Appendix II: Down the rabbit hole. (Additional topic references).

 

Down the rabbit hole.

Quiet Quitting and Lying Flat. Looking at the trend with a long generational lens.

From The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.

The other day I got an email from some news source about "quiet quitting".  I only read the headline and the first paragraph, so I didn't inform myself on whatever it was about in any depth.

Then this headline hit the news sources:

Conan O'Brien's assistant who's 'quiet quit' her job for over a decade says it's okay to be 'mediocre' and find ways to do the 'minimal amount of work possible'

Now there's a blizzard of such stories, so many in fact that I saw a story about how many there are.  Another story, on NPR, put it this way:

Over the last several weeks, the concept of "quiet quitting" has exploded like a supernova across the media universe.

And they don't all apply to just the US.  Here's one about our supposed arch economic nemesis, the People's Republic of China:

Before ‘quiet quitting’ in the U.S., there was ‘lying flat’ in China. How the anti-work movement swept the world’s two largest economies

Apparently "quiet quitting" means two things.

To some people, it apparently means just doing as little as possible and not getting too invested in your job.

Conan O'Brien's longtime assistant just wrote a book on the topic, and claimed this status for herself, which is interesting.  In some ways, the book sort of recalls the 1967 film How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying.¹

The other meaning is close, but not quite the same.  It means to do the amount you are paid for, and nothing else.  I.e. your own time, is your own time.  Again, the NPR article put it this way:

"You're still performing your duties, but you're no longer subscribing to the hustle culture mentality that work has to be your life. The reality is it's not — and your worth as a person is not defined by your labor."

Indeed, both of these trends have the latter as their common theme.

So what is going on here?

I probably ought to put my usual peremptory rejection of the Stauss-Howe Generational Theory in here, as once again I'm citing to it, but there's something generational going on here, I'm pretty sure.  Interestingly, it really shows where the theory is lacking, vindicating, I suppose, my skepticism about it.  This trend is generational, but it doesn't fit into the "this generation, then that" categorization the Stauss Howe theorist back.  About the only thing that rings true on this development is that changes tend to follow a crisis.

Crisis you say?

Well, I could hand you a veritable cornucopia of crises.  COVID-19 provided a huge one, and perhaps just now we're really getting to learn what its long term societal impacts are. As one Lying Flat Chinese individual noted:

But when the pandemic hit, life as he knew it came to an abrupt stop. Like many other workers Covid made him reassess his priorities in life.

Chatting with artist friends back in his home town it struck him how although they had little money they always had something interesting to say about their day and what they were up to - while all he had was work.

From the BBC. 

Anyhow, what that would mean that they should have these sets of characteristics.

What I've observed before here is this regarding the generations that follow the Boomer, and the Boomers themselves.  The Boomers were the most fortunate generation, as a generation (individual stories can and often do run counter to a generation's story).  They were born into a post-war world in which wealth was abundant like never before. Their parents sent large numbers of them to college at a time when you could still get a good job with just a high school diploma.  The US was the dominant economic power.² 

Like spoiled children often do, in their late teen early adult stages, they rebelled against their parents, and did so spectacularly.  But also, like privileged children, they came back into the fold pretty quickly as a rule.

Again, huge disclaimer, this might apply to you if you were listening to Richie Havens at Woodstock, but very well might not if you were listening for the VC in Vietnam.  Individual circumstances vary.³

As a generation, however, the same generation that didn't want to trust anyone over 30, hit their 30s, and went into careers of all sorts.  Pretty soon, the same generation that was lampooning their parent's generation for being interested in "plastics" was looking for all sorts of new uses for it.

As a huge generational cohort, and one that stepped over their parent's heads economically pretty quickly, they've been enormously reluctant to let go of the reins.⁴   The ultimately irony is the same generation that criticized their parents, a damaged generation that had grown up on the Second World War and the Great Depression, they ultimately espoused much of the same ideals in the workplace, even though they damaged much of their parent's generation's ideals in other areas (more on that in a separate post coming up).

So, what occurred, it seems to me, is that the generations that followed the Boomers more closely resembled some prior generations rather than have bold new features.  Generations Jones, growing up in the boomers wake but also enduring the tail end of a crisis, the 1970s inflation, came to have much the same view that the Depression Era or World War Two era generation did about work, although they differed on many other thins. Better find some and keep it.  They simply endured the Boomers as they had little choice, knowing that they were going to be seated at the children's table forever, must like teenagers in their mid-teens who find themselves seated with ten-year-olds at the Thanksgiving Table. No, you can't choose your own cut of turkey.  No, you can't have a glass of wine.  Yes, you are getting gravy whether you like it or not.

The Millennial's, and the generation behind them, seem to me to be a lot like the generation that fought World War One, that being the supposed Lost Generation.  No matter how they are defined by demographers and social scientists, those generations, when looked at, generally came into their own young, as prior generations had, and had little concept of employer loyalty.  Indeed, the same generation in the teens and twenties was often strongly pro labor and strongly anti "fat cat".  

I've noted these two instances before, but regarding this generation, back with the Pritzker Military Library still had its excellent podcast, it had a very good podcast regarding that generation. An author had interviewed a large number of very elderly American Great War veterans, and their interviews had some striking similarities.  One veteran recalled how he'd graduated from high school, taken a job at a local insurance brokerage right after that, fought in the war, came home, went back to work for it, married and lived out his entire life right there, ultimately owning the brokerage.  Collectively the men interviewed, many of whom were from farm families, had the view that life was hard, sudden death was common, the war came, it was hard, and sudden death was common, got out of the service, and life was hard, with sudden death being common.

World War One was one more thing.

So how does this relate to quiet quitting and laying flat?

More than you might suppose, I'd submit.

Generation Jones silently concluded, almost from the moment that they turned 18, that life was hard, and they were going to have to work in the shadow of the Boomers, with the Boomer set to use up as much of everything absentmindedly and remaking the world in the plastic image of the time, as The Graduate lampooned.  Their opinions didn't matter, and never would.  They pretty much resigned themselves to dying at their desks, and now that they're nearly 60, they're still resigned to it, with that resignation reinforced by their fellows, set to die at their desks, and often by their spouses, who grew up in the same era and are afraid of any thought that a person would do anything other than keep on keeping on, until the last row is plowed, and the tired mule dies in harness.

And to make it all the better, the Great Inflation, the horror of the economic times when they entered the workforce, has returned, robbing them at the begging of their entry into the work force, and cheating them at the period that should be the end.

Millennials, X and Y are different, however.  And maybe in this way, they're looking back.

Romanticizing the past is really dangerous.  Past times were typically much less ideal than we'd like to imagine.  But things in fact can be lost.

Much of what we see today in general family trends is merely a return to the past.  Adult children who are not married living at home is a return to the past.  Even married children living in a parent's home is a return to the past.  Not really feeling like moving all over the country, and focusing on work to support your life, rather than it being your life, well. . . that is in some ways too.

Footnotes

1. I'm not going to read it, in part because Conan O'Brien isn't funny. Also, however, writing a book is a pretty ambitious endeavor and I somewhat doubt that the author had quietly quit, but who knows.

2.  This isn't intended to be a bash on the Baby Boomers post, and indeed, most of the post on this site that seem to, aren't meant to be.  What this post documents is trends.

