Turkey Tetrazzini
Half a pound spaghetti; half a pound mushrooms, sliced; 3 tablespoons butter; 3 tablespoons flour; 2 cups turkey stock or chicken broth; two or more cups cubed turkey (or ham); half a cup green stuffed olives, sliced; half a cup whipping cream; 2 tablespoons sherry; 1 cup parmesan cheese.
Cook the spaghetti by package directions and drain. In a saucepan, sauté the mushrooms in the butter, then stir in the flour and cook, stirring constantly over medium-high heat, to blend and brown the flour. When the flour begins to brown, add the broth and cook, stirring constantly, until the sauce thickens. Add the turkey and olives and cook five minutes over low heat. Add the cream and sherry, and freshly ground pepper to taste, and stir well to blend. Add salt to taste. Turn the spaghetti, sauce and half the cheese into a baking dish greased with a little olive oil. Sprinkle the rest of the cheese over the top and bake at 350 for 25-30 minutes.
Stuffing Patties
Shape cold stuffing into patties two-thirds the size of an English muffin. Brown on both sides in olive oil.
Stuffing Casserole
Mix leftover stuffing with green bean casserole in equal quantities. Saute cubed turkey dark meat until crispy at the edges, and in the same skillet sauté a handful of button mushrooms. Stir turkey and mushrooms into the stuffing mix and pour all into a greased casserole baking dish. Top with canned onion rings. Bake at 350 for 25 minutes.
Cranberry Sauce Salad
In a large bowl, mix leftover cranberry sauce (the fresh-cranberry kind), a cup or more of cubed navel orange sections, a small can of black olives, halved, and a couple handfuls of cilantro.
Thanksgiving Monte Cristos
Dip two slices of good sourdough bread in beaten egg. Spread leftover stuffing on one of the slices, place sliced white-meat turkey on top, and a thin layer of cranberry sauce mixed with stuffing on top. Fry in butter until browned on both sides.
Turkey Sandwiches
Sliced white turkey, room temperature; roasted red peppers in a jar; soft white bread; mayonnaise; fresh-ground black pepper.
Slather mayonnaise on two slices of bread. Layer on slices of turkey. Place red pepper over turkey. Grind black pepper over, cover with second slice, cut in half and serve with potato chips.
November 23, 2005
November 21, 2005
Annual turkey findings
For the 23rd straight Thanksgiving Day, the findings of the Kettner Blvd. College of Turkey Surgeons and Airport Relocation Committee remain unchanged.
The surest way to have a moist, flavorful turkey for Thanksgiving is to shoot it and smoke it.
If you are new to the debate, the KBCTSARC was created to research answers to two dilemmas of our time:
1) Is there a way to make turkey moist?
2) Where should San Diego locate its new airport?
The first issue is universal, or at least as widespread as those regions on the planet where turkey is cooked and served.
The second issue is local. I was born in Texas, where you can put an airport almost anywhere, but since 1972 I have lived in San Diego, California. Sometime in the 1930s, San Diegans started talking about the need to relocate their airport from Lindbergh Field to some better location.
Three-quarters of a century later, that question is still in the hands of a committee (not the KBCTSARC) which meets regularly to discuss potential locations as disparate as the Imperial Desert (a two-hour drive) and the Pacific Ocean (airport built on piers or pontoons).
The KBCTSARC, meanwhile, goes about its business casually, a pace consistent with our motto: “Not likely to happen in our lifetimes.” Our current airport relocation advice is: leave it where it is. Yes, Lindbergh Field is the smallest major airport in the United States, with no room to expand, and its traffic capacity is about to be reached (a claim first made, incidentally, sometime in the 1950s). We say: let the capacity be reached! If an airport cap means a cap on regional population, business, congestion, air pollution, infrastructure strain, and crime, then by all means, let us mount a campaign to keep Lindbergh where it is!
Regarding the turkey, a fresh bird (not frozen, or previously frozen) is best, about 18 pounds. You will need a large syringe, used originally by large-animal veterinarians but now a popular item in kitchenware stores and catalogues. And you will need a Weber kettle cooker, the 22-inch size, and a bag of charcoal briquets laced with mesquite. With the syringe, inject into the bird’s breasts and thighs a mixture of melted butter, chicken stock, and a couple tablespoons of sherry. In this mixture, saturate a clean dishcloth and place it over the bird.
