The baby boomers had everything – free education, free health care and remarkable personal liberties – but they squandered it all. Now their children are paying for it. —The New Statesman
Joseph Fouche first quotes Lex‘s reaction to the Occupy* protests:
My hatred of the Boomers, who have brainwashed and wasted these kids is boundless. There is nothing wrong with them. They have just never been taught anything but bullshit. They have been betrayed by their parents and their teachers. It is very depressing. The country has been shamefully dumbed down.
Reading all this with just a little partisan bias, I’d say that he then blames left-wing Baby Boomers for both the intellectual vacuity of their young epigones and for the country’s inability to reform its policies and effectively address the current crisis.
They say they want a revolution. To have a revolution, you must have a secular social catechism that accumulates the sort of strategic effects that will trigger a fatal split in our current set of societal elites. In the crisis so far, we’ve only seen dusty formulas trotted out by ancient and creaky Boomers yearning re-fight the glorious battles of youth.
Again.
And again.
Here’s an unintended side-effect of extended human lifespans: ideological stasis. To butcher Max Planck: a political notion does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. Boomers, given unnaturally long biological life by historical developments they barely comprehend, give unnaturally long life to their foolishly destructive notions. Society may stagnate in some areas while progressing in others with unforeseen effects. This may make the process of sorting out of what’s needed to grapple with our current predicament prolonged, painful, and prone to triggering frustration and outbreaks of corrective violence.
Go tell the Boomers that, in the words of Oliver Cromwell and Leo Amery:
You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!
The dining hall of Berkeley College, one of the twelve residential colleges at Yale.
This is where I used to eat lunch.
Michael Rubin (Davenport ’94) warns us that Yale is going to hell in a handbasket, the colleges are losing their distinctive individual identities, the left is running the place into the ground, and la patrie est en danger!
For decades, residential colleges have both been Yale University’s chief selling point and the feature by which the university differentiates itself from its Ivy League companions and other top tier universities. All freshmen are subdivided randomly into one of 12 colleges, remaining affiliated with it for four years and living there for three or four years. The net effect is that the colleges provide a sense of community—the chief benefit of a small college experience—with the classroom and campus resources of a much larger university. In a society in which identity groups often self-segregate themselves, the residential colleges also enable Yalies to meet a diverse array of people.
While in theory each residential college is equal, over time, they develop different characteristics. Each college is led by a master. Some masters are disinterested: When I was an undergraduate, I was in Davenport College. In my freshman year, the master was a professor of 19th-century Germany and ran the college like a Prussian general. In my subsequent three years, the master was a retired admiral, who, it turned out, was retired not only from the Navy but also from anything which required effort. In contrast, when I was a graduate student, I was for a year a resident graduate affiliate in Pierson College. Harvey Goldblatt, a professor of medieval Slavic literature, was master and quickly catapulted Pierson into the envy of all other colleges: He knew each student not only by name, but also made an effort to interact with everyone. He cheered on the residential college’s intramural sports teams, and even undertook his own alumni endowment to allow, for example, a spring break trip to Italy for most seniors. Behind the scenes, he was involved in administrative issues and stayed on top of everything from employee morale in the dining hall to the length of time scaffolding remained up after work was completed.
Alas, Yale has changed. In the twelve years since I have left New Haven, faculty members tell me that the number of administrators has almost doubled. While Yale University once encouraged autonomy among students to set up organizations, fix problems, and take responsibility for their own decisions, today, an ever-increasing number of deans get involved to regulate all aspects of life and administration. Whereas Yale students could once choose to excel in extracurricular activities or academics, today there is little differentiation: grade inflation and administration intervention has evened the playing field so that a lazy and irresponsible student will, from his or her record, appear equal to one who in the past might have been able to differentiate themselves academically.
The quest for equality and the bolstering of safety nets has not only blurred distinctions amongst students, but also faculty. At some point, administrators—for whom bureaucracy rather than education is a career—decided that it was unfair to have inequality among colleges. After all, if a college master managed to energize both students and alumni, students in other colleges might resent that another master was not up to the job.
Enter President Richard Levin: Replicating what too often happens in liberal society, rather than celebrating success or encouraging competition to keep up, Levin instead sought to encourage mediocrity by “equalizing†the college experience.
He’s basically not wrong, of course. But the rot set in long, long ago. Kingman Brewster, brilliant, talented, and impeccably bred from the bluest blood of Plymouth Colony descent, personified Yale’s style, ethos, and tradition perfectly, better, one thought inevitably, than any other living, breathing person could, but the King was already leading Yale full tilt down the primrose path of fashion, Modernism, and leftism.