There are no perfect generations, I'd note, including the "Greatest Generation" that has come to be untouchable.  If this were a much longer post, it'd go into that in some detail as well, as much of what we're seeing right now stems from their experiences, with lives shattered from the Great Depression and World War Two, and being unable to really put them back together thereafter.

Right here, however, is a good place to note this.  The parents of the Boomers were different to start with, as they had been through a crisis that dated back to 1929 and their lives had no chance of being normal until 1945. The impact on the personality of the generation was inevitable.

3. See 2.  This can't be emphasized enough.

When I was a National Guardsmen in the 1980s my unit was full of Vietnam Veterans who hadn't gone to college and who had instead gone to war.  Their histories didn't match that of the generational archetype in a lot of ways.

4.  A bizarre example of this was given to the country the other day when the Biden White House had James Taylor perform at the signing of a bill.  Taylor performed Fire and Rain.

Seriously?

Fire and Rain was released in 1970.  

In terms of years passed, this would be equivalent to having had Al Jolson sing That Haunting Melody at the signing of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, which was the top hit of 1912.  For that matter, Taylor's era was closer to Glen Miller's than to the current one.  There's no way having Taylor signing at a White House event makes it relevant to most current Americans given that most were born after 1970s.

Besides, Taylor is overrated and boring.

La Ancien Régime

It's not like this column has the readership of one by George F. Will or something where I need to worry, really, about its presentation, but I'll note that this is one of a couple of posts I've brought in and out of the Zeitgeist thread and have ended up posting it as a single thread, because of its nature, I guess.

I have a recent thread on our Monday At The Bar series about a bill that would raise judicial retirement ages.  I'm against that.  I'm pretty convinced, by this point in time, that such thoughts are a byproduct of two or three things operating in American society, one being the weird American belief that everyone is going to grow old with their body's and minds fully intact.  Americans want to believe that everyone is 20 years old, right up to the moment they die at age 120.

The other is the Baby Boom generation's refusal to let go. The same generation that didn't want to trust anyone over 30, when they weren't 30, now doesn't want to trust anyone under 60.

Which brings me to this.

During the last election, there was a Republican undercurrent that Joe Biden was either senile or approaching senility, a highly ironic position given that there were many who suspected that nearly as old Donald Trump wasn't right mentally himself.  Indeed, both men have been highly studied, although on the back burner, by their opposing camps and both of those camps have the ability to argue that the opposing figure just isn't who he used to be.

Whether or not that's correct we are at a point where the evidence is now really in.  The nation really has to turn the leadership of. . . everything over to younger people.  

Joe Biden's Presidency so far has been a complete mess.  Starting off with real hope in some quarters, things are now off the rails in all sorts of ways.  Trump and Biden combined, and it was both of them, operated to make the withdrawal from Afghanistan a complete route, wasting decades of American effort in a retreat that will forever be remembered for how badly it was done.  Trump's meandering in the early part of the Coronavirus Pandemic, which was somewhat understandable at first but which turned into a bizarre "look at me not wearing a mask" series of photo ops has left Biden with a gigantic public health mess which he now needs to address, but the messaging has been very bad on it.  Biden needs to win the inevitable court challenges on his new OSHA mask policy, and get it enforced, or he will look hopelessly weak and that will fuel the left/right divide that's wrecking the country.

Trump took a lot of criticism for his very aggressive border policy but Biden's reaction, started when he was still a candidate, was a muddled open the border policy, no matter what he might claim about that now, which is swamping the border and leading to a giant humanitarian crisis.  If Biden didn't want to be as rigid and aggressive as Trump, he didn't have to be, but his counter policy was going to create a disaster, and it did.

Legislatively, the Administration has taken a strong economy, which was damaged by the pandemic, and inserted inflation into it but will not yield in a way that will address that, leaving trying to get some order into things in the hands of a single Senator  Much of this is in order to attempt to bring in a set of policy goals which are his right to back, as he's the President, but it's all happened too slow to really effectuate them.

So the point?

Well, this.  This administration is really close to dissolving into complete ineffectiveness.   Biden may turn out to be a gift to Republicans the way that Jimmy Carter was.  But only if the GOP gets over their own  old man.

Which brings us to the second point.  We're now on year five of administration by really old men, one a populist who had no prior government experience and who was scary from time to time, and one a neo left-winger who is ineffectual.

Theodore Roosevelt was 42 years old when he became President.  Franklin Roosevelt was 51.  Ronald Reagan, who seemed ancient at the time, was 69.  Most Presidents have been in their 50s when they took office.

There's a reason for that.

It's only in the last decade, as baby boomers reached their 70s, that a cult of antiquity took over the nation's politics at the highest level.  Since then, it's extended into everything, and the legislature is about to ask the people of Wyoming to amend the constitution to extend it to the bench.

The opposite should be occurring.

Funny thing is, Americans are now acclimated to this.  I mentioned this to a colleague the other day, and specifically referenced Sanna Marin, the 35-year-old Prime Minister of Finland. The colleague was shocked, demeaned Finland as an irrelevant country, and then went on to say that a President needed "some experience".

Experience relevant to the times, yes.

To another time. . . well not so much.

And to be mentally agile and capable as well.

Some recent legal observations

LSAT Baloney Sliced Thick

I don't pay much attention to Quora, and I don't know why anyone else does either.  A lot of the questions on it are stupid, quite frankly, and the answers can be as well.

In the latter category was a recent question from some poor soul along the lines of whether only studying for a couple of years for the Law School Admissions Test was too little. Some law prof came in and said yes, and not only that, but that you had to have been studying for it basically since grade school.

Bullshit.

I didn't study for it at all and scored high on it.

I'm not the only one.  I heard of one instance in which a fellow took it (and didn't go to law school after being admitted) even though he didn't study and spent the prior night partying rather heavily.

Frankly, the test is supposed to test your ability to think logically.  If you don't have that, maybe you can train your mind to it, but studying for the test probably isn't the best way to do that.

Anyhow, study away.  Probably you should.  Most people seem to.  But you don't need to be doing it during recess at Public School 97.  

Of note, one of the Ivy League schools recently dropped the LSAT as an admissions requirement, and I don't blame them. When a test like this, which tests your mental process, is studied for, people are studying to defeat the test.  And they're probably accomplishing that to a large degree.  Hence, it no longer has any real meaning.

Out of Jurisdiction

I recently tried a case out of state.  I've done that once before, but that was in Federal court, not state court, and it was a trying experience in more ways than one. I've had other out of jurisdiction state court cases, but this is the first one that's gone all the way to trial.

One revelation was that the positions associated with the court are different, which surprises me.  Here, judges used to have a Judicial Law Clerk, who was a recent law school grad who served as a lawyer for the bench, and during trial a representative of the Clerk of the District Court always sits in the trial.  In quite a few courts the Judicial Law Clerk is now the Permanent Law Clerk, i.e. a lawyer for whom that is a career option.  A bailiff sits in the trial as well.

Where I was, however there was a "Clerk" during the trial.  We also had to hire our own court reporter.  There was no bailiff, the clerk sort of acted in that role.  On the last day, a representative of the Clerk of Court's office was there for the verdict.

I was sufficiently confused about it later that I looked the "Clerk" up, and it's clear that the clerk is a Judicial Law Clerk.  I don't know if it's a permanent position in that court or not.

It might be. The reason I note that is that in doing that I was surprised that the young lawyer had moved around in the lawyer's infant career a lot.  That lawyer has only been licensed for about two years (a little less) but had already clerked somewhere else, had been an associate with a large multi state law firm for a  year, and then had moved on to the court. 