Build small, 20-briquet fires on either side of the fire grate. Close the kettle and lid vents halfway. Place the bird, unstuffed, in the center of the grille, to create indirect-heat cooking. Moisten the cloth every 45 minutes and tend the fires, adding a few briquets each time. Remove the cloth the last hour of cooking and inject the bird again. Cooking time should be about four hours. When a thigh wiggles freely, he is done. When he is finished, he will come out with a deep mahogany glaze.
But he won’t taste “barbecued.” He will have a smoky essence, but he will be all turkey. Turkey is like hamburger; it remains turkey no matter what you do to it. Thus the usual accompaniments are correct. Roast a big pan of dressing, with oysters and walnuts in it. Make a mess of giblet gravy, and sprinkle a quarter-cup of leftover coffee on the giblets as they are sautéing. Make a big pan of oven-roasted (350 degrees) vegetables: new potatoes, onions, carrots, red and green bell peppers, broccoli stalks, all chunked and tossed with a little olive oil, salt and pepper. When these are starting to get tender, add the broccoli florets and plenty of crimini mushrooms and let it go another 15 minutes.
Have fresh white bread and a full jar of mayonnaise ready for the turkey sandwiches on Friday. Always the best part of Thanksgiving dinner.
The surest way to have a moist, flavorful turkey for Thanksgiving is to shoot it and smoke it.
If you are new to the debate, the KBCTSARC was created to research answers to two dilemmas of our time:
1) Is there a way to make turkey moist?
2) Where should San Diego locate its new airport?
The first issue is universal, or at least as widespread as those regions on the planet where turkey is cooked and served.
The second issue is local. I was born in Texas, where you can put an airport almost anywhere, but since 1972 I have lived in San Diego, California. Sometime in the 1930s, San Diegans started talking about the need to relocate their airport from Lindbergh Field to some better location.
Three-quarters of a century later, that question is still in the hands of a committee (not the KBCTSARC) which meets regularly to discuss potential locations as disparate as the Imperial Desert (a two-hour drive) and the Pacific Ocean (airport built on piers or pontoons).
The KBCTSARC, meanwhile, goes about its business casually, a pace consistent with our motto: “Not likely to happen in our lifetimes.” Our current airport relocation advice is: leave it where it is. Yes, Lindbergh Field is the smallest major airport in the United States, with no room to expand, and its traffic capacity is about to be reached (a claim first made, incidentally, sometime in the 1950s). We say: let the capacity be reached! If an airport cap means a cap on regional population, business, congestion, air pollution, infrastructure strain, and crime, then by all means, let us mount a campaign to keep Lindbergh where it is!
Regarding the turkey, a fresh bird (not frozen, or previously frozen) is best, about 18 pounds. You will need a large syringe, used originally by large-animal veterinarians but now a popular item in kitchenware stores and catalogues. And you will need a Weber kettle cooker, the 22-inch size, and a bag of charcoal briquets laced with mesquite. With the syringe, inject into the bird’s breasts and thighs a mixture of melted butter, chicken stock, and a couple tablespoons of sherry. In this mixture, saturate a clean dishcloth and place it over the bird.
Build small, 20-briquet fires on either side of the fire grate. Close the kettle and lid vents halfway. Place the bird, unstuffed, in the center of the grille, to create indirect-heat cooking. Moisten the cloth every 45 minutes and tend the fires, adding a few briquets each time. Remove the cloth the last hour of cooking and inject the bird again. Cooking time should be about four hours. When a thigh wiggles freely, he is done. When he is finished, he will come out with a deep mahogany glaze.
But he won’t taste “barbecued.” He will have a smoky essence, but he will be all turkey. Turkey is like hamburger; it remains turkey no matter what you do to it. Thus the usual accompaniments are correct. Roast a big pan of dressing, with oysters and walnuts in it. Make a mess of giblet gravy, and sprinkle a quarter-cup of leftover coffee on the giblets as they are sautéing. Make a big pan of oven-roasted (350 degrees) vegetables: new potatoes, onions, carrots, red and green bell peppers, broccoli stalks, all chunked and tossed with a little olive oil, salt and pepper. When these are starting to get tender, add the broccoli florets and plenty of crimini mushrooms and let it go another 15 minutes.
