instance, a couple of years ago an editor on some Pennsylvania rag announced that, supposedly after much soul searching, he was no longer going to publish Ann Coulter's column. The reason: she was an "extremist."

Editors and publishers believe that views — and often, plain facts — that don't fit into a standard ideological template are dangerous, per se. One and all, they imagine themselves to be "centrists" when they actually have their own biases in favor of political correctness, reverse discrimination, the Democratic Party, open borders and various other positions. They are centrists only in that their particular biases are widespread, not necessarily in the country at large, but among other people in their profession.

So they see it as a large part of their mission to make sure that the public isn't exposed to "wrong" ideas that might corrupt them.

There is no reason to have an exalted opinion of the public's ability to assess the truth or make good decisions. But editors who believe they ought to determine what reaches the public are no more wise or objective than anyone else. The editor-in-chief or publisher of a newspaper hasn't spent his life studying history, philosophy, spirituality, politics, the scientific method, the arts, or any other useful discipline. His career history consists of interviewing people who may be pig ignorant, writing stories to meet deadlines, and playing office politics to be promoted to that corner office. But Bova thinks that he and others like him ought to determine what is "fit to print."

Bova was upset because "my grandson (age 12 at the time) read on an Internet site that the government is lying about the 9/11 terrorist attack on the Pentagon. With graphics and supposedly expert testimony, the site purported to show that the Pentagon was not hit by a hijacked airliner, but by a missile fired by the Department of Defense itself. I looked at the presentation and it was pretty convincing, as far as it went. It’s easy to prove a point when you don’t allow any contradictory evidence to be presented."

Yes. Just like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the rest of the mainstream media. The Times allows no uncouth dissent in its pages to confuse tender liberal minds; The Post has one tame "conservative" in George Will.

Bova should have said to his grandson something like this:

"As you go through life, you'll find that the world is full of people with different opinions and different shadings of opinion. There aren't two sides to every question; there are as many sides to every question as there are people with ideas about it. Some opinions will strike you as crazy, others will seem crazy but those who hold them may offer what looks like convincing evidence. You'll discover that for every subject, there is a 'conventional wisdom' — that is, a standard view held by most 'experts' and people who imagine themselves to be experts, like journalists. In controlled media, like newspapers, magazines, and TV networks, this 'conventional wisdom' with slight variations or disagreement on minor points is all you'll hear. When you go on the Internet and whatever other uncontrolled media may pop up in the future, there will be a far wider variety of facts and ideas. There isn't much hierarchy, and anybody can publish what they damn please.

"What you see and read on the uncontrolled media will range from brilliant unconventional insight to dull platitudes to crackpot theories, only there will be no 'higher authority' like in the mainstream media to tell you which is which or keep you from knowing about anything they disapprove of. To reach any tentative conclusions, you're going to have to start from the position that nobody, yourself included, knows all the answers going in. Crackpots are mostly what they seem, but occasionally not. The conventional wisdom is sometimes right, maybe usually, but remember that it's basically just a machine that adds up the votes.

"In short, young man, you're going to have to do what successful cultures have always relied on their citizens to do. You're going to have to think."

Trust but verify

To be a critic in the old days, you had to have a list of intellectual credentials as long as your arm and be employed by a newspaper or a magazine. Now, everyone's a critic, and media outlets themselves are in the crosshairs. The burgeoning world of the Internet is filled with people - some qualified, many not - who call themselves media critics. Their stock in trade is, in many cases, abuse, and their targets are the traditional media they'd like to replace.

Nick Madigan, The Baltimore Sun, January 14, 2007

A word in your ear, Nick?

Let me admit, straight off, that although I have two degrees, neither is in journalism or media studies or whatever intellectual credentials it takes to write a column for The Baltimore Sun. I am clearly not qualified to call myself a media critic. And I am not here to abuse you. How difficult your world must be these days, after you have no doubt spent years deciding what is and isn't news, and what criticism may be expressed and what may not. I can understand that it doesn't steady your nerves when those who are not ordained get it into their heads that media people can have unexamined assumptions — "biases" is the term sometimes used — that affect their news coverage.

You lay bare your hurt feelings when you write, "Some media criticism sites are widely respected within the profession for their care in checking facts and balancing the comments of critics with responses." Please accept my sympathy. No one should have to accept scrutiny or, God help them, criticism from anyone outside their profession! Least of all a journalist. After all, only another journalist knows how tough it is — as one you quote says, "Traditional journalism has dug a bit of this hole itself, with that imperious 'We're delivering the truth to you every day' attitude,' he said. 'We all knew they were putting out what the reporter could cobble together on deadline.'"

That's bad enough for one media person to endure in a lifetime, but I can scarcely imagine your pain when what one of your interviewees calls a "self-appointed critic" isn't just going on about loose ends not tied up under deadline pressure, or even frauds like Jayson Blair and Janet Cooke, but about slanted news. Everyone knows reporters are middle-of-the-road, split-the-difference, anti-extremist types, careful to give each side its due. How could anyone possibly imagine any contrast in tone between "older organizations like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, a 'national media watch group' that refers to itself as progressive" and "the Media Research Center, whose self-proclaimed conservatism dictates its denunciations … ."

Fortunately, as you note, there are real media watchdogs, a far cry from those unlicensed bloggers, to point out when newspapers go too far in, for example, shading stories to make illegal immigrants or minority-group killers look bad.