That's remarkably different from when I was first a lawyer.  Lawyers who went on to be clerk's did it as a career move knowing that they'd occupy the position for only a year.  It was normally their very first job out of law school.  Very rarely did a practicing lawyer leave practice to become a clerk, although I do know of two who did that to become Federal clerks for a year.  There were no full time career clerks, which now are common.  Federal clerks are pretty much all career clerks, I think.  Those who entered private practice didn't leave it after just one year, and if they did leave their first jobs rapidly, it was because they went to work as public defenders and had planned on other employment to start with.

Differences in views towards employment and employers have been noted by older lawyers for quite a while, but in some ways this is something that's always the case.  When I was young, which seems like just yesterday but which is actually quite a while ago now, it was extremely common for the Baby Boomers to comment on how everyone below them in age had no work ethic and expected to move up the ladder as an entitlement.  I always thought this the height of irony coming form a generation which actually had an enormous sense of entitlement and which was actually given a massive amount of everything by their parents, whom had endured the Great Depression and World War Two and  who accordingly didn't really know, to a significant degree, what real life was actually like.  That generation, which Tom Brokaw mislabeled "the Greatest Generation" in his hagiography devoted to them, knew crisis and suffering and wanted their children to be spared that.  As a result, we got the generation that Donald Trump, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, etc., are in that won't let go of anything.  They actually were allowed to skip entire rungs on the ladder, and then later on kept people from climbing up it, imaging that they'd pulled themselves up by their own bootstraps when, to a significant degree, their doting parents were there tying their shoe laces the entire time.

Clearly, I'm painting with a broad brush, and unfairly, and this doesn't apply to every member of the generation.

Anyhow, when the Millennials and the older Gen Y folks started to enter work, including the legal field, there really was something different about them.  The Gap Generation folks, like me, who fit in between Gen X and the Boomers pretty much felt we had to find a job and plug on.  It was our only option in life, really.  Gen Xers and older Gen Yers, like what is described about the generation that fought World War One (the "Lost Generation"). had much less job loyalty and pretty much took the view that they had to fend for themselves.  Boomers repeatedly accused them of being unrealistic and lazy, but they were neither. They were highly realistic and far from lazy, they just didn't have dog like loyalty to an employer master.  Indeed, they didn't really expect anything, including employment, to last.

Now, however, we're seeing the younger Gen Y and older Gen Z people in the workplace and their views truly are different, at least it seems to me.  Hardly any prior generation would have skipped through that many employers right off the bat, in the example of the Clerk, but I don't think that's uncommon.

I'm not sure what that means, but again, I don't think they're lazy at all.  I think their view towards work is much different, and they don't expect anything to really last, employment wise.  I don't know what their views are, as a whole, on much else.

While I find that rapid employment change a little distressing, as a now older lawyer who hopes that people will stick around, I think I get it a bit, and that their views may be much more realistic than the Boomers really.  Indeed, I think we're seeing a retrograde attachment to work that takes us back to prior generations over a century ago.  If the Gen Xers were like the Lost Generation, the current 20-year-olds in the law and everything else seem more like those workers from the 19th Century, whom you'll often find went through quite a few jobs in a course of a lifetime, or if they were professionals went through quite a few positions.

I hope some other trends reflect that as well. For one thing, I'm sick of the uber bloated massive law firms that have become a feature of American law.  The fact that younger lawyers bolt pretty readily should operate against that, as those firms depend upon a stable supply of sheep to be corralled to mow the grass of the company pasture.  If the sheep are wild, and take off, that sort of corralling can't occur.

Money, Time and Life

Related to this, I've recently had the odd experience of watching a person on the cusp of the Gap Generation, but from a different region of the country, try to reconcile his mental image of work with that of the reality of others views.  Said person isn't really accomplishing it.

This comes up in the context of said person speaking to a younger Gen Xer about that person's work, which is with a legal agency.  The older Xer treated the younger one's work as surely a stepping stone on to other work for "more money".  The younger person didn't see it that way at all.

Indeed, the younger person liked their job, which had relatively low stress, okay wages and really good hours.  He couldn't see whereas he was suffering, as the older one thought other work, in the private sphere, offered a "chance to make more money".

What was clear in the conversation is that  the older of the two viewed making more money as the be all and end all of any job.  That was the whole point, and the only point, of employment. . a chance to make more money. The younger one saw his job as a job and was content with that.

I'm seeing a lot of that with younger workers, particularly the younger Gen Xers and the Gen Yers.  Again, they're like the Lost Generation that way. They want to have a job, have a family of some sort (that hasn't completely returned to the Lost Generation view. . . yet), and to be able to enjoy life, often in a small way.  These younger folks feel that the ability to go fishing after work or watch a ball game is as important as the Dollar.

And they're right.

The March of Technology

I lasted tried a case in February, which was the first post pandemic trial I've done.  In that Wyoming bench trial, neither side used anything high-tech. The case just wasn't that suited for it, sort of, although there were photographic and text exhibits.

In this recent trial, however, all the exhibits were shown to the witnesses electronically and they were all published (shown) to the jury in the same fashion.  A technician attended the entire trial in order that this could be seamlessly accomplished.

The technician was fantastic and did a super job with pointing out the text and going through the electronic exhibits. While I've done a lot of trials, this was the first one I've ever done that was 100% high-tech in this fashion.

I'll admit that I've been skeptical, or perhaps just reluctant, to acknowledge the effectiveness of this, but it's now clearly here and that's the standard.

Like automatic transmissions being in everything, I guess I can accept reality, however, without liking it.  I don't like it.

But that's where we now are.

Going on and on

One thing that I really liked that the other jurisdiction did was to limit opening statements and to constrict voir dire (questioning of the jury).

Various Wyoming courts take different approaches to this.  Most ask the lawyers "how much time do you need for openings?" and then debate how much time will really be given.  I just had a proceeding in which that question was asked, and the plaintiff's lawyer said he needed 1.5 hours.

In the other jurisdiction the court simply informed us that we had 20 minutes.  No debate, you have 20 minutes.  And this was in a highly technical case.

I'm really good at public speaking, and frankly I was relieved.  Anything over 20 minutes is an exercise in hubris and boring the jury.  It might have been in the case at the time of the Gettysburg Address that people were ready for an hour-long speech, but that was in a day in which people had spent half the day getting there, were going back tomorrow, had no phones to check, and weren't getting back to their work right away, and weren't used to 30 minute television shows.  No modern audience is going to listen to an hour-long speech from anyone, let alone a lawyer.  Even if you have super wonderful graphics in which the entire accident is reenacted by Kate Upton and Billie Eilish with background music from Iris Dement are they going to do that.  Just forget it.

None of which keeps lawyers from asking for all kinds of time.  We're stuck in the past that way.

Suiting up

 Extraordinarily well dressed lawyer, W. Morgan Shuster, in New York in 1914. Shuster's impeccable dress is emblematic of the well dressed businessman of this era.  He's wearing a three piece wool suit and carrying a cane he almost certainly doesn't need to use.  And, he's wearing a bowler.

As a Wyoming lawyer, but a lawyer, I've watched the slow decline in clothing standards while participating in it.