Have fresh white bread and a full jar of mayonnaise ready for the turkey sandwiches on Friday. Always the best part of Thanksgiving dinner.
November 15, 2005
A pleasant feel of burden
Here’s a line from David Carr, writing in the “Technology” section of The New York Times, that I like, and believe in:
“The great thing about the Web is that people can say almost anything they please. But it will only mature as a medium if people see that as less of a license than as a burden.”
He was referring mainly to blogs, which in the main are stream-of-consciousness daily (or hourly) journals streaming from every imaginable kind of mind. Most of them would have run their course quickly, as the novelty wore off, both on behalf of the author and the reader, and they moved on before everyone died of boredom.
But then some of these blogs attracted advertisers, who are interested in hit rates as opposed to content. Some of these blogs have made their authors rich, which gives the others incentives to stick around for awhile.
There’s nothing wrong with that. I hope my blog makes money someday. If there is a demographic for a blog that is mostly completed essays, it will. If it means I have to pour my life’s hourly minutiae into a computer, then it won’t, because I won’t go there.
That being said, I do have to follow up on an experiment I had proposed in the blog the other night, to dress up hamburger patties in onions, garlic, green pepper and Trader Joe’s enchilada sauce (the best) served over rice. But I also had a steak that I had cut from a piece of filet mignon in the bag, selling at CostCo for $7.99 a pound. I made the sauce in one skillet, and I need to say that when the onions, green peppers and garlic were getting soft, I poured in a quarter-cup of coffee left over from breakfast and let it bubble down to a glaze. If there is any, I always add a little leftover coffee to sauces, but that’s another story.
I cut the steak into half-inch slices and sautéed them quickly in a little olive oil to brown them but leave them medium-rare. These I placed on the rice and poured the sauce over. Not bad. I had the thawed hamburger, of course, and these I browned thoroughly in a hot skillet, then turned down the heat and let them cook until they were quite dry, just like my grandmother used to make them. They develop their own glaze. You eat them like a big hard beef cookie, and they are delicious.
These are the kinds of things I think is okay to say in a blog. The Web is an absolutely democratic medium, so others can say what they want, too, and that’s all right. There’s infinite space for it – they are only files in a computer – and no doubt a readership for whatever gets written and mistaken for writing. For that reason, the Web will always support a vast community of the immature, or the immaterial.
And I will be here, too. I love to write, as long as there is a little feel of burden to it.
“The great thing about the Web is that people can say almost anything they please. But it will only mature as a medium if people see that as less of a license than as a burden.”
He was referring mainly to blogs, which in the main are stream-of-consciousness daily (or hourly) journals streaming from every imaginable kind of mind. Most of them would have run their course quickly, as the novelty wore off, both on behalf of the author and the reader, and they moved on before everyone died of boredom.
But then some of these blogs attracted advertisers, who are interested in hit rates as opposed to content. Some of these blogs have made their authors rich, which gives the others incentives to stick around for awhile.
There’s nothing wrong with that. I hope my blog makes money someday. If there is a demographic for a blog that is mostly completed essays, it will. If it means I have to pour my life’s hourly minutiae into a computer, then it won’t, because I won’t go there.
That being said, I do have to follow up on an experiment I had proposed in the blog the other night, to dress up hamburger patties in onions, garlic, green pepper and Trader Joe’s enchilada sauce (the best) served over rice. But I also had a steak that I had cut from a piece of filet mignon in the bag, selling at CostCo for $7.99 a pound. I made the sauce in one skillet, and I need to say that when the onions, green peppers and garlic were getting soft, I poured in a quarter-cup of coffee left over from breakfast and let it bubble down to a glaze. If there is any, I always add a little leftover coffee to sauces, but that’s another story.
I cut the steak into half-inch slices and sautéed them quickly in a little olive oil to brown them but leave them medium-rare. These I placed on the rice and poured the sauce over. Not bad. I had the thawed hamburger, of course, and these I browned thoroughly in a hot skillet, then turned down the heat and let them cook until they were quite dry, just like my grandmother used to make them. They develop their own glaze. You eat them like a big hard beef cookie, and they are delicious.
