The Icepick Cometh

Looking at the largely over-50 women and men disrupting the Democratic Rules Committee this afternoon with their sad Woodstocky cry of Denver! Denver! I realized something I had not previously considered. When people like them claim that this is the last chance ever for a woman to become president (which, if you believe that, then what the hell was the feminist movement about — promoting women's rights or promoting Hillary Clinton?), what they really mean is that this is the last chance for there ever to be be a Baby Boomer woman president, which might be true.

Because just like their hero, these Boomers are "all about me." It's not that there will never be a another woman who can be president (and one who hopefully won't need to ride her husband's coattails to rise to the Senate and beyond — you call that an inspirational story for women everywhere?). It's just possibly the last chance for a woman born before 1960 to become president. Quite frankly, it might possibly the last chance for any Baby Boomer to reach the White House.

Want to see the level of contempt Hillary has for the next generations? Right now on her official Hillblazers Web page — the page for "Young Leaders for Hillary in 2008" — the dominant item on the page is something called "Project T-shirt," which states: "We need your help to make a critical decision -- our next official campaign t-shirt."

So, on the day of the Rules Committee meeting, when her candidacy hangs in the balance, the major message on her Web page specifically geared toward the Next Generation is to design a fucking T-shirt. Not go out and protest with the Boomers. Go make a pretty picture to print onto a freebie.

In other words, you're too young to be of any good of us other than making a logo. This is perfect, because it's indicative of what both the Clintons and her Baby Boomer supporters are all about. I can just see her marketing department dreaming this up, like it's some bullshit corporate gain-share team-building exercise — "I know, let's draw in some younger voters by having them design a decal for a T-shirt. That's what the young kids like to do now, with their Photoshop and whatnot. It will help us 'connect' while letting the younger voters think that we think they're important."

To be fair, Hillblazers has links down the side with "5 Things You Can Do!," like becoming a Hillary supporter on the Facebook and other newfangled social networks.

I have to say I am truly sad for any Gen X'er or Millennial who supports this candidate, especially since she and her advisers see you as nothing other than expendable pawns in her campaign.

Incidentally, Obama has a Web page for his younger supports, too, called Generation Obama (ahem, and who coined a headline using a similar phrase? Um, yours truly) talking about grassroots activism and starting a support chapter in your community, with not a hint of anything so condescending as designing a fucking T-shirt.

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OK, now that we got that out of the way, check out this headline from Talking Point's Memo: Who's Disenfranchised? by Josh Marshall. This expresses what I've been cooking in the back of my brain but never made the full jump to put into words: If those in Florida and Michigan who voted for Hillary are so "disenfranchised," what about the people in those states who did not go out and vote at all on those days because they were told that their Primary was not going to count?

Now those people's voices will only be heard as part of this compromise Hillary supporters have unsatisfactorily pressured the Democratic leaders to concoct today, by counting those two against-the-rules elections at a 50% discount.

This does not erase the fact that people didn't vote in those primaries because they were told it was more-or-less a mock election, like those elections we used to do in middle school when the candidates were Reagan, Mondale and Bill the Cat. Hillary had no compunction to disenfranchise those would-be voters by making those elections "real," essentially discarding their worth as ballot-casters in order to change the rules to suit her. Typical of Hillary. Typical of a Boomer.

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Maybe as journalists, would-be journalists, wanna-be journalists, ex-journalists, bought-out journalists, hacks, reporters and disenchanted prematurely retired ex-journalists, perhaps all that is left to cover is ourselves and by extension, our opinions, even if it is only for an audience of one.

And as a seasoned reporter myself — after two whole conventions — I can safely say that you get about as many insights into the hearts and souls of the candidates on the campaign trail as you would watching a plastic fern grow.

—Matthew Klam, Fear and Laptops on the Campaign Trail, New York Times Magazine, September 2004

The Boston Globe's Dan Shaughnessy says the same thing, almost four years later, about sports — "That's just the way it is now," he writes — and bemoans the lost access to players the media once had.

Shaughnessy is 100% correct — that's just the way it is now.

To which I say, yeah, it sucks. Just deal with it.

Pat Jordan is worried, too, but he seems to be adapting to it better.

It's been coming to this point for a long time. Thirty-five years ago, Red Smith said it best:

The sportswriter learns to adjust, to make allowances. When you're listening to these people, who are serving special interests, you simply adjust by taking a little off the top.

Pat Jordan might have taken a lot off the top for his Deadspin article, but I applaud the adjustment. After all, it's the future.