One’s other quibble is that no one really goes to Yale for the residential colleges.
Most people admitted don’t even know about the residential college system, a New World, early 20th century attempt to emulate the British Oxbridge style of elite education, until they have read thoroughly their admissions material.
I think it isn’t really possible for Yale colleges to feature the colorful individuality and eclat, which in earlier days reflected the personalities of great men like Basil Duke Henning (a direct descendant of a famous Confederate Kentucky cavalry officer) or Beekman Cannon (whose marriage and private life inspired Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf). America just does not supply a suitable contigent of illustrious, flamboyant, and idiosyncratic WASP gentlemen scholars anymore. Besides, today’s Yale values “diversity” over cultural continuity and arete.
Out-of-date “Heather Has Two Mommies†controversy to be superseded by the hip new “Kate Has Three Mommies†model?
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On a leafy drive in west Los Angeles, at a newly renovated home with cathedral ceilings and a backyard pool, 4-year-old Kate Eisenpresser-Davis’ friends have been known to pose an intriguing question: “Why does Kate have three mommies?”
Lisa Eisenpresser, 44, and her partner, Angela Courtin, 38, share custody of Kate with Eisenpresser’s ex-partner.
When asked to describe their life, Eisenpresser and Courtin respond with the same word: “Normal.” Days are spent searching for the right balance between work and home, and zigzagging through Mar Vista to meetings, school and gymnastics.
Courtin is pregnant. Kate will soon have a sister, Phoebe, conceived from Eisenpresser’s egg and sperm from a donor — the same 6-foot-1 Harvard grad, who scored a 1580 on the SAT, who served as Kate’s donor.
“It’s almost like I’m too busy to be thinking too deeply about being gay and different,” Eisenpresser said.
Maybe she shouldn’t bother. According to a Times analysis of new U.S. Census figures, the Eisenpresser-Courtin-Davises are on the leading edge of change — of a steady evolution in the meaning of “family” and “home” in California.
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J continues:
But what the heck kind of woman not only tells the media that the sperm donor that facilitated her childbearing is a Harvard grad but tells the media his frickin’ SAT scores? (Unfortunately, I can’t evaluate how awestruck I ought to be without more information on whether the reported score was generated before or after the various dumbing-down “renormings†of the scoring system.)
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T responds:
Presumably the singing groups will soon need to update their repertoires to include “Your Daddy Was a Yale Sperm….”*.
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* A reference to the old-time Yale a capella singing group song “Your Daddy is a Yale Man,” which not every reader may be familiar with, so here are the 2009 Whiffenpoofs performing same:
Anne Merritt complacently describes a list of skills which today’s millenials are apparently content to go without. Her list includes using a standard transmission (no real sports cars for you, kiddies!), cooking anything from scratch (no real food either), building anything, fixing anything, penmanship, and even sharpening a knife.
Compare the late Robert A. Heinlein‘s opinion of minimal masculine competence.
A man should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
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SHARPENING A KNIFE
The best method is to use a flat stone. Ideally, to do a really excellent job on a very dull knife, you want three stones: in order of coarseness, a coarse carborundum, a soft Washita stone, and a hard black Arkansas stone, but you can pick up a flat rock off the ground and use it if you have nothing better.
Wet the stone. A light machine oil is best, but water, even spit, will do.
Take your knife and pretend that you are trying to cut a thin slice off the stone, cutting away from you. Do one side and then the other. The angle you want is quite effectively approximated by pretending to be cutting a thin slice off the stone.
Obviously, if you have coarser and finer stones, you start with the coarse and end with the finer stone. Hard black Arkansas
stones are expensive, but you can produce the finest finished edges with one of those.
High-end custom knife makers, like Randall, commonly supply small medium India whetstone in a pouch outside the sheath. One little India stone of that sort is basically adequate.
Newly appointed Yale deans this fall: W. Marichal Gentry, dean of student affairs and associate dean of Yale College, and Shelly C. Lowe, the University’s first assistant dean for Native American affairs and director of the Native American Cultural Center.
In an email to the entire Yale student body, Dean of Student Marichal Gentry reminded students that “consensual sex can be gloriousâ€. We’re used to getting emails about staying safe, saving the Yale Police phone number in our phones, and to always call for help, especially around the biggest drinking weekends of the year. The past two years we have received very standard emails about Spring Fling, Harvard-Yale, and Halloween, but this one definitely caught the eye. With unusually eloquent prose for Dean Gentry he reminded us,
A few years ago when we introduced the idea that consensual sex could be glorious, it seems that was a surprise to many. Consensual sex is having the sex you want, something you can say “yes†to, not something you’re afraid to say “no†to. Glorious consensual sex is something given, not taken, something shared not endured: something that makes you smile the next day, not something that hurts psychologically, emotionally or physically.