Florin's NewsTrust site aims to spotlight excellence. Funded by The Global Center, a nonprofit educational foundation established by Rory O'Connor, a documentary filmmaker and journalist, News Trust hopes to help support itself by offering media outlets its rating service, which would enable readers and viewers to rate stories based on criteria such as fairness, objectivity, factual evidence, clarity and relative importance.

Thank goodness for "professionally edited" sites! NewsTrust wants to make sure we don't overlook any of the media they've anointed for excellence: magazines like Mother Jones and The New York Review of Books; newspapers like The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, and The Observer; "TV sources" like Democracy Now, PBS, and BBC News; and wire services like Reuters, the Associated Press, and Agence France Presse. Only there's something about all those "top rated" sources — I can't quite put my finger on it. Not to worry at all, though, Nick. I'm one of those unqualified commentators on other Internet sites who are, in your words, "far less careful" than NewsTrust.

Oh, by the way, Nick … that word in your ear. The NewsTrust site spells its name with the words "bumped" — no space in between. Journalists are supposed to notice little things like that, and I can't imagine a copy editor on an excellent paper like The Baltimore Sun messing up your careful work. Please don't take this as criticism. I know you just had to cobble your piece together to meet a deadline.

Cage Match: Galloway versus Hitchens

11.24.09 The posting below was the first on Reflecting Light, more than four years ago. Probably no one at all would have read it had not "Michael Blowhard," of 2 Blowhards, given me a plug. (I had been a commenter on 2 Blowhards for some time.) I'm still grateful to him for introducing me to his audience.

As for the posting, I think it was a good enough description of the event. However, I was still rather deluded at the time concerning Iraq, which I now belive was one of the most foolish enterprises a U.S. president ever got us into before the incumbent took the reins. I haven't heard anything about George Gallagher in quite a while, but I doubt my (lack of) esteem for him would be any different today.

But I'm also somewhat less of a Chris Hitchens fan nowadays. His writing was, and is, elegant and thought-provoking, even when I disagree with his points. And he is something of an old-fashioned English eccentric, quite out of phase in personal style with the priggish modern Left, which counts in his favor. Yet a leftist he remains, or a "right liberal" in Lawrence Auster's terminology, and his positions have disappointed me too many times.

It’s hard to understand now that rhetoric was considered a high art form, a basic component of civilized life, from at least the Greek Golden Age (fifth century B.C.) right up to the 19th century. In our time, rhetoric has degenerated into speech making, with all that implies of droning banality. Likewise, we smile knowingly when we’re told that people traveled hundreds of miles to hear Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas debate one another in the Illinois Senate Campaign of 1858. Those audiences, it’s assumed, showed up because they were stupefied with boredom in their farms and small towns, withering from the lack of satellite dishes affixed to their log cabins.

But the much anticipated debate on Iraq between George Galloway and Christopher Hitchens showed that a round of verbal Mutually Assured Destruction can still be electrifying. Naturally, the respective cheerleaders for Messrs. Galloway and Hitchens, as well as the punditocracy, all found much to deride, and some pronounced the whole business dreary. There was certainly plenty to make anyone cringe, but I don’t know how the great divide over Iraq could have been expressed more vividly, all the ad hominem attacks notwithstanding.

It’s a kick just to see how the two protagonists present themselves. Here is Hitchens, upholding his honor as a dissolute writer, shirt collar unbuttoned, looking like he’s just come off a three-day bender. He often plays nervously with his eyeglasses in his hands, as though not quite sure what to do with either. Still, even when he’s obviously extemporizing or heatedly interrupting to protest criticism, the phrases and sentences are beautifully constructed, the mot juste ready on his tongue.

George Galloway can’t have been better cast as Hitchens’s opposite. No honey tongued smoothie he, his roots in tough, plain-speaking Scotland on display. Yet, attired in what appears to be a cream-colored suit, white shirt and off-white tie, Galloway looks every bit the dandy. You can and should detest his ideas, but you can’t knock the delivery. He has an actor’s sense of timing and gesture, knows how to make a point even if it’s absurd.

The differences only become more pronounced as the event proceeds. Hitchens is devastating in his opening remarks, but seems to wind down gradually during the evening. Galloway begins poorly from a rhetorical standpoint, culminating in his claim that Hitchens, once a political ally, is a butterfly that has devolved into a “slug,” leaving a trail of “slime.” Crude stuff, and I’d like to think even a few of Galloway's supporters in the audience had the sensitivity to be embarrassed at it (but I wouldn’t place any bets on that being so).

Yet Galloway does, to be honest, turn out to be a thumping good defender of the indefensible. I enjoy listening to demagogues, if they are skillful enough; it’s a craft, albeit a dark one, and there’s a low pleasure in seeing it done to a turn. By the close of play, Galloway has Hitchens on the ropes. (Again, you understand, I’m just referring to delivery, not content.)

All in all, the match was nothing like the dry and stylistically impoverished discussions of issues you can watch on PBS. It was more like two hungry, caged tigers, splendid in form, allowed to try to claw each other’s guts out. Purists can decry the level of personal insults both men generated, and by the rules that have made formal debating a synonym for academic tedium, they are right. But Galloway and Hitchens each presented a viewpoint that is widely held, and put their cases strongly, even if the former's was beyond contemptible. You are unlikely to see a more spirited statement of both sides in the controversy that that has driven a wedge through the western world, and whose consequences for the future can hardly be overstated.

C-SPAN2, which morphs into Book TV on the weekends, will re-broadcast the debate on Sunday, September 25.