As teams, political parties, athletes and candidates continue to control the message (and control the messengers in a growing trend to hire their own reporters), we're seeing the of loss of hard news, which might turn into ceding the coverage of hard news if the media conglomerates see a way to save money out of it.

In the end, it may not be such a bad thing. Instead of parroting the PR-party line coming out of the press conferences, let's let the flacks break their "news" and let the smart media quickly dissect it and turn more toward analysis — it's not the breaking news, itself, that is so important, it's what it means — and, for features, toward what we see in Jordan's Deadspin and Slate pieces: the write-around.

Consider that "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" is thought in some circles perhaps the best magazine article of all time though the subject famously never allowed Gay Talese and to interview him. Instead, Talese talked to Sinatra's acquaintances and just watched the guy.

This, unfortunately, requires time, talent, a sharp eye and a broad mind ("He was, as usual, immaculately dressed. He wore an oxford-grey suit with a vest, a suit conservatively cut on the outside but trimmed with flamboyant silk within; his shoes, British, seemed to be shined even on the bottom of the soles."). These things are in short supply in an MBA-dominated newsroom culture and among J-school educated writers who can't escape the grip of publicists dictating coverage and fear the same thing Shaughnessy wrings his hands over — lost access.

If that wasn't problem enough, would a corporate-owned bottom-line oriented magazine or newspaper even take a chance and dedicate the resources and take a risk on such an article?

So beyond the unusual (unfortunately, investigative reporting is now unusual, given newspapers' bean counting and belt tightening), what's left?

To be sure, Shaughnessy is not explicitly laying blame for this decline on anyone, though he seems to be tipping his Samuel Adams in the direction of publicists and the players who hide behind them.

But the media has its share of blame to shoulder, too. Even Red Smith once said he was admonished by his editor, Stanley Woodward, to "stop Godding up those ballplayers."

It's worse now, even if today's media builds the public's heroes higher only to tear them down later. The press is as complicit as anyone in building sports into an empire; reporters' guilt in this is subtle, but self-serving, and any reporter who complains about how ESPN has ruined sports (and I think it has, to a large extent) ought to remember that the booming Business of Sport also keeps them in business, if only just barely. Call it the Media-Athletic Complex.

(NYT Magazine article via comment on Gawker; Shaughnessy column via The Big Lead; Red Smith quotes from an actual book (yes, printed on paper!), The Red Smith Reader, which excerpted Smith's 1973 interview in No Cheering in the Press Box, neither of which appear to be in print on Amazon, though used copies are available.)

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Bit of a running commentary a couple of weeks ago on Gawker worth revisiting to determine if Obama is a Baby Boomer or a Gen Xer (among other running commentaries). His birthdate of 1961 makes it problematic, putting him right at that cutoff birthyear range defined by Strauss & Howe, who argue that Gen X (they called it the 13th generation) began in 1961. Others say this generation began in 1965.

I've already argued that Obama belongs to the later generation, but true to anyone born around the border year between two generations, he exhibits traits of both generations.

He would have been too young after just turning age 8 (if not too impressionable or, more likely traumatized) to experience the excess of Woodstock in 1969 the same way the Boomers did. Yet, I don't think he would have been too old at age 32 to be listening to Nirvana when Kurt Cobain committed suicide in 1994.

He has both the idealism of the Boomers and the pragmatism of the X'ers.

To put perhaps too fine a point on it, birthrates peaked around 1957, saw a slight decline during the recession of 1958 (which didn't hit the U.S. as hard as it did elsewhere in the world), and then peaked again in 1961 (I haven't had the time to see if the recent inclusion of new states Alaska and Hawaii impacted 1961's numbers vs. 1957's, but I can't image it was terribly significant). Then birthrates took its steep decline into my decade of the 1970s, likely spurred on by the unrest in the national mood, a slowing economy and increasing use of birth control and Roe v. Wade (January 1973).

But if you need a cutoff date (and I think I do) I'm calling it 1961 based on this alone: The FDA first approved the Pill for contraceptive use on June 23, 1960, which would start impacting fertility rates in 1961. True, Wikipedia conservatively estimates a half-million women were using Enovid for three years before that (the FDA initially approved it for menstrual disorders before OK'ing its use for birth control). But if you need a cutoff, I'd say place it at nine months after June 23, 1960 — I'll let you round it back to the start of 1961 for convenience's sake. (You could keep making arguments for cutoff dates revolving around Pill history — when it was first marketed after the FDA approved its use for birth control, when every state allowed all married and unmarried women to use it, etc., but I'm using the first date — that's my story, and I'm sticking to it.)