The philosopher can hardly avoid laughing at the 180 degree reversal of the Puritan establishment’s position on carnal activity on the part of the persons it supervises in loco parentis.
Yet, plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose, the annoying tone and conscribed perspective of the cant of indulgence differs only in puerility from the earlier cant of continence.
Yale has acquired a treasure in Dean Gentry. To mark the inauguration of one’s term in office by delivering via email a sermon to the water advising it to run downhill represents a gift for inadvertent comedy amounting to genius.
And I’m doubly grateful to Mr. Gentry for bringing it to my information, via his university appointment press release, that Yale now boasts a dean in charge of Native American Affairs. Who would have imagined that Yale actually had Native American Affairs? We are not Dartmouth, after all.
Sing, Eris, Goddess of Discord, the joys of Diversity!
America’s elite has a problem. It’s skinny jeans and scarves, it’s Bama bangs and pants with tiny, tiny embroidered lobsters, it’s Michael Cera, it’s guys who compliment a girl’s dress by brand, it’s guys who don’t know who bats fourth for the Yankees. Between the hipsters and the fratstars, American intellectual men under the age of twenty-five have lost track of acting like Men—and these are our future leaders. We have no John Wayne, no Clint Eastwood. And girls? Girls hate it.
This all occurred to me at 1:47 a.m. on November 8, 2008. I was on the phone in a hotel hallway, listening to this guy moan about this girl that didn’t want to get it get it, if you will. Out of some cruel, dazzling dark corner of my metal heart, a single thought formulated: Man up.
Intellectual elite girls know this secret. Vanderbilt University stands near the light end of a two-decade tunnel from Southern Playground of the Rich to generic Duke stepsister, but the tunnel produced a foil to the unmanned masses: the 2000s Vandy Girl. Embodied most in a handful of elite sororities, the concept of Vandy Girl requires one shot of the Old Spirit (pearls and champagne and knowing what to say and when to say it), and two shots of this confidence that’s a tic-tac-toe board of goals and timelines.
So, the calculus goes, the girls isolate aspects of masculinity—the drive, the confidence—in lightning rounds of Natural Selection Yahtzee. The men, likewise, drift to the center. They soften. They become Euro basketball players who never played high school ball, falling down like they’ve been shot after every hand check, and telling you they don’t feel respected. Don’t feel respected? Feel? I wouldn’t trust that person in a crisis. Why can’t we all shift in one direction, instead of stumbling into an androgynous mass of feelings-first zombie groupthink?
But perhaps you don’t believe me. Maybe you live in some neo-noir situation where the men smoke on dark corners or in open plains and don’t wear scarves unless it’s cold enough to cut a hole in some ice and pull a fish out, and even then are a little hesitant about the whole thing. I don’t know your life.
They’re not bad guys, not necessarily, this First Team All-Sister Mary Margaret. They’re generally polite, they love their parents, they get good grades at excellent schools. But underneath this sheen of the Good Kid, the Good Kind, thought overcomes action, and emotion overcomes thought.
“It’s selfishness,†my high school principal explained to me. He grew up in Western Pennsylvania and commands respect, whether at my privileged high school, or at his new, post-retirement post at a far rougher school. “It comes down to two questions: ‘What have you done for me lately?’ and ‘How will this look?’ â€
Vanity over pride, selfishness over self-restraint—serious problems that can be traced from one to the next, streaks of light in the dark forming one big circuit.
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Yale undergraduate conservative leader Tristyn Bloom found the other young lady’s observations too obvious, and had a different idea of the correct masculine attitude.
I can sympathize with Miss Miller. I’m no fan of limp-wristed milksops, and I can forgive an (almost painfully) redundant essay. But something about this line caught my attention:
“Vanity over pride, selfishness over self-restraint–serious problems that can be traced from one to the next, streaks of light in the dark forming one big circuit.”
Now I don’t know about you, but when I read the phrase “vanity over pride” I didn’t think of metrosexuals, I didn’t think of hipsters, I didn’t think of the Backstreet Boys, or Justin Bieber, or anyone from the 20th, or 21st, centuries at all. Those three words, like some kind of hypnosis-induced trigger, brought before my mind’s eye, in rapid succession: Sebastian Flyte, Peter III, Paul I, and the stereotypical image I somewhere acquired of what most Hanoverian kings must have been like ages 7 through 36. I kept reading, and thought of the whiny, needling tone of Prince Kurbsky’s epistles (justified though it may have been) and Oblomov’s distinctly effete brand of hypochondria (grounded in self-conception as “delicate”, rather than basic neurosis). I thought of decadence and decadents throughout culture and history, from the late Severan Dynasty of Ancient Rome to the Karamazov Dynasty of 19th century Russia.
But no, these are new problems.
“Pain + silence = masculine strength” is certainly an old formula, and one that has waxed and waned over time as the be-all, end-all of manliness. Miss Miller proposes we address its current waning by stubbornly invoking some Frankenstein’s monster with John Wayne’s heavy cadence, Don Draper’s emotional repression and Winston Churchill’s functional alcoholism. “MAN UP!” we cry, hoping they see what we do when we say it.
Now granted I hate fops- really, I do- but I have to go back to Sebastian Flyte for a moment, because I think he has a better answer. There’s a scene early on where Sebastian and Charles are driving together to Brideshead, and Charles is being very inquisitive about the Flytes (for my own convenience I’m referencing the transcript of the 1981 miniseries):
“You’re so inquisitive.”
“Well, you’re so mysterious about them.”
“I hoped I was mysterious about everything.”
“Why don’t you want me to meet your family? Who are you ashamed of, them or me?”
“Don’t be so vulgar, Charles.”
We missed this 3:54 video of unmanly behavior from last week which went viral. The young lady says she broke up with him for other reasons than being struck by the ball he ducked.
Hat tip to John Hinderaker.
John then found the perfect counterexample. 1:36 video
Poor Veronica will be initially infatuated with Kevin Keller, but he’ll eventually become her walker.
John L. Goldwater (1916-1999), an orphan and distant relative of Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater, was a strong admirer of small town America and an arch champion of family values, who played a key role in establishing the Comics Code Authority in 1954.
Goldwater invented Archie, his teenage associates, and their paradigmatically American hometown Riverdale in 1941, modeling the new series on the popular “Andy Hardy” films. He deliberately created Archie as a rival to Superman.
Goldwater “thought of Superman as an abnormal individual and concluded that the antithesis, a normal person, could be just as popular.”
Superman performed extraordinary feats, averting cataclysmic perils to humanity and thwarting the plans of evil geniuses, while Archie just blundered along happily through high school, facing no problem larger than choosing between the romantic possibilities presented by the blond and wholesome Betty and the wealthy brunette Veronica. Goldwater believed that Archie was successful precisely because he was “basically a square, but in my opinion the squares are the backbone of America… [and] strong families.”
I expect a loud spinning sound can be heard in the vicinity of the late John L. Goldwater’s grave. His grandson made a announcement this week that the old man would probably not very much have liked.
Archie Comics announced Wednesday that it’s introducing the strip’s first openly gay character. His name is Kevin Keller, and rumor has it that he’s a strapping, blond hottie who draws the immediate attention of Veronica and who wrestles with how to gently rebuff her flirtations.
Co-CEO Jon Goldwater says the move is “just about keeping the world of Archie Comics current and inclusive,” adding that the new character makes sense because “Riverdale has always been a safe world for everyone.”
Kevin is slated to make his first appearance in September.
The majority of the Archie comic audience are kids and sexual orientation has no place in this comic. Archie has been a pillar of honest, genuine content for many successful years so why change that?
The San Francisco Examiner brings up the often-voiced suspicion that the Archie series already had a gay character, the rebellious and misogynistic Jughead.
Archie comics is debuting its first gay character, although that should be ‘out’ gay character, since obviously Jughead, that woman hating anti-social with the dry sass, has always been the main gay of Riverdale High.
The late John L. Goldwater ruled that Stan Lee Spiderman strips written in response Federal Department of HEW requests featuring anti-drug use advocacy were a comics code violation.
The Yale University Undergraduate Admissions Office boasts of having set out to “reinvent the dull genre of admission videos… with something… a little different.”
That something turns out to be this generally lame and appalling, faux hip 16:49 musical video, produced in collaboration with undergraduates and recent alumni.
It is intended to appeal to today’s high school students as a take-off on the popular high school musical television series Glee, and was praised by one alumnus on the LinkedIn discussion as “clever, fun and effectively ma[king] the point, without being boringly traditional, pretentious or elitest. (sic)”
Of course, I am myself boringly traditional, pretentious and elitist, so my soul positively writhed in horror at the spectacle of a Yale education being marketed in bad rhymes on the basis of a strange combination of consumerism (a salad bar and grill, college laundramats and gyms), the collegiate architecture of James Gamble Rogers, conformist political correctness (4 “cultural houses,” a sustainable farm), and the mere quantity of organizations and activities.