At my first day of work in 1990 I reported to work wearing a double-breasted Brooks Brothers suit.  The first partner who came in was wearing wool khaki trousers and a blue blazer, and he was dressed down.  He told me that I didn't have to wear a suit every day.

For years and years, however, I normally wore a tie and clothing appropriate for a tie.  Then COVID 19 hit.

For much of the prior spike of the disease (we're in a spike now, of the unvaccinated, but of course the entire state disregarding that) I kept coming in the office.  I was often the only one there when we were at the point where the staff didn't have to come in.  I pretty much quit dressing in office dress at the time as there wasn't much of a reason to do it.  Nobody was coming in, I was there by myself, what the heck.

I've not made it back to normal, and not everyone else has either.

And of course normal in 2019 was not the same thing it was in 1999, or 2009.  We'd already slid down the dressing scale in the back of the office, where I am.  I never used to wear blue jeans in the office, but by 2019 I already was a fair amount.  Starting with COVID 19, I am all the time.

One of the things about that is that in 2019 I already had a selection of older dress clothes that were wearing out I hadn't replaced.  Probably the inevitability of their demise would have caused me to replace them on in to 2020.  But I didn't have to.  Additionally, the long gap in time meant that I pretty much didn't do anything about the fact I'm down to two suits now.

Two suits isn't much if you are a trial lawyer.

Well, running up to the trial I was going to go down to Denver and get new ones.  But I ran out of time.  I still haven't done it.

I need to.

I'll confess that part of my reluctance to get new suits is that I'm 58 years old.  I don't wear suits daily at work, and I'm not one of those guys who is going to claim "I'm going to work until I'm 80".  Any new suit I get now will still be in fighting shape when I'm 68, and that's reasonably enough, but to my cheap way of thinking, emphasized by the fact that I have two kids in college, its something that is both easy for me to put off, and in the back of my mind I tend to think "maybe I won't really need those if . . . "

Well, I probably better remedy that.

Cliffnotes of the Zeitgeist Part 7. One more won't hurt me. . .

or so conservatives must think.

Senator Joseph McCarthy.  McCarthy was actually largely correct in his accusations, once you see what they really were, and who they were actually made against.  He very clearly had an inside connection with somebody with intelligence inside the government.  My guess is that it was J. Edgar Hoover.  At any rate, while he was correct, he became personally so distasteful that he permanently damaged his cause and even later books that have shown the validity of his accusations have failed to repair his reputation or that of his cause.  He was loved at the time, of course, until he wasn't. There's a lesson here.

Donald Trump has been invited to speak at CPAC in Orlando, this Sunday.

Why would they do this? This will confirm Democrats and Independents, and traditional Republicans, in their choice not to go with the GOP this year, further decrease its influence, and make it harder for those who hold populist views seriously without it looking like simply Trump worship.

People like Victor David Hanson like to speak of "Trump Derangement Syndrome". While that may be worth talking about, the fact is that Trump didn't win the popular vote by any measure either time he ran.  He's not a popular man with the majority of Americans and by inviting him, the issues that concern populist Republicans are being fused to Trump in a way that will guaranty their electoral decimation in upcoming elections.

This is a serious matter.  Populists do have a collection of valid concerns and valid points about them. But Trump's effort at overturning the election and failure to distance himself from extremist are tarring all of them and the entire movement with the same brush.  The tighter the grip Trump has on any section of the GOP, the less likely it is to win anything at the national level going forward, and the more likely that the result will be a permanent shift of the American political center to the left.

McCarthy may have been right about most of the things he was complaining about in the 1950s.  But he was easy to dislike and has become permanently disliked. There's a lesson from history here and we all know what happens to people who fail to listen to history.

Nonetheless, what is clear at this point is that the traditional conservative wing of the party is now in full retreat.  Mitch McConnell, who only a couple of weeks ago sounded like he wanted to have Trump arrested, has stated he'd vote for him if he ran in 2024.  And right now, quite frankly, it looks like such a run is really likely, something that even a few weeks ago would have been regarded as highly unlikely.  As it remains unlikely that Joe Biden will run again, that would likely pit Trump against Kamala Harris, if . . . 

Doesn't anyone notice how old these people are?

If, that is, Trump hasn't passed on simply due to old age, or become mentally feeble due to the same reason.  

It's bizarre to see how even at this late state of the Baby Boom generation, people remain seriously entrenched in the seeming view that only they can lead the nation.  A person would have had good reason to believe that Joe Biden would have been the last Boomer President.  Now, that's not all that certain, as nothing in this political climate is very certain.

Restricting Balloting.

There's a lot of GOP effort being expended to address, proponents claim, chances of "election fraud", even though there's next to none of it occurring.

In Wyoming, legislators have a couple of bills floating on  the topic.  Senators Barrasso and Lummis have signed on to a Federal bill that will fail which will basically prevent States from making the reforms they did to address the still ongoing Coronavirus Pandemic.  The law proposes to eliminate unmonitored ballot collection boxes (one of which I saw in Rawlins just last week) and to require states to send absentee ballots only to those requesting them.

This is another issue that will come to haunt the GOP. There's no evidence of widespread ballot fraud at all, and this plays into the Democratic claim that the Republicans are seeking to restrict the vote.  While this will play to the Trumpite base, it won't play to the traditional wing of the party, which is now simply leaving it.

XX Chromosomes and Scouting

The first group of female Eagle Scouts received that status this week.

First of all, that's great for this group of young women. Achieving Eagle Scout status is hard to do, and they deserve praise for their accomplishments.

But it's also sad in a way in that its a further erosion of, well dare we say it, manliness.

Girls can be girls, but boys can't really be boys anymore, even virtuous boys, which was what the Boy Scouts were all about originally.

Let's be honest.  Because human nature remains human nature no matter how woke some may be and wish for everything to be, there are fundamental differences between men and women, and boys and girls, at every level.  Scouting recognized that, and hence that's why there was a Boy Scouts and a Girl Scouts.

While I note that I'm not an adherent every time I cite them, and then I go on to cite them, Strauss and How, in their generational theory (there's a category link to it below) argue that the character of men is different in different cycles as a whole (not necessarily individually) due to the views of women in any particular period.  So, for a lack of a better way to illustrate it, in some eras women want a bunch of touchy feely wimps such as featured on This Is Us.  In others, they want Ethan Edwards from The Searchers.

This makes sense from a evolutionary biology prospective, as women's role in elemental societies is, well, more societal than men's.  But rather crudely, if you live in a society that's about to be attacked, you want guys who are capable of handling that.  If you live in one where there's no risk of being attacked, you might now want guys who are looking for fights.

There's a lot more to this than that, but we live in an oddly emasculating era which has superseded a highly masculine one.  If Strauss and How are right, generational succession goes from Hero, Artist Prophet to Nomad.  They also figure the categories of generations by years a bit more differently, which is to their credit, as they would have the Baby Boom Generation ending earlier than some others do.   You can read all about that elsewhere, but they also have a concept of cyclical crises and periods of stability that impact generations, with women generally being the cultural influencers that impact male character patterns, if not necessarily individual males, at any one time.

Okay, so what?

Well, we are living in a very female influenced era culturally.  One that has even seen the intrusion of women into roles that are not only traditionally male, but arguably biologically male, from an evolutionary biological prospective and even attacks on the concept of gender itself, biologically unsounds though that may be.  And part of what occurs, when this occurs, is that men, and before that boys, really have no refuge in which they can be just guys.

