musings
I’m having an extremely difficult time posting today. I just can’t seem to think clearly. I don’t know what’s up with that.
I’m avoiding the gym tonight. I know it’s lame excuse but it’s always so crowded on Mondays it’s almost not worth going. I know it’s a lame excuse.
Anyway, I’m sort of mulling over a whole bunch of stuff. For instance, the story about the presentation by the anti-gay group in Utah County. The American Fork PTA was absolutely right to cancel the presentation. The group that was invited holds views that are extreme, radical and at odds with the views of mainstream medical and mental health professionals. That’s a nice of waying saying they seem like a bunch of well intentioned bigots.
I’m also pondering the idea of integrity and honesty. A friend of mine recently got taken in by an internet scam. Thus far it’s cost him $1100. $100 of that was for attorney fees after he was arrested for trying to cash a forged/fraudulent check. Now, you could say he’s just gullible and getting what he deserves. He called me this evening and he’s getting all this shit from his family about how stupid he is for falling for this scam and frankly that’s just not helping.
I’m thinking about tea. In Steven Johnson’s The Ghost Map he has a short - almost a throwaway - passage about tea. His point is that drinking tea resulted in a vast improvement of health for the people of England. A similar event occurred with coffee and the US. It works like this. Generally, water is not safe to drink. It’s full of bacteria and all sorts of stuff that makes you sick. Tea, however, has two big advantages. First, you boil the water and kills lots of bacteria. Then, the tannins in the tea have antibiotic properties which kill off other bacteria. The anti-oxidants in tea can help boost your immune system. When tea became the national drink in England, it actually resulted in improved health for the nation.
Last but not least, I’ve been reading about the 1918 flu pandemic. It killed 100 million people worldwide. It was the worst pandemic in modern history - very likely killing more people than the Black Death (which killed a much higher proportion of the population but overall fewer people.). Unlike the Black Death which seared itself into our cultural memory, the 1918 Influenza Pandemic has been weirdly and largely forgotten until very recently. As fears of the Avian Flu have spread, the 1918 pandemic has returned to public consciousness. After thinking of the flu as a temporary and relatively minor ailment, we’ve been forced to confront the reality that it can be deadly. That scares the hell out of us.
Last but not least, I’ve been thinking about Alfed Kinsey. On a regular basis, conservative attack Kinsey - portraying him in the least flattering light possible, arguing he was a pedophile and sex abuser and pervert of the worst kind - in the hope that if they discredit him, it will somehow undo the sexual revolution. It seems they believe if we as a culture reject Kinsey, we’ll all run back to the mythical fifties, live in the burbs, have kids and stop thinking about sex. Conservatives seem to believe that without Kinsey, all the stuff they don’t like about never have happened.
April 1st, 2008 at 2:51 pm
On Kinsey, I’m nobody’s conservative, but I can say that I, for one, am interested. I do feel like it matters, because Kinsey stands for an “As long as it feels good” licentiousness that had some disastrous consequences for that generation — the generation that raised us; or would have, if they hadn’t been otherwise occupied by key parties and finding themselves. [Not that I'm bitter at all.]
Whether or not Kinsey himself was a responsible researcher, he has come to symbolize the proposition that taboos against such behavior as miscegenation, homosexuality, women’s lib and no-fault divorce are all of a piece with and morally equivalent to taboos against such behavior as adultery, exhibitionism, child pornography, child exploitation, and sex work. And that all of these taboos would shrivel under the harsh but objective light of science.
For a thoughtful fictional exploration of this issue, I recommend Mister Posterior and the Genius Child, by Emily Jenkins. See http://www.amazon.com/Mister-Posterior-Genius-Child-Jenkins/dp/B000H2MZ8Q/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1207085595&sr=8-1. Or, of course, there’s the old Aldous Huxley standby. See http://skojec.wordpress.com/2007/10/18/aldous-huxley-was-a-genius/
April 1st, 2008 at 3:40 pm
AD - BTW - looked up your profile at the law firm - you look like you haven’t aged at all, I’m a little bitter. I’ll get over it with therapy.
The links remind me of the scene in the movie Mame - Patrick describes playing “Fish Families’ for his beaming Auntie Mame and horrified trustee Mr. Babcock.