These are the kinds of things I think is okay to say in a blog. The Web is an absolutely democratic medium, so others can say what they want, too, and that’s all right. There’s infinite space for it – they are only files in a computer – and no doubt a readership for whatever gets written and mistaken for writing. For that reason, the Web will always support a vast community of the immature, or the immaterial.
And I will be here, too. I love to write, as long as there is a little feel of burden to it.
November 13, 2005
Getting around the First Amendment
The First Amendment to the Constitution guaranteed the press practically absolute power to do its job in the brand-new United States of America.
Its job? Watchdog. To the authors of the First Amendment, and the Constitution, that job may have been the most important work to be done, in a society that wished to be free and democratic. That conviction is apparent in the amendment’s language. It states, in part, “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press.”
The key word is “abridging,” which means to put limits on. It means the authors understood that freedom of the press was a fundamental reality in the new nation, a reality that existed before the Declaration of Independence, and before the Constitution. Nowhere in the Constitution is there a reference to freedom of the press. The Constitution did not create freedom of the press in the United States, because the authors understood that freedom of the press predated the Constitution.
The watchdog was necessary to expose power where it was mutating into corruption. The authors knew how fragile men were in the guardianship of power; they built what balances they could into the Constitutional structure of the three governmental branches. But it was impossible to anticipate every mutation that power might take into corruption. That threat needed an independent watchdog.
Since the 18th century, then, the press has enjoyed the First Amendment freedom to do its job in behalf of freedom. Here is John Adams: “There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.” Thus was the press, via the First Amendment, given free access to all men.
Now the press is being discounted by the Bush administration. Here is George W. Bush, speaking to a reporter: “You’re making a powerful assumption, young man. You’re assuming that you represent the public. I don’t accept that.”
Behind that amazing statement is a strategy: “There’s nothing we can do about the First Amendment, so we have to go around it.” The strategy ultimately won’t work, because if the battle ever comes down to a referendum about the free press, the alternatives will suddenly become very clear. It is just such a nasty feeling, that such a strategy has been taken, like pulling up floorboards and finding swarms of termites.
Its job? Watchdog. To the authors of the First Amendment, and the Constitution, that job may have been the most important work to be done, in a society that wished to be free and democratic. That conviction is apparent in the amendment’s language. It states, in part, “Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of the press.”
The key word is “abridging,” which means to put limits on. It means the authors understood that freedom of the press was a fundamental reality in the new nation, a reality that existed before the Declaration of Independence, and before the Constitution. Nowhere in the Constitution is there a reference to freedom of the press. The Constitution did not create freedom of the press in the United States, because the authors understood that freedom of the press predated the Constitution.
The watchdog was necessary to expose power where it was mutating into corruption. The authors knew how fragile men were in the guardianship of power; they built what balances they could into the Constitutional structure of the three governmental branches. But it was impossible to anticipate every mutation that power might take into corruption. That threat needed an independent watchdog.
Since the 18th century, then, the press has enjoyed the First Amendment freedom to do its job in behalf of freedom. Here is John Adams: “There is danger from all men. The only maxim of a free government ought to be to trust no man living with power to endanger the public liberty.” Thus was the press, via the First Amendment, given free access to all men.
Now the press is being discounted by the Bush administration. Here is George W. Bush, speaking to a reporter: “You’re making a powerful assumption, young man. You’re assuming that you represent the public. I don’t accept that.”
Behind that amazing statement is a strategy: “There’s nothing we can do about the First Amendment, so we have to go around it.” The strategy ultimately won’t work, because if the battle ever comes down to a referendum about the free press, the alternatives will suddenly become very clear. It is just such a nasty feeling, that such a strategy has been taken, like pulling up floorboards and finding swarms of termites.
November 12, 2005
Scratch pancakes, waffles and chili
I am happy to report that I am marrying a woman (Dec. 3) who not only has a bacon press, but she makes pancakes from scratch.
Karen is smart and fun and involved in the world, and of course that is where it starts. It is also cool, and very distinctive, that she makes pancakes from scratch. She made them last weekend, and they were light and fluffy and floated off the plate up to bite level, even with butter and syrup.
I asked her for her recipe, to share in the blog, and she said flour, sugar, salt, egg, milk, the usual recipe, but there is a secret, she said, and she wouldn’t tell me that. She said all the good cooks would know.