This doesn't mean there's some previous era in which everything in regard to male/female roles was perfectly defined, although in a lot of ways that changes much less than people like to imagine, and perceptions of change have more to do with economic changes in broad economies at any one time then the do with actual changes in cultural views.  And it doesn't mean that there should be some sort of strict segregation between boys and girls at all times. Indeed, at least in my view, strict segregation at the primary school level actually tends to encourage vices, and the societies that practice that usually see the results later on in men and women who never learned about the others in their formative years with resulting permanent impacts on their characters.

But it does mean that there ought to be at least some places where boys can go just to be boys, and to learn, well, many things.  And the same is true in the opposite direction for girls. And indeed, for girls, it still is.  There's been no male penetration into deeply female roles or organizations in any meaningful sense.  Find a boy in the Girl Scouts and chances are high that you are going to find an odd storty behind it, and one that is probably vested in that person's parents.

Find a girl in the Boy Scouts, or now just the Scouts, and what you'll find is high achieving girls.  You'll also soon fine less manly boys in the same organizations, which have been having troubles recently anyhow, and soon just fewer boys in general.  Some will remain, but they won't be the same group that would have been there otherwise, and those who are there, aren't going to learn the same lessons they would have otherwise.  Overall, everyone will suffer for that.*

They forgot what society they lived in

People like Mike Lindell, that is.

Lindell is the founder of the My Pillow company. I don't know anything about the pillows and not that much about Lindell, other than his personal story is really a classic rags to riches type tale.  

In the U.S., that's enough to cause people to love and hate you, which is something to keep in mind.  He's also a vocal Evangelical Christian, which also will draw praise while drawing some dislike as well.  None of that, however, is what he's now in trouble for.

Lindell has been sued by Dominion Voting which is sick and tired of its voting machines being slammed.  Lindell made claims that Dominion rigged the election for Joe Biden, a statement for which not only is there no evidence, it's demonstrably false.  Dominion is a business and they don't like their product being hammered by falsehoods, no deeply believed by those who are asserting those falsehoods.

People like Victor David Hanson like to talk about Trump Derangement Syndrome which they claim causes people on the left to be completely irrational about Donald Trump. An argument can be made that some of that did in fact exist during the Trump Administration, particularly early on. The problem is that the same term can also apply to Trump's diehard supporters.

One of the things about Trump is, quite frankly, that while he had real accomplishments he has major character defects.  He's boorish, crude, and has had a history of questionable behavior with women.  He's also a prima donna and narcissist who simply can't stand the thought of public criticism or losing.  

In normal US politics that would doom a person, but it didn't with Trump.  A lot of his base supporters originally didn't care about any of that as long as he acted as a wrecker.  Over time, he's developed a personality cult that nearly worships him, in spite of all of his obvious faults.  People in that category suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome as well as they can't be objective at all about Trump.

This doesn't apply to every Trump supporter by any means.  But it applies to some.  Guys like Lindell and Patrick Coffin seem to have simply fallen off the reality wagon and are willing to endorse all sorts of conspiracy theories about one thing or another.  Coffin, who used to be an objective conservative religious voice now hosts people who see Bill Gates conspiring to create a pandemic in order to create a new world order.  Lindell boosted the Dominion nonsense.  

Lindell is now one of several figures getting sued by Dominion. Dominion no doubt doesn't hope to be reimbursed by them for their losses, whatever those may be, but is out to repair its reputation through litigation. The litigation will achieve that.

Dopey New Jersey

The Garden State has legalized weed.  Because that's what people in New Jersey really need to be, stoned.

Not that New Jersey is by any means alone in this, to be sure.  It's just following the pack.  

It does say something that in early 21st Century America, however, one of the biggest movements of the day is one that allows people to be oblivious.

Exit Franco

Francisco and Ramon Franco, 1925, in North Africa.

A statute honoring Francisco Franco's role as a commander in the Rif War, put up in 1978 was taken down this past week.  Apparently it was the last one, which is remarkable in part as it was put up in the 1970s.

Franco had his supporters in Spain during his long dictatorship, as well as his supporters elsewhere.  All that now seems definitively in the past.  Having said that, this has been a strange trip.  Franco had his supporters in the west during the civil war period that proceeded World War Two, and even had some after that.  Indeed, quite a few.  During much of the 30s he was, however, disdained by the American left including the popular media.  World War Two certainly increased that disdain, and for good reasons, as he crept up on joining Nazi Germany and fascist Italy in the war.  By war's end, however, he was courting the west.  His regime died with him, which he was aware would occur, but he retained sufficient support for a monument to his command in the Spain's colonist Rif campaign was still erected, which is pretty amazing really. And we just passed the 40th anniversary of the attempted 1981 Fracoist coup, which of course failed.

Nobody in Span is going to try a Francoist coup now.

Streaming

Paramount movies has announced it will provide movies for streaming 45 days after their initial release.

Sign of the times.

Footnotes

*And, no, I wasn't an Eagle Scout.

I was in Scouting so briefly that I usually say I was never a Boy Scout.  In actuality I was, but as noted, very briefly.

Young Diognetus in the modern world.

No surprise here, on this blog. This trend been going on for some time.

But the Huffington Post, that internet blog started by Greek expat Ariana Huffington (who in person pronounces her name in a way that sounds, for all the world, like Aweewaana Wuffington), just published on it.  Meaning that the trend is extremely far advanced because by the time the press notices a trend, it's long since ceased being a trend but is a development.

July 11, 2019

behold,
the
millennial
nuns

More and more young women are being called to the religious life, after 50 straight years of decline. What on earth is going on? By Eve Fairbanks

Illustrations by Matt Wisniewski

A couple of weeks ago on a Sunday edition of this blog I ran this item:

Churches of the West: Holy Protection Byzantine Catholic Church, Denver, Colorado.

That item expanded out considerably on the feature on the same church on our companion blog, Churches of the West, and it's at least the fourth here to note a trend towards orthodoxy. And by that we mean small "o" orthodoxy, not Orthodoxy, although, as noted in those posts, that trend very much includes Orthodoxy.  More specifically, it includes, in a major way, the Catholic and Orthodox faiths and, in more minor ways, the the conservative transitional branches of the Lutheran faith, and more particularly, the conservative traditional branch of the of the Episcopal church, with that latter group frequently asserting (nearly always asserting in fact) that they are big "c" Catholics of another type.

I haven't apparently formally coined it yet, but this does give evidence of what will be our Eighteenth Law of Behavior, which is that by the time the media takes note of a trend, it's not longer a trend, it's a development.  And that's what we're seeing here.

I became aware of this news article on the Huffington Post as it appeared on the Twitter feed of a young Millennial Catholic woman who posted it and whom was not surprised.  Don't bother to try to look up "young Catholic woman" or even "conservative young Catholic woman" or "conservative young Catholic", as you'll find far too many and never find the item. There's leagues, including everything from young Catholic laymen to young Catholic nuns (one of whom as a twitter account dedicated to momenti mori) to young Catholic priests.

Moreover, you'll also find that they've moved, way, way, beyond what the news media imagines them to be and, moreover, way, way beyond what Baby Boomer Catholics think them to be.  We're not talking about some mousy young woman here who never gets outside except to attend Mass and whom wears a dress last common in 1946 combined with a mantilla just to go outside.  Not by a long shot.  They're conservative. . .and they're hip, cool, and know a lot more about everything than you do.