April 1st, 2008 at 10:20 pm
You are too kind. I look like somebody’s haggard 39-year-old mom, which I am, or will be come Thursday. You are looking mighty fine yourself. Must go rent “Mame” now…
April 2nd, 2008 at 1:28 am
It doesn’t seem as though the Kinsey movie did too well, but that doesn’t surprise me. I can only imagine how horribly embarrassing it would have been for a young religious couple or just friends to go see it together. They would have wanted to run out of the theater and probably did. I watched it alone and thought it was fascinating.
I personally don’t think there was as much free sex going on in the sixties as we all imagined. It’s always fun to imagine though, isn’t it?
Being a 55 year old now. what I remember about the fifties was that our parents were very serious and stiff about everything. They had just won world war II and knew everything. We were supposed to just listen and prepare to toil for the good of the nation. That’s why we rebelled and explored all kinds of different lifestyles. I never felt there were “disastrous consequences” for us other then the fact that the powerful in this country beat us down every chance they got because they wanted to be in charge. They won too, and look where that’s got us.
What’s so bad about feeling good Astrodon?
April 2nd, 2008 at 6:31 am
Larry - It’s an interesting point of connection. For a lot of folks in our age group (AD and I both graduated from the same college the same year), the experience of our childhood was the experience of seeing adults act not very adult. When we needed and wanted adult guidance we couldn’t get it. I think what we objected to was not the sixties but the seventies and that decade’s reduction of the real parts of the sexual revolution to sleeping around, suburban swinging, and the Love Boat.
I actually have rented but not yet watched the PBS documentary on Kinsey. I should say rewatched since I saw it when it was first broadcast. Kinsey is credited/blamed with all kinds of influence he didn’t have. His studies however forced a lot of people to reexamine their values about sexuality in light of his findings. Other changes - including hormonal contraception - played equally important roles in changing American attitudes toward sexuality. IMHO, Kinsey’s biggest contribution was breaking the perception of consensus - there had never been actual consensus but social forces in the US encouraged people to believe there was. Kinsey’s studies forced people to acknowledge that what the US had in the postwar era was the appearance of consensus.
AD - I don’t believe you! And my photo on the site was taken in Costa Rica and everyone looks better in Costa Rica.
April 2nd, 2008 at 9:21 am
Astrodon, Will you be ‘haggard’ on Thrusday, or sombodys’ Mom, or 39? If the latter, then Happy Birthday! Woo haa.
I wanted to expand on your sense that the parents of that generation were simply distracted with keg parties and finding themselves. Quite high on my list of distratcions was the ever-present thread on Nuclear holocust and, of course, the treachery that was going on over in Vietnam. Certainly that list can be expanded, but beer would only get one so far. To the kids who feel short-changed, I apologize.
April 2nd, 2008 at 12:29 pm
Oh, I’ll still be somebody’s mom on Thursday, and so it goes without saying that I’ll still be haggard on Thursday, but I will turn 39 Thursday. Thanks for the birthday wishes. 39 is whatever, but next year this time, I want to have a blow-out so big you’ll be able to see it in Utah.
In fairness to boomers, I should say that many are lovely, including my own earnest civil servant parents; one a new immigrant from Jamaica, and one from Appalachia; the first of their families to go to college.
I think they are failry representative. Compared to the time and energy they would later expend on the purchase of a new PC, all of their early life decisions seem to have been made with reckless abandon. But they mostly worked out.
You almost didn’t go to college? I liked my job wrapping gifts in a department store. How’d you choose a major? My friend was doing it. How were you going to navigate being an interracial couple? Didn’t think about it. How did you succeed without a network? They were giving jobs away like candy to new grads.
It’s no criticism to say they didn’t know what they were doing. Didn’t know from nest eggs. Didn’t provide any structure. They were hedonistic, but they weren’t hurting anybody. They were entitled, but the world was easier then.
They hugged us. They just about never hit us. They TALKED to us. I’m sure all that they did do was completely without precedent from their own parents. I fully appreciate how revolutionary that was. They are the civic-minded, free-thinking, conscientious side of boomers. LB and Caveat, no doubt you are also.