“I make good waffles, too,” she said. She already knows about my preference for waffles not with syrup, but with chili, so she was not too reluctant when I suggested that next weekend she make the waffles, and I’ll bring the chili (Hormel, no beans). And we will have a pecan waffle for dessert.
Talking about chili gave me a dinner inspiration. I took out hamburger to thaw, and I was thinking about just well-done hamburger patties, with onion and garlic, and a green salad. Now I am thinking about the patties, with onion and garlic, but also with green chiles and enchilada sauce, served over rice. We will see what happens.
Karen is smart and fun and involved in the world, and of course that is where it starts. It is also cool, and very distinctive, that she makes pancakes from scratch. She made them last weekend, and they were light and fluffy and floated off the plate up to bite level, even with butter and syrup.
I asked her for her recipe, to share in the blog, and she said flour, sugar, salt, egg, milk, the usual recipe, but there is a secret, she said, and she wouldn’t tell me that. She said all the good cooks would know.
“I make good waffles, too,” she said. She already knows about my preference for waffles not with syrup, but with chili, so she was not too reluctant when I suggested that next weekend she make the waffles, and I’ll bring the chili (Hormel, no beans). And we will have a pecan waffle for dessert.
Talking about chili gave me a dinner inspiration. I took out hamburger to thaw, and I was thinking about just well-done hamburger patties, with onion and garlic, and a green salad. Now I am thinking about the patties, with onion and garlic, but also with green chiles and enchilada sauce, served over rice. We will see what happens.
November 11, 2005
Veterans Day, 2005
I am totally non-partisan in my aggravation with presidents who get us into wars we a) shouldn’t be in, and b) don’t know how to win.
It was John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson who stumbled us into Vietnam. That exercise was well under way when I received my draft notice in August, 1966. I didn’t protest. Many draftees in those days shot their big toes off, or ate a pound of sugar the night before their pre-induction physical, or took off for Canada. I was an American first and a foreign policy critic second, so for me, service was the only option.
I did game the system somewhat. By August, 1966, I knew enough about the Vietnam conflict to know I did not want to go there simply as an infantry grunt on the ground. When I got drafted, I looked around for alternatives. I asked an Air Force recruiter about officer training, but apparently there were thousands of guys who thought of that first.
Eventually I decided to enlist in the Army for officer training in artillery. The guns, I figured, were behind the lines. Not until I was in OCS at Fort Sill did I learn that a) in Vietnam there were no lines, and b) practically all artillery officers begin their combat service as FOs, or “forward observers.” The FO was actually in FRONT of the lines, spotting targets and coordinating fire with commands to the gun batterys, back there behind the lines.
Oh well. No one in the service ever actually believes he or she will get killed. At Fort Sill there was a joke that the life expectancy of an artillery second lieutenant in Vietnam was two-thirds of the way down the ramp getting off the airplane from the States. We laughed, and it was the tough, ironic laughter that young men learn who have been thrown together in a completely foreign and demanding environment whose ultimate lesson was survival. But get killed? No way.
Nevertheless, we were eager to learn what the instructors had to show us about doing our jobs, which included staying alive. If I had worked a tenth as hard in college as I did in OCS, I might actually have made the dean’s list.
When I was graduated and commissioned in June, 1967, there were 170 new lieutenants coming out of Artillery OCS every week. All but about 30 percent received assignments that ultimately would take them to Vietnam. I was one of the 30 percent. My assignment was to West Germany, where I spent two years guarding freedom’s European frontier with a big dinosaur of a weapon called an Honest John.
Men I knew went to Vietnam and died there, or served there, survived, and came home changed men, from shared sacrifice in behalf of flawed leadership and a futile mission. For a long time I felt guilty about that. Then in the mid-1980s, I visited the Vietnam Memorial, the “Wall,” in Washington. It was a transforming experience. The Wall took in the light, the day, the living, the whole life that a day has, at any moment, and me with it. The spirits for whom the Wall was erected were my hosts, and they were as much a part of the day, and the life of the day, as I. It was an astonishing memorial to the 55,000-odd names etched into the Wall. People were etching names onto papers flattened against the etchings, and the names appeared on the paper as if emerging from that life inside the Wall, where they lived.
I touched a few names with my own fingers. Before the day had ended, I realized I no longer felt guilty. I just felt lucky.