And I'm not interjecting hyperbole here. They really are hip. They really are cool. They really are conservative.  They're extremely orthodox. And they know a lot, lot more about absolutely everything than you do, and that would tend to include, if any read this (and I doubt very much any do) many of the aging Baby Boomer priests who went through American seminaries in prior to 1990.  And it certainly includes the now very aging and always a minority, although a very influential one at one time, of Boomer "progressive" or "liberal" Catholics.

And that's why they're Catholic (or Orthodox).

Indeed, leagues of them are converts and most of them came out of secular educations that didn't treat religion kindly whatsoever.  But they are the most educated American demographic ever, and a lot of that education is self education.

In an era in which a lot of the American population has seemingly run around self educating falsely, reading internet baloney about how the South tried to leave the Union as the North tried to ban NASCAR or that World War Two as a conspiracy between Franklin Roosevelt and Hirohito to fix the 1942 World Series, a quiet counter has been going on in which smart, young, people have picked up what amount to post doctorate educations in the Liberal Arts.

And frankly, modern American culture, maybe American culture in general, isn't looking so good to them.  Modern western culture itself isn't either, although what it came out of is, and is deeply understood by them in a way that most English speaking people haven't since the rewriting of history following the Reformation.

And they've reacted.

Now, they're not rejecting all things Western in general, but they've seen up close and personal the wreck of things that prior generations have made.  It's clear to them that the consumer culture brought to a head in the post World War Two American world is lacking.  It's plain to them that the victor in the Sexual Revolution was disease and despair.  They accept science and nature and have rejected the position of the State of Tennessee's position against Skopes which the ignorant eroniously asociate with Christians in general, and in fact have a better grasp on science than any generation prior to them.  Like Chesterton generations earlier they don't confuse that position with Christianity and had the courage to asks what's behind the what's behind.  They've read the Fathers of the Church and know them more deeply than any group of Christians since the 2nd Century.

They're Diognetus in the world.

Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign. 

And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.  

They live in the flesh, but they are not governed by the desires of the flesh. They pass their days upon earth, but they are citizens of heaven. Obedient to the laws, they yet live on a level that transcends the law. Christians love all men, but all men persecute them. Condemned because they are not understood, they are put to death, but raised to life again. They live in poverty, but enrich many; they are totally destitute, but possess an abundance of everything. They suffer dishonor, but that is their glory. They are defamed, but vindicated. A blessing is their answer to abuse, deference their response to insult. For the good they do they receive the punishment of malefactors, but even then they, rejoice, as though receiving the gift of life. They are attacked by the Jews as aliens, they are persecuted by the Greeks, yet no one can explain the reason for this hatred. 

To speak in general terms, we may say that the Christian is to the world what the soul is to the body. As the soul is present in every part of the body, while remaining distinct from it, so Christians are found in all the cities of the world, but cannot be identified with the world. As the visible body contains the invisible soul, so Christians are seen living in the world, but their religious life remains unseen. The body hates the soul and wars against it, not because of any injury the soul has done it, but because of the restriction the soul places on its pleasures. Similarly, the world hates the Christians, not because they have done it any wrong, but because they are opposed to its enjoyments. 

Christians love those who hate them just as the soul loves the body and all its members despite the body's hatred. It is by the soul, enclosed within the body, that the body is held together, and similarly, it is by the Christians, detained in the world as in a prison, that the world is held together. The soul, though immortal, has a mortal dwelling place; and Christians also live for a time amidst perishable things, while awaiting the freedom from change and decay that will be theirs in heaven. As the soul benefits from the deprivation of food and drink, so Christians flourish under persecution. Such is the Christian’s lofty and divinely appointed function, from which he is not permitted to excuse himself.

So missed from the Press, which is focused on the travails of boomer Jeffrey Epstein (1953) and his quest for young skirt, is that story itself merely reflects an aspect of the Boomer assault on the culture that commenced in some ways the year of Epstein's birth.  Epstein merely had the wealth to engage in what Playboy celebrated as a desirable goal.  Up until called on it openly, at some point after it became the battering ram on the existing culture between men and women, it also advocated girls as targets for male desires, often cartoon form, until that was too widely noticed and it was forced to back off.  By that time, however, it had been taken up in entertainment in the form of films and music.  It's backed off some since then, but only because disgust became widespread in the cultural mainstream.

But that doesn't mean that the culture at large isn't badly damaged, and indeed much of it wrecked.

And Millennial's know it.

But those steeped in the culture and fully accepting of the "progress" of post 1945 culture have been unable to grasp that fully, including Millennial's who have not been exposed to anything else.  And the dominant Boomer culture just isn't able to grasp it, as it isn't as well educated as the Millennial's are.

Those who are so educated, and as noted largely self educated, have been able to look back and some have been able to sort through both the Boomer wreckage and the wreckage of earlier, some much earlier, eras.

We've cited the Strauss-Howe Generational Theory here more than once and while reserved in our opinion on it, we've also come to the point of acknowledging that it has a lot of credence to it.  The backers of that theory have maintained that its incapable of being disrupted, except by perhaps as something as radical as a nuclear war or something.  And this looking in another direction we're seeing here supports their theory.

But I wonder if it also gives evidence of a major disruption in it.  If it does, that disruption would be deep education.

And if that's the case, a Counter Revolution of epic proportions is going on.  . and has been for some time.

Crappy but predictable career advice

From the ABA list serve:

Michelle Obama got this advice after confiding to her mother that she hated being a lawyer

And what, pray tell, was that advice:

“You know, my mother didn’t comment on the choices that we made,” Obama said. “She was live-and-let-live. So one day she’s driving me from the airport after I was doing document production in Washington, D.C., and I was like, ‘I can’t do this for the rest of my life. I can’t sit in a room and look at documents.’ I won’t get into what that is, but it’s deadly. Deadly. Document production. So I shared with her in the car: I’m just not happy. I don’t feel my passion. And my mother—my uninvolved, live-and-let-live mother—said, ‘Make the money, worry about being happy later.’ “

Let's look at that again.

Make the money, worry about being happy later.

Michelle Obama was born in 1964, one year later than me.  Her mother, Wikipedia reports, was born in 1937.  So at the time this advice was given, her mother was at least 50, maybe older (we aren't really informed when this advice was given, only that it was give prior to Mrs. Obama meeting her husband. . . we know that Michele Obama graduated from Harvard Law School (of course) in 1988 (she's a Princeton undergrad by the way) and met her future husband in 1989 (their first date was to see "Do The Right Thing").  So, this conversation must have occurred in 1988 or 1989.

Michelle Obama is a really smart person.  And extremely well-educated, to say the least. So if she was relating to her mother that she hated being a lawyer and wanted to hang it up. . . well that really says something either about the law as a profession (and the propaganda surrounding it) or maybe the place she was working, or maybe her personality.  Any of those could be true.

But it also says something huge about that generation that her mother was part of.

Now, Her mother was born late enough that she's not really part of that Depression era generation that Tom Brokaw has grossly mischaracterized as being "The Greatest Generation".  The generation she would have been born into is the "Silent Generation", which according to the generational theorists Strauss and Howe, we've written about before, has the following characteristics:

• Silent Generation (1925–1942) (Artist) 

Again, this is a commonly used term for this generation.  I can't say much about them other than that both of my parents would have fit into it.  According to Strauss and Howe that would mean: 

Artists grow up overprotected by adults preoccupied with the Crisis, come of age as the socialized and conformist young adults of a post-Crisis world, break out as process-oriented midlife leaders during an Awakening, and age into thoughtful post-Awakening elders.