But there’s Mister Magoo and there is self-absorption to the point of pathology and many boomer parents, such as the ones who did a number on my own beloved spouse, are guilty of the latter.
Note to Glenden’s readers: Any self-effacing comments should be read in the context of the astonishing tally of feminine wiles expended by the gaggle of us vying for his attentions in college.
April 2nd, 2008 at 3:42 pm
I was actually talking about the 2004 movie made about Kinsey with Liam Neeson. Kinsey was on a mission to get America informed about sex and he never gave up. It’s an amazing story of courage with some tragedy too.
I can’t really compare my life to many others. I came from a broken family, which was supposed to ruin my life but didn’t. I had a wonderful mother who kept a roof over our heads while we played and my father drank. I was actually glad I didn’t have an overbearing father who required me to follow in his footsteps like some of my friends. My mother was always at work when I was a teenager and I had to figure things out for myself. I wasn’t a troublemaker despite the fact I did drugs. In those days, my crowd stayed away from alcohol and the funner drugs that became popular in the 70’s.
I’m basically a loner and I like it that way. I’m a financial failure for the most part, but have enough to get by and have never asked anybody for any help. I never went to college, but managed to teach myself how to program an Atari computer well enough to program printing software which could have made me a whole lot of money if it had been finished a couple of years earlier. The whole experience was kind of depressing because of all the work I put into it, but I’m not sure my life would have been any better with money. It was exciting to get it published.
I’m basically a happy guy who never had children but is fascinated with life. I’m very distressed to see my country being run into the gutter by a bunch of cronies and war profiteers who have convinced the generations after mine, that it was all our fault. That part makes me angry.
Those are musings from a member of the least great generation. BooooHoooo!
It’s really cool that we have blogs like these to flesh these things out and not just be defined by the corporate media as a bunch of blind consumers.
April 3rd, 2008 at 8:35 am
Larry,
I actually haven’t seen the Liam Neeson portrayal of Kinsey. I actually good things about the movie. I can imagine, based on the PBS documentary, that the movie would have had some folks running for the exits. Kinseyis often credited with creating the formal field of sexology (I don’t know if that’s the correc term); he was one of the first people to study it in a consistent way, to try to apply scientific methodology to the study of human sexuality. I think his greatest contribution lays establishing that there is greater diversity of sexual experiences than was previously assumed.
I think it’s fair to say the experience of generations younger than baby boomers has often felt like showing up to the amusement park the day after the crowd rioted and finding everything a mess and broken. The boom generation did a good job of questioning the assumptions they received but have done a poor job of creating and maintaining social capital, of sustaining instituions. The World War Two generation and the one immediately after them were all about institutions - the boom generation wisely questioned that outlook. But, in doing so, often failed to see the value of institutions and traditions and failed to learn the skills required to rework and sustain what was valuable while abandoning the parts that didn’t work anymore.
If you look at the Bushistas and their hangers on, what you see is a concerted, long term attack on institutions of society - from education, to the military, to government, to churches - often dressed up in the clothing of “saving” these same institutions. Consider that Dubya was once applauded for having so much respect for the Oval Office that he wouldn’t take his jacket off inside the office; yet his actions have done more to devalue the presidency as an institution than any president in history.
April 4th, 2008 at 12:01 am
It’s inevitable that each generation will blame the previous one for problems left to them and I’m not going to make the case that mine did everything right by any stretch, but I don’t remember any of us being against the institutions set up by FDR and others to keep checks on things and provide help for the ones who needed it. I never once complained about having to pay my taxes.
Tearing down the institutions and whining constantly about taxes was, and is the main goal of the conservative nutcases who want everything for themselves, not the boomers I respect. That being said, it’s true, we left a mess, but I think it’s more because we didn’t see the extent of the conspiracy to ruin things for the middle class until now.
I’ve heard many times that Reagan used to keep his jacket on out of respect for the Oval Office, but this is the first time I’ve heard about W doing it. Reagan used to talk a lot about rolling up his sleeves. I wonder if that would have defiled the Oval Office. It’s all a bunch of crap. Reagan would have taken off his coat in a New York minute if it would have hurt the labor unions.