Today is Veteran’s Day, 2005, and again we are in a war we shouldn’t be in, and we don’t know how to win. This time the president is George W. Bush, and I am aggravated by him. Mainly I am aggravated by an image that is dominating my day, and it is an image of him interviewing soldiers via satellite television, a month or so ago. It was not a spontaneous, but a staged, event, to encourage public support of the war in Iraq. The soldiers had been coached in their answers.
It struck me as an amazing, and amazingly ignorant, betrayal of leadership principles, but the soldiers didn’t seem to mind. They were not in a position to mind, because a) the president is their commander-in-chief, b) they are Americans first and foreign policy critics second, and c) they are there to do a job, and part of that job is staying alive. Whatever else is going on, they understand, first and last, that they are living in a survival world, and it is their world alone to survive. Not much beyond that matters. If it occurred to them that they were being used by the president in this interview, it was in a way that was completely insignificant, compared to the other uses being made of them by him.
That may have been why the president seemed so uncomfortable in their presence. But that may be giving this president too much credit. If a commander-in-chief can’t speak to his soldiers off the cuff, it’s not likely he is interested in what they think, or feel, or say. George W. Bush has become positively creative, in his second term, in discovering ways to memorialize his aversion to leadership. Becoming so ill at ease, trying to appear a leader of fighting men and women, is not the image of a commander that I would prefer to dominate my thoughts, on Veteran’s Day 2005.
It was John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson who stumbled us into Vietnam. That exercise was well under way when I received my draft notice in August, 1966. I didn’t protest. Many draftees in those days shot their big toes off, or ate a pound of sugar the night before their pre-induction physical, or took off for Canada. I was an American first and a foreign policy critic second, so for me, service was the only option.
I did game the system somewhat. By August, 1966, I knew enough about the Vietnam conflict to know I did not want to go there simply as an infantry grunt on the ground. When I got drafted, I looked around for alternatives. I asked an Air Force recruiter about officer training, but apparently there were thousands of guys who thought of that first.
Eventually I decided to enlist in the Army for officer training in artillery. The guns, I figured, were behind the lines. Not until I was in OCS at Fort Sill did I learn that a) in Vietnam there were no lines, and b) practically all artillery officers begin their combat service as FOs, or “forward observers.” The FO was actually in FRONT of the lines, spotting targets and coordinating fire with commands to the gun batterys, back there behind the lines.
Oh well. No one in the service ever actually believes he or she will get killed. At Fort Sill there was a joke that the life expectancy of an artillery second lieutenant in Vietnam was two-thirds of the way down the ramp getting off the airplane from the States. We laughed, and it was the tough, ironic laughter that young men learn who have been thrown together in a completely foreign and demanding environment whose ultimate lesson was survival. But get killed? No way.
Nevertheless, we were eager to learn what the instructors had to show us about doing our jobs, which included staying alive. If I had worked a tenth as hard in college as I did in OCS, I might actually have made the dean’s list.
When I was graduated and commissioned in June, 1967, there were 170 new lieutenants coming out of Artillery OCS every week. All but about 30 percent received assignments that ultimately would take them to Vietnam. I was one of the 30 percent. My assignment was to West Germany, where I spent two years guarding freedom’s European frontier with a big dinosaur of a weapon called an Honest John.
Men I knew went to Vietnam and died there, or served there, survived, and came home changed men, from shared sacrifice in behalf of flawed leadership and a futile mission. For a long time I felt guilty about that. Then in the mid-1980s, I visited the Vietnam Memorial, the “Wall,” in Washington. It was a transforming experience. The Wall took in the light, the day, the living, the whole life that a day has, at any moment, and me with it. The spirits for whom the Wall was erected were my hosts, and they were as much a part of the day, and the life of the day, as I. It was an astonishing memorial to the 55,000-odd names etched into the Wall. People were etching names onto papers flattened against the etchings, and the names appeared on the paper as if emerging from that life inside the Wall, where they lived.
I touched a few names with my own fingers. Before the day had ended, I realized I no longer felt guilty. I just felt lucky.
Today is Veteran’s Day, 2005, and again we are in a war we shouldn’t be in, and we don’t know how to win. This time the president is George W. Bush, and I am aggravated by him. Mainly I am aggravated by an image that is dominating my day, and it is an image of him interviewing soldiers via satellite television, a month or so ago. It was not a spontaneous, but a staged, event, to encourage public support of the war in Iraq. The soldiers had been coached in their answers.
It struck me as an amazing, and amazingly ignorant, betrayal of leadership principles, but the soldiers didn’t seem to mind. They were not in a position to mind, because a) the president is their commander-in-chief, b) they are Americans first and foreign policy critics second, and c) they are there to do a job, and part of that job is staying alive. Whatever else is going on, they understand, first and last, that they are living in a survival world, and it is their world alone to survive. Not much beyond that matters. If it occurred to them that they were being used by the president in this interview, it was in a way that was completely insignificant, compared to the other uses being made of them by him.
That may have been why the president seemed so uncomfortable in their presence. But that may be giving this president too much credit. If a commander-in-chief can’t speak to his soldiers off the cuff, it’s not likely he is interested in what they think, or feel, or say. George W. Bush has become positively creative, in his second term, in discovering ways to memorialize his aversion to leadership. Becoming so ill at ease, trying to appear a leader of fighting men and women, is not the image of a commander that I would prefer to dominate my thoughts, on Veteran’s Day 2005.
November 04, 2005
Generation gap now light-years
Children – that is, any person age 25 or younger – live in a world so different from the adult world that it could almost be described as a parallel universe.
This is nothing new. It was as true of my generation, in the 1940s, 1950s and into the 1960s, as it is today, except in the matter of degree. I am now 62. When I was 25 and younger, it was popular to say, “Never trust anybody over 30.” Yet we had to live with, and live like, the old fogies. It set up the sort of angst that began to show up in movies like “Blackboard Jungle,” and “Rebel Without a Cause.”
Here is a passage from my book “Warbirds,” which is about Texas high school football, but also about America in the 1950s: “American post-war mainstream culture, and the companies that marketed to it, was still adult-oriented, and in goods and services, movies and entertainment, the kids wore and watched and listened to the same things as their parents because that’s all there was. It was very much a youth culture that convened at the movies and in the hamburger joint parking lots, but the movie was ‘Three Coins in the Fountain,’ and Perry Como, Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, Eddie Fisher and Patti Page sang practically all of the music coming out of the car radios.”
That all started to change after 1954, with the arrival in the youth awareness of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, and with the spread of television. But compared to 2005, the 1950s in America might as well have occurred on another planet. Last week, in the comic strip “Zits,” Jeremy’s mom has asked him to take out the trash. Jeremy, not moving from the couch, says, “Ages 14-25, $94 billion in discretionary spending.” His mom counters by offering to freeze his allowance. In the last panel, Jeremy, dumping the trash in the can, says, “The retail industry respects me more than my parents do.”
That’s not generally true, but it is true in most cases that the retail industry pays at least as much (and frequently more) attention to children than their parents do. The kids are spending the $94 billion on things they want and have been manufactured, created, or organized for them. If parents researched their kids one-tenth as much as the retail industry does, millions of parent-child relationships would change. In 1954, parents didn’t have to pay attention to what was out there; it was all the same. In 2005, parents can’t keep up with what’s out there, even the ones who try. When my kids were teenagers, I watched MTV regularly, because it was the best way to find out what was going on in my kids’ world. I also tried to watch “The Simpsons.” But I failed. Bart didn’t interest me as entertainment. Neither did MTV, though it was fun to mute the sound and play old Patti Page LPs while Madonna and Aerosmith tore up the screen.
Kids today have terrific power. They have the retail industry wrapped around their little finger, and the media furiously develops product that shows children in control of their, if not the, world. In their world, the 2005 kids find it popular to say to anyone outside that world, that is, anyone over 30, “Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.”
I have heard chatter coming from that world lately. In our college newspaper staff meeting a couple of weeks ago, a female student-reporter said female students in her classes have adopted anti-intellectualism as a tool of popularity. Apparently they are expending quite a bit of energy at their desks, affecting and maintaining an air of indifference. My student-reporter said when she raises a hand to contribute to the class discussion, the girls behind her roll their eyes at each other and say, “There she goes again.”
Then in the San Diego media, a story has developed about a high school girl posing for artsy photos in a student-produced “literary” magazine. The girl is also a professional (though very much still at the portfolio-building stage) model. The story developed when her parents, who knew about her professional activities, became angry when the “lit mag” was published without their knowledge. Apparently the girl never told them about the project.
The parents are suing the school district, but that’s another story. The story here is about two recent examples of activity in the parallel-universe youth world that give us fogies useful information about that world. It is possible that kids in their youth world believe in their power, and that their power is greater than ours. They no longer are obligated to check with us, or to participate with us, and don’t expect us, or want us, to speak unless we are spoken to.
Troubling. It reminds me of “Lord of the Flies.” The little beasts, murderous in their power lust, become little boys again the instant an adult appears. In this story, 2005 may be the instant for adults to appear.
This is nothing new. It was as true of my generation, in the 1940s, 1950s and into the 1960s, as it is today, except in the matter of degree. I am now 62. When I was 25 and younger, it was popular to say, “Never trust anybody over 30.” Yet we had to live with, and live like, the old fogies. It set up the sort of angst that began to show up in movies like “Blackboard Jungle,” and “Rebel Without a Cause.”
Here is a passage from my book “Warbirds,” which is about Texas high school football, but also about America in the 1950s: “American post-war mainstream culture, and the companies that marketed to it, was still adult-oriented, and in goods and services, movies and entertainment, the kids wore and watched and listened to the same things as their parents because that’s all there was. It was very much a youth culture that convened at the movies and in the hamburger joint parking lots, but the movie was ‘Three Coins in the Fountain,’ and Perry Como, Doris Day, Rosemary Clooney, Eddie Fisher and Patti Page sang practically all of the music coming out of the car radios.”
That all started to change after 1954, with the arrival in the youth awareness of Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, and with the spread of television. But compared to 2005, the 1950s in America might as well have occurred on another planet. Last week, in the comic strip “Zits,” Jeremy’s mom has asked him to take out the trash. Jeremy, not moving from the couch, says, “Ages 14-25, $94 billion in discretionary spending.” His mom counters by offering to freeze his allowance. In the last panel, Jeremy, dumping the trash in the can, says, “The retail industry respects me more than my parents do.”
That’s not generally true, but it is true in most cases that the retail industry pays at least as much (and frequently more) attention to children than their parents do. The kids are spending the $94 billion on things they want and have been manufactured, created, or organized for them. If parents researched their kids one-tenth as much as the retail industry does, millions of parent-child relationships would change. In 1954, parents didn’t have to pay attention to what was out there; it was all the same. In 2005, parents can’t keep up with what’s out there, even the ones who try. When my kids were teenagers, I watched MTV regularly, because it was the best way to find out what was going on in my kids’ world. I also tried to watch “The Simpsons.” But I failed. Bart didn’t interest me as entertainment. Neither did MTV, though it was fun to mute the sound and play old Patti Page LPs while Madonna and Aerosmith tore up the screen.
Kids today have terrific power. They have the retail industry wrapped around their little finger, and the media furiously develops product that shows children in control of their, if not the, world. In their world, the 2005 kids find it popular to say to anyone outside that world, that is, anyone over 30, “Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to.”
I have heard chatter coming from that world lately. In our college newspaper staff meeting a couple of weeks ago, a female student-reporter said female students in her classes have adopted anti-intellectualism as a tool of popularity. Apparently they are expending quite a bit of energy at their desks, affecting and maintaining an air of indifference. My student-reporter said when she raises a hand to contribute to the class discussion, the girls behind her roll their eyes at each other and say, “There she goes again.”
Then in the San Diego media, a story has developed about a high school girl posing for artsy photos in a student-produced “literary” magazine. The girl is also a professional (though very much still at the portfolio-building stage) model. The story developed when her parents, who knew about her professional activities, became angry when the “lit mag” was published without their knowledge. Apparently the girl never told them about the project.
The parents are suing the school district, but that’s another story. The story here is about two recent examples of activity in the parallel-universe youth world that give us fogies useful information about that world. It is possible that kids in their youth world believe in their power, and that their power is greater than ours. They no longer are obligated to check with us, or to participate with us, and don’t expect us, or want us, to speak unless we are spoken to.
Troubling. It reminds me of “Lord of the Flies.” The little beasts, murderous in their power lust, become little boys again the instant an adult appears. In this story, 2005 may be the instant for adults to appear.
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