I definitely don't see that in my parents generation.  Indeed, I really think that there was very little difference between the World War Two generation and them, other than they were born at an age where they were either serving very late in the war, or in the next one.  In other words, if the artist category describes people born in the late 1920s, anyhow, this doesn't seem right to me at all. And indeed, perhaps the generational years assigned to this cohort are flat out wrong.  It wouldn't strike me, for example, that kids born in the Jazz Age year of 1925, who would have been eligible for military service in 1943, would share that much in common with people born in 1945.

Well, what I noted there, I'd note again.  I don't think there's a colossal difference between the World War Two generation and those born in the late 1920s and the 1930s.  Indeed, my guess is that the overarching nature of the twin global crises of World War Two and the Great Depression had a big generational leveling effect. To add to that, my mother, who was slightly older than my father, was actually old enough to have joined the Canadian armed forces, which she inquired about doing, if she had wanted to (she realized right off that her genteel upbringing made her singularly unsuitable for service life, and so she didn't pursue it).  My father was too young to serve in World War Two, but that generation that came close to fighting in it always looked to it and their late teen experiences such that it was a looming event in their life. . . in some ways even a larger event than the one that many of them did serve in (including my father), the Korean War.

I do think the name the "Silent Generation" is apt, however, as something in what appeared in the ABA article did really strike me, that being" my mother didn’t comment on the choices that we made".  My parents, and in particular my father, didn't either. I sure wish he had, quite frankly, as he had a wealth of personal experience and had lived a really hard young life (he worked in his father's packing house in the 1940s as a teen, he became the head of the family in his late teens when his own father died, he had effectively become the father to his youngest brother when he was that age and on into his own twenties. He'd started off in manual work and then had been sent to college at his mother's command and had acquired a dental degree which he worked at until he died at age 62).  I would have liked his insights, but he didn't really provide them.

But when he did, they were basically of the same nature as Michelle Obama's mother.  He never told me "Make the money, worry about being happy later.“ but I recall that he did tell me, when I was thinking of becoming a game warden and majoring in Wildlife Management "there are a lot of guys around here with wildlife management degrees and no jobs" and when I was thinking of going to law school "a law degree is something you can use for a lot of things".

He was flat out wrong on the last comment in spite of being truly a quiet genius.  He was probably right in his first observation, however, FWIW.

So what's my point?

Well my point is that this advice is both in error in objective fact (there's no guaranty that you are going to rake in piles of bucks as a lawyer), and in what it suggests on a larger scale.  But it's also common to generations that grew up in financial distress.

Indeed, it's frankly a common view for my own generation if they grew up around here.  People like me were born into a local economic depression and in some ways most of us never got over it, just like our parents that grew up in the Great Depression also didn't get over it.  Having a job, in and of itself, was absolutely paramount in people's minds, given that so many of us (myself included) at least at one time didn't have one.

This view, we're now told, is common to "Generation Z", the generation that is just coming into the workforce.  Some new studies relate that in terms of employment, they look a lot like the generation that came of age in the wake of the Great Depression.  They seem to value job stability above all else, and they don't worry about climbing to the top of the economic ladder.  Indeed, it's reported at least right now that they'd rather get a job in an established entity owned by somebody else, rather than try starting one up, which makes a great deal of sense if their personal youthful experience with that effort is watching things fail.

Maybe generational traits truly are cyclical.  If so, maybe we can hope for an abatement in some other trends that have come on post 1960.

But was Michelle Obama's mother right?  Well I don't think so.  I grasp what she was saying, but that can be a recipe for long term bitter disappointment.

Indeed, I frequently note that people who give these recollections in the public sphere often had their lives take a really dramatic turn that makes the value of their recollection questionable.  In fairness to Michelle Obama, she's not really conveying this recollection as advice.   More telling is that the Harvard Law graduate (and as I've noted in the past, while I think it's singularly unfair and a bit absurd, Harvard Law graduates pretty much get to write their own ticket) only briefly practiced law and put her license on inactive status in 1993.  She was admitted to the bar in 1988. So, in fact, she basically rejected her mother's advice.

Probably wisely.  Things worked out, and her career, while it probably wasn't as lucrative as the one she started to pursue in 1988, turned out no doubt to be more interesting.

Boomer, wake up. Generations, Part One of Three

I saw this headline on a financial website:

Why The 'Me, Me, Me' Generation Needs Help From You, You, You

In fairness, this categorization was not made by the author of the article, who reluctantly admitted that he's technically part of the Millennials, the generation this article is about.  Indeed, he stated:

Of course, for all of the criticisms and accusations lobbed at millennials, by any standards, they've been dealt a pretty rough hand as they attempt to begin their adult lives. The earliest millennials have already been forced to endure two stock market crashes and multiple armed conflicts (sparked by one of our nation's most traumatic experiences in a century), and they've inherited a world with some of the least-trusted leaders in history, a trend that doesn't seem likely to change any time soon.

Time magazine came up with the " 'Me, Me, Me' Generation" categorization.

It did that in 2013 in an article in which it noted:

I am about to do what old people have done throughout history: call those younger than me lazy, entitled, selfish and shallow. But I have studies! I have statistics! I have quotes from respected academics! Unlike my parents, my grandparents and my great-grandparents, I have proof.

Here’s the cold, hard data: The incidence of narcissistic personality disorder is nearly three times as high for people in their 20s as for the generation that’s now 65 or older, according to the National Institutes of Health; 58% more college students scored higher on a narcissism scale in 2009 than in 1982. Millennials got so many participation trophies growing up that a recent study showed that 40% believe they should be promoted every two years, regardless of performance. They are fame-obsessed: three times as many middle school girls want to grow up to be a personal assistant to a famous person as want to be a Senator, according to a 2007 survey; four times as many would pick the assistant job over CEO of a major corporation. They’re so convinced of their own greatness that the National Study of Youth and Religion found the guiding morality of 60% of millennials in any situation is that they’ll just be able to feel what’s right. Their development is stunted: more people ages 18 to 29 live with their parents than with a spouse, according to the 2012 Clark University Poll of Emerging Adults. And they are lazy. In 1992, the nonprofit Families and Work Institute reported that 80% of people under 23 wanted to one day have a job with greater responsibility; 10 years later, only 60% did.

Well, baloney.

How on earth has the Boomer generation, which authored this opinion, remained so completely delusional about their privileged generational status, let alone their own history?

To hear them tell it, you would think that every member of the Boomer generation walked uphill both ways to school in a blizzard everyday. And now they lament the rootlessness and aimlessness of the following generations, which have failed to follow their examples of hard work and enterprise.

Eh?

Bull.

Now, let me now state that I'm not into categorizing an entire generation; well too much anyhow.  The same Boomer generation that's identified with anti war protests, etc., actually fought in the Vietnam War and it had a higher volunteer rate than the World War Two generation.  So a person can only take this sort of thing so far.

Boomers protesting the Vietnam War.

 Boomers fighting the Vietnam War.