Somehow or other, Yale’s distinctive identity, described by F. Scott Fitzgerald thusly:
I think of all Harvard men as sissies… and all Yale men as wearing big blue sweaters and smoking pipes.â€
I think of Princeton as being lazy and good-looking and aristocratic — you know, like a spring day. Harvard seems sort of indoors…
And Yale is November, crisp and energetic.”
was wholly overlooked.
Today’s young people are implicitly being expected to decide on their choice of college in much the way they would choose between holiday resorts or apartment complexes, purely on the basis of appearance and amenities. Yale today has no distinctive character or identity at all, it seems. The video has nearly 17 minutes of musical performances (of a sort), and no one ever sings “Bright College Years.”
It was not completely without its moments, however. Near the beginning a motley crowd, obviously made up of Yalies, is sitting there pretending to be parents and prospective students. A fashionably racially diverse admissions officer (played by Kobi Libii) is unctuously answering questions.
He answers an inquiry as to whether all Yale professors teach undergraduates in the affirmative, boasting that all tenured Yale professors teach undergraduates, so that even a freshman might be taking a class from a Nobel Prize winner. At that point, a wife goes “Oooo!” and elbows her husband, an Asperger type sporting a pocket protector, who blinks confusedly a few times in response and who (one strongly suspects) is, in fact, himself one of those very same faculty members just referred to.
The Boston Globe describes this as old news, but I had not heard. Harvard University is licensing its name to a division of Wearwolf Group for use in labeling a line of men’s clothing.
The clothing line, to be labeled “Harvard Yard” will obviously be marketed to people who are unaware of the existence of J. Press, the Andover Shop, and Brooks Brothers. They will think they will be dressing like preppies attending Harvard, but they will really be dressing in accordance with the idea some gay guys who didn’t go to college at all have of how men at Harvard should dress.
Is Harvard really so badly off that they need to sell their name to get money for scholarships? Couldn’t they just get Drew Faust and some of their female faculty out there in bikinis doing car washes?
The Harvard Yard line will arrive in stores next spring with shirts selling for $160 and up, pants starting at $195, and blazers selling for $495. Eventually the company plans to add women’s wear to the mix. None of the Harvard Yard clothing actually bears a Harvard logo. The clothes have subtle touches to show their pedigree, such as crimson stitching around buttonholes. Shirts, sweaters, and jackets are also named for buildings on campus and streets in Cambridge.
Contemporary Britain is competing very seriously with California in the contest for the best nonsensical ideas applied in daily life.
Newcastle’s onebestway, a small design and marketing firm facing tough economic times, took serious steps to deal with the crisis. It hired a swami, excuse me! a business psychologist, to help in improving morale.
David Taylor, a business psychologist, told workers at design and marketing onebestway, in Newcastle upon Tyne, that a Naked Friday idea would boost their team spirit.
He was called in to help the firm after six staff members were forced into taking redundancies at the start of the credit crunch.
Mr Taylor told them that, by stripping off their clothes, staff could also strip away inhibitions and talk to each other more openly and honestly.
He said: “Inviting an organisation to go naked is the most extreme technique I’ve used. It may seem weird but it works. It’s the ultimate expression of trust in yourself and each other.”
Despite some initial reluctance, nearly all the staff took off all their clothes – except for one man, who wore a posing pouch, and one of two female workers, who kept on black underwear.
Sam Jackson, 23, the house manager, was the only woman to go fully naked. She said: “It was brilliant. Now that we’ve seen each other naked, there are no barriers.
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The Daily Mail reports that careful preparations had to be made, but assures us that the experiment proved a grand success.
During the week leading up to the strip-off, the workers were encouraged to photocopy parts of their bodies to make them more confident about themselves.
A nude model was also brought in for the workers to sketch and talk to.
Sam added: ‘It took a week of David being in the office for us to build up courage. The first few steps were very nerve-wracking, but once I got to my desk and got used to it, I felt totally comfortable.
‘It was emotional but we found we were much more able to talk to each other honestly – and have been since. The company
Managing Director Mike Owen, 40, said: ‘We’re either brave or mad. But I did tell everyone they didn’t have to do it -only if it felt right.’
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Naked Office, a television program which filmed all this, will be aired July 9th on Virgin1.
Until recent times, for most people, both food and sex were considerably less available than they are today.
In the Hoover Institute’s Policy Review, Mary Eberstadt meditates on the curious way in which, at the present time, the community of fashion has come to place a strongly principled ethical focus on eating, just when old-style sexual morality has been replaced by total latitudinarianism.
, expresses dissatisfaction with the masculinity of elite male millennials. 