Anyway, this was spawned by the above-linked Gawker posting, which was inspired by backlash to a recent Radar article.

EDS NOTE: Originally published on our WordPres.com site at theicepickcometh.wordpress.com on Saturday, May 17, at 12:57 a.m., during that week when this Blogger blog was locked. Just wanted to get it posted on this site, too, to continue our Generational conversation.

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And to continue off on a tangent from that last post, no back talk from you about those three sites are all I read now. Or see this 4-year-old New York Times article that a Gawker commenter pointed out last week, back when the blogs were new, slightly desperate and in need of acceptance; today they're just about all I read, and I'm having trouble shedding a tear for old media:

Fear and Laptops on the Campaign Trail (New York Times Magazine, September 2004)

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I've just about had it.

Read this:
Insulting people's intelligence (Daily Kos, May 21)

And this:
Toxic (Talking Points Memo, May 22)

And this:
Hillary Supporters To Annoy DNC Rules Committee On Saturday (Wonkette, May 27)

'Nuff said.

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I saw this New York Times article after it was discussed in an anonymous comment in the excellent blog watching Gannett, and it's actually an excerpt of a book entitled The Big Squeeze by Steven Greenhouse. After reading the excerpt that accompanied the Times' review, the Gannett Blog commenter is correct — how can you not get angry at a scenario like this?

But what's most sad is that Hillary is using her own ambition to play Culture War with Obama during the Primary end-game. It's a divide-and-conquer approach that has worked for the other side of the aisle since the Reagan Revolution.

Instead of voting their economic interest, a should-be opposing candidate merely needs to say certain culture-divisive buzz words and the economy (and their status in it) is suddenly forgotten in the minds of many swing voters. Phrases like: minorities, elitism, rap music, abortion, religion-bashers, patriotism, anti-America. Get abused by your boss at work? So what, because everything from Family Values to invoking RFK's assassination suddenly distracts you from remembering that while you're working, you're still stuck at the poverty line.

Far be it for a cynic like me to sound like a True Believer, but I think Obama will overcome Hillary playing the Race Card in Appalachia and the coming culture battle in the fall. He has to, if we're going to salvage any self-worth that still exists in America.

Meanwhile, I don't know where to stop linking to this Times excerpt. Here's another one, about how almost one in four American households spend at least 40 percent of their monthly income paying down its debts.

Or you can just read about how middle class husband-and-wife teams are working three months more per year than they did 25 years ago.

While we're at it, remember this next March when all the predictable press releases and ensuing articles come out bemoaning the decline of worker productivity during March Madness: the excerpt states that with worker productivity up 60 percent since 1979, hourly earnings have risen only one percent for 80 percent of American workers.

What's worse, the courts seem to be backing and encouraging this kind of corporate greed. Read the beginning of the book review again and see what I mean.

Based on the review alone, I'm ready to buy Patagonia (if I could afford it) and shop at Costco (if there was one near me).

But it's not going to be an easy sell, despite the review's closing on this sentence: "Even so, it’s little wonder that surveys find so many American workers yearning for an election that could produce genuine change." Because once the culture attacks come out, the economy is usually Swiftered under the table. Let's hope it doesn't work this time.

Meanwhile, to just sum it up, this quote, from the excerpt:

For millions of low-income workers, the promise of America has been broken: the promise that if you work hard, you will be rewarded with a decent living, the promise that if you do an honest day's work, you will earn enough to feed, clothe, and shelter your family.

Somewhere, David Simon is nodding in agreement.

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After reading yet another indulgent Q&A interview (this time, from a week's old New York Times Magazine), I thought I needed to get in on the action. So here's how I imagine my own personal Ten Questions would go:

Your blogger lives in a cozy bungalow that's as old as John McCain, with plumbing that probably works as good as McCain's.

Morning routine: I'm up usually by 7:15 a.m. on weekdays, which is about 45 minutes later than it should be, and thus throws everything off. I need coffee immediately, and then I'll go feed/kick the cat, who most likely tried to wake me at 6:30.

Favorite item in the house: Toss-up between my laptop and the Mr. Coffee maker.

Writing memento: A binder containing photocopies of clips. Just articles I liked and had the energy to photocopy and three-hole punch. I probably have 18 boxes of newspapers in the attic, containing (hopefully) articles that I once intended to clip someday. Oh, I also have a trophy I won because I was the best shot at a press junket at a game club. It was only, like, the second time I shot a shotgun, and I won hands down. Of course, I was competing against some aging travel writers while I grew up playing Duck Hunt on Nintendo. It (the trophy, not the NES) is a bookend on a shelf in another room of old newspapers.

Most annoying thing about blogging: Running out of coffee. I also get tired of telling people the blog was not named after Val Kilmer's character in Top Gun.

Self-indulgence: GTA when the mood strikes.

Pets: The cat is evil. She terrorizes any visitor, and constantly begs for food, even if her dish is full, because she wants you to watch, sort of like Sharon Stone in Sliver (is that the correct reference?). But we love her for who she is (the cat, that is).

Obsolete item he won't part with: Today's newspaper.

How he writes: Usually it's get angry, vent, re-write, add in a dash of self-pity, edit, post, then catch every incorrect usage that spell check didn't catch.

Procrastination technique: Is there one that hasn't been invented? I've tried them all.

Favorite vacation: Actually taking one. Something with a beach would be nice, with no wind, poop or broken bottles. A trip to the Bronx Zoo would be cool too.

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The Baby is in total Ike from "South Park" stage now — he says a three-word sentence of recognizable words, and then the equivalent of five paragraphs of baby talk. Thankfully, the top of his head doesn't detach and pop up and down like Ike's.

Here's a sample I tried to transcribe last night:
"Ameeto passh, paasch! Shtash, opeen, malk kootch. Ashtoo baasch koosh. Peete schaan. Uh-oh. Lid. All done. Vamash maam. All set. Dowsaurs. Baack. Baack a beez. Darwars. Thaas. All set. Daamee. Fwouwaur. Boossooseet."

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I don't know by what miracle this happened, but Blogger's Techies have released us from Spam-accusation blockage limbo. Thanks, Blogger™! On the one hand, I've been locked out from posting anything new for a week, so I would have had the scoops on Hillary's sexism charges, life being discovered on Mars, Bigfoot and The Soprano's missing Russian being spotted together in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey, and I would have beaten WAMC to their scoop about Clinton-supporting Gov. Paterson saying Hillary has gone too far in pressing the Florida and Michigan issues. On the other hand, I've been freed in time for Memorial Day weekend, so I must say, Thank you, Google! Thank you, Blogger! Happy Memorial Day! It's great to be back! PublisherCat has been on our case, and now she is happy we're back in business.

Oh, dear readers (all 2 of you) if you don't see a new post here for a few days, check me out over on the WordPress site at http://theicepickcometh.wordpress.com, which I am keeping as a back-up for now. I intend to double-post as much content as practical in case I get locked out again (and to keep my options open).

For the uninitiated, about a week ago I got a form message on my blog's dashboard saying I'd been flagged by Blogger's spam-detection robots as being suspected as a spam blog. To accompany this, I was blocked from posting anything new until a human reviewed this blog. In so many words, the form messages said to click a button to submit a request, and if I was still blocked after four business days, there was another form procedure to submit for a second review request. We finally got freed sometime between 10:30 p.m. and 1 a.m. tonight. There was no other way to contact any sort of customer service — no IM, no chat room (except for other "citizens" like yours truly), certainly no phone number. I don't want to slag Google/Blogger and tempt fate again, so let's just say I'm happy to be back.

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We're walking on a side street and a man comes out of a house carrying a garbage bag. We walk together, the three of us, me and the Baby on one side of the street, the stranger on the other. At the end of the block, the man doesn't hesitate, and without a hint of shame or self-awareness, drops the bag of household garbage into a city garbage pail in the bright early evening daylight and walks on.

This wasn't a refugee from the student-ghetto or someone you might reasonably assume doesn't give a shit; this was a 60ish white guy with a flat-top haircut and thick dark glasses coming out of a fairly well-kept home on a residential side street, someone who should know better.

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To the Press, it's like shooting fish in a barrel, finding voters virtually tripping over themselves to provide the dumbest-sounding quotes during Hillary's racial sabre-rattling in a state that's 95% white. But it's scary, too: these people are actually saying these things, and whites showing ignorance and ugliness (working class or otherwise) aren't limited to one state.

Still, let's not forget that West Virginia has brought us Jennifer Garner (mmmm, Jennifer Garner) and Mary Lou Retton, too. So they got that going for them. Which is nice.

If Barack Obama goes on to lose to John McCain in the general election, poly scientists will point to this day one of the reasons why.

And Clinton proved that white people would rather vote for another white person. Thanks for reminding us all of the progress we sort-of haven't made.

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The Clinton ego machine rolls on, continuing to try its best to produce the first-ever president from the Silent Generation, represented in the form of the 70-ish John McCain.

The New York Times had a good article on McCain's generation a few Mondays ago. The article correctly echoes the research Strauss and Howe wrote about in their Generations book more than a decade ago when they, too, mentioned that the Silents have never had one of their own elected as president (the Times notes it as the generation born in the 1930s).

Born in and around the Great Depression, too young to fight in World War II, then raised and coming of age in the prosperous and mostly conforming 1950s, "smothered" and over-protected by their parents and society at large.

Re-reading that, I think of my son. Born in a recession in an era of protecting children (perhaps over-protecting, as witnessed by the vitriol over New York Sun columnist (and NYC-living) Lenore Skenazy's decision to let her 9-year-old son ride the subway alone), with perhaps a longer-term war underway and hopefully brighter economic days on the far side of all this (sometime around 2019, perhaps).

McCain's is a generation that produced Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis, an in-between generation, too young to fight the Great War (and gain the glory and amass the power while perfecting the institutions laid out by FDR), but also too old to be part of the future sell-out hippies of the Baby Boomers. As film directors, think 1930s-born Woody Allen or Clint Eastwood and Francis Ford Coppola — either neurotic or lyrical, but thoughtful either way.

I find this interesting not just because of the implications for my son and our future, but also because of this inter-generational presidential race — at the moment, it's between members of three different generations. Hard as it may be to separate the issues of race and gender on their own, but think how each of the candidates formed their world views not only because of what they saw and experienced, but at what ages they were when went through these personality-forming experiences.

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OK, all the posts you see below (with the exception of "Tulips and Burritos" and "Writing buzz-kill") came over from our old blog at crucialbbq.blogspot.com. Starting now, we're starting over, right here at The Icepick Cometh. We're cleaning out and cleaning up some of the old posts. We're also experimenting over at our Word Press site, so we'll see which service works more best for our zócalo.

Yes, we took PublisherCat and Alien Editor with us.

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Finally saw the Buzz Bissinger rant from HBO. Almost a week later he sounds regretful in his tone — even though he was still spoiling for a fight two days afterward in a New York Times story — and I have to agree with him on bemoaning the overuse of gossip on blogs. But whereas David Simon's anger made me want to save newspapers and pray for their survival, Bissinger's over 50 anger made me hope they'd die off, and die quickly.

Perhaps the best point of the reaction to Bissinger's comments is the blogosphere gives hacks and never-was's like me a space to write, even at a table of one. At some point, much like a career minor league pitcher, you realize you've gone as far as you can go professionally. The 25-year-old minor leaguer, of course, has the fear of being cut and finding another line of work. The Single-A journo has these fears, too, in the form of layoffs and buyouts, but can sometimes exist longer, provided he or she has can stomach continuing on in hackdom, but has to give up pretensions of even making it to Triple-A. Otherwise, if the layoffs don't get you, the depression will.

Maybe you had the talent but weren't willing to move to Odessa like brave Bissinger. Maybe you got sick of covering small-town school boards and high school games. Maybe you fell in love with a person, or a place, and didn't want to move but couldn't land a writing gig in that town, and you curse your desire to write while your friends in other professions seem to have plenty of opportunities and earn more than your pittance.

Maybe, hard as it is to realize, you just didn't have the talent, not enough of it anyway.

I'd like to make excuses that it's more competitive in the last 15 years than it ever was for Bissinger, that there were more newspapers and magazines and outlets when he started with fewer writers of all stripes (read: non-white males) seriously competing with him, and when I began trying to land jobs papers were in decline and Al Gore and Kim Jong Il hadn't invented the Internet yet, to say nothing of blogs, and blah, blah, blah.

Maybe W.C. Heinz would've blogged instead, as the Kansas City Star's Joe Posnanski says (link via The Big Lead). Or maybe not.

But there it is: talent, most likely, would have risen anyway, as Bissinger said of Heinz, especially had it been accompanied by greater ambition.

And a willingness to move to Odessa. And a publisher that would even read a query letter. And an ability to have a hiring editor overlook that you have neither an Ivy League pedigree (Harvard, especially, Cornell probably won't do) or an MBA or useless J-School Masters. And a willingess not to eat or support your family while that all goes on. OK, I'll stop.

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We walked up the street and he pointed out each of the bunches of tulips growing in the sidewalk gardens, purples and reds and yellows and oranges cups coming up out of the ground, surrounded by low black iron mini-fences. He liked the steps of the brownstones, too, liked to say "stoop." He got too distracted by the lights and sounds of the burrito joint, though, so we got it to go, and went home to eat and play baseball on the back patio, the baby throwing his whole body into every pitch, so much so that he toppled onto the ground, giggling.

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