Moreover, the "Boomers" aren't really one single generation, in spite of what demographers might claim.  The generation is supposed to be the one that was born between 1946 and 1964.  Well, baloney.  That may be true in a statistical sense, but when people look at the boomers they're really looking at the generation that came of age in the 1960s and early 1970s.  Indeed, demographers have variously defined people who were born from 1960 to 1965 in various ways, including as members of the following generation, Generation X, or members of their own demographic, the Gap Generation.   What that tells us, and accurately, is that people born between 1960 and 1965 don't fit in well to the Boomers and identify more strongly with later generations, and that''s how we will sue that information here.  Indeed, a kid born in 1960 would graduate high school in 1978, and have very little in common with one who graduated in 1968.  Even at that, graduates from 1980 would have even less in common, and more in common with those graduating in 1988, and maybe even more in common with 88 grads than 78 grads.

Anyhow, having said this, I hear and read shots taken at Millennials all the time, and I think they're very far off the mark, quite frankly.

I just don't see it.

Indeed, what I do see, is quite the reverse.  The Millennials, and the "Gap Generation" and Generation X just ahead of them are sort of uniquely burdened by the Boomers in ways the Boomer just can't seem to grasp.

The Boomers are the most fortunate generation in American history, and they've enjoyed a world, and its resources, like none before it and like none after it. But they don't grasp that all.

Prior to the Boomers, access to college was based on money.  A  high percentage of Americans didn't even graduate from high school prior to their generation, but their parents made sure they did, and having been exposed to university in mass as a result of the GI Bill after World War Two, they made sure that their kids had access to it as well. The entire concept of public assistance going to university came out of the GI Bill and it was the World War Two generation that gave rise to the Boomers that massively expanded the concept. 

The huge difference between then and now is that the Boomers entered life, delayed compared to their parents, in an era of unparalleled opportunity, but they don't realize it. Moreover, they are acclimated to it.  

The 1945 through 1970 period was one in which merely having a college degree was nearly a guaranty of white collar success.  And even though college degrees became exponentially more common in the period, even having simply a high school degree (the dropout rate remained higher than it is today) meant a person could usually find a decent paying job of another type.  Entire classes of jobs that require college now did not require a college degree then.  Europe's economy remained destroyed form World War Two well into this period, and the United States made everything.  All of this meant that it was much easier to be successful than it is now, and much more difficult to fail.  A person with a trade skill or a college education was going to do well, for the most part.

And do well even with the delayed entry into adult life, which the Boomers (as we will see in a later installment of this series) largely experienced.  Prior to their generation, the entire concept of a delayed adulthood, stretching form the late teens up into the mid twenties, didn't exist.  If you look at old photographs and kids graduating from high school look more adult, that's because, as we will really see, they truly were.  Perhaps they were in the Boomer generation as well, as they sense, but not in the same way.

That's because they were really the first American generation to experience a period of delayed adulthood on a generational basis.  It had always been the case that the wealthy and privileged who were able to go to university experienced that, and tales of youthful college life date back to the Middle Ages.  But most people didn't experience that.  Most Americans, as we have explored in prior threads, by 18 were looking for work. They may have lived at home, and probably did (we'll also be looking at that), but they weren't kids.

Indeed, if a person wants a contemporary movie portrayal of what this period was like, sort of, for younger Americans, a good cinematic portrayal of it is provided in the film Marty.  Another good one, sort of, is provided in the film The Apartment.  "Oh no, those films are about adults. . . ".  Yep, but they're about younger adults than you might imagine.  The stay at home blue collar protagonist in Marty does pretty accurately reflect a common generational experience for the time.  And the fact that slightly wayward Miss Kubelik has immediate resort to her sister and brother in law in The Apartment isn't far off either.

Boomers came of age, for various reasons, at a time in which there was much more slack for everything.  The government expanded benefits to the boomers that they still enjoy today and that they're completely acclimated to without understanding that prior generations lacked them.  The wide latitude given to the generation in social terms meant that the generational reaction to the Vietnam War, which didn't occur with the earlier Korean War, fought by men who were only a bit too young for World War Two but who were kids during the Great Depression, was tolerated and even absorbed by the nation.  The same generation that reacted negatively to the war in Vietnam would send later generations to fight in the Middle East without even noting the sense of irony that created.

And coming into power in the wake of the  Vietnam War, it doesn't seem to recall any sense of irony in a generation that was part of a "youth movement" holding on to power with nearly cold dead  hands even though it is no longer the largest generational cohort.  Indeed, that last fact is amongst the most ironic.  The Boomers started entering government in the late 1970s. And there they remain.  This year we see two out of the three candidates fitting into that generation (Sanders is actually from the prior generation, which probably explains why his views seem different, in part).  No post Boomer candidate survived the primaries.  The Boomers will rule on.

But in ruling on, they've forgotten that when they were younger they were defined by rejection of everything they now grump about, even as they fail to realize that they've failed to come fully back around to the values of earlier generations that they've somewhat adopted but not in the softened form that existed for their parents.  They massively, as a generation, rejected the values of their parents.  They wouldn't serve. They rejected the corporate work life.  They laughed at the value of money.  They rejected much of the tradition of male/female relationships.  They felt no standards should be accepted that existed simply because they did.  Drugs, personal license, etc., were all vices they brought into their generation in spades.

And now they complain that the Millennials don't save and don't work.

In 1973 they made a hit out of Taking Care of Business.

You get up every morning from your alarm clock's warning
Take the 8:15 into the city
There's a whistle up above and people pushin', people shovin'
And the girls, who try to look pretty

And if your train's on time, you can get to work by nine
And start your slaving job to get your pay
If you ever get annoyed, look at me, I'm self-employed
I love to work at nothing all day

And I'll be takin' care of business every day
Takin' care of business every way
I've been takin' care of business, it's all mine
Takin' care of business and working overtime, work out

If it were easy as fishin', you could be a musician
If you could make sounds loud or mellow
Get a second-hand guitar, chances are you'll go far
If you get in with the right bunch of fellows.

People see you having fun, just a-lying in the sun
Tell them that you like it this way
It's the work that we avoid and we're all self-employed
We love to work at nothing all day.

Hmmm. . . .

Well, by 1987 they were watching Wall Street, with its punchline.  "Greed is good".  Indeed, both of the current front runners in the current Presidential election, who are Boomers, have lauded Wall Street in the past, and it's only because of pre-Boomer Sanders, who appeals to Millennials, that this is suddenly in question.

Somehow that generation of the 1960s that went to college but which was for peace, love and dope (keeping in mind that this wasn't a universal view, and others were "pround to be an Okie from Muskogee"), and never trusting "anyone over 30" became corporate in the extreme, and in a way their parents never were, in the 1970s.  1956 gave us The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit about the generation that came home from World War Two, but the focus on money that's present in that representational film falls far below that which came to define the Boomer generation in later years.

As we'll deal with shortly, a lot of this criticism of the Millennials, and the Gaps, by the Boomers, is really unwarranted.  Indeed . . . in the great scheme of things, they probably stand closer to the Boomers parents, and maybe even their grandparents, than the Boomers do.  If Boomers feel that the Millennials don't share their values, well they're partially right.  They might share an older set however, with prior generations. And they have to live in the world that the Boomers have dominated since the 1960s, and that's not easy for generations that are faced with having less of absolutely everything.

Of course, that's true of some Boomers, indeed quite a few of them, as well.  All along there were those who worried about the direction everything was going and have had to live with it.  That's cold comfort indeed.

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Postscript

It's been pointed out to me that I'm not on the only one to make some of the observations here.  Stephen Cobert has done the same: