Free Silver

I’m not especially nostalgic for MAD, but it makes for an interesting sorting hat between millennials and the generations (including those lost to history) theorized to have preceded them. (If you read the previous sentence and said “what’s a sorting hat?” then you’re in the latter category). MAD the magazine is quintessentially Boomer. It began publication in 1952, when the oldest boomers were seven years old. It remained a cheap, reliable source for a gonzo sensibility and the sort of 12-year old humor that could, half understood, be repeated by a nine-year old to project knowing sophistication. Though its run on the newsstand continued until 2019, it was relegated to quarterly publication a decade before – never a good sign in the print world.

Like Boomers, Gen Xers had MAD magazine available through their middle school years, but their monopoly on irreverent juvenalia was gone. Cracked was the less sophisticated rival, but neither magazine stood a chance against Beavis and Butthead.

Millenials would have had access to MAD magazine during their middle school years as well, but I’d bet money that a random millenial, when asked about MAD would answer about MADtv which ran for 15 seasons starting in 1995. I had just started high school when it debuted. How it lasted 15 seasons is beyond me – it only begrudgingly earned my eyeballs because it started 30 minutes before Saturday Night Live and was slightly more interesting than the local evening news. Still, it is a good instant marker, among “when did you first use the internet” “do you remember the Challenger explosion” and “which ending did you see in the theatrical release of CLUE\?” to gauge whether you’re in the Millenial or Gen X side of the divide.

I bring this up because unlike Mary Clyens, who was born in 1979 and resides firmly in Generation X, I was born in the frontier between Generation X and Millenial. Depending on who draws the line my birth in the first half of 1981, would make me a young Gen Xer, possibly the last ever born, or an elder millenial (to quote the title of a recent Iliza Shlesinger stand-up special. Miss Shlesinger was born in 1983).

So I was comforted to see this tweet by Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic:

I feel him on the last point, having a younger sibling with the firmer millenial birth year of 1987. It’s amusing that pretty much everyone like me who was born in the cusp years finds ways to draw the line that places them on the Gen X side of things. I didn’t get the sense growing up that Gen X was an exclusive club that one might wait in line to get into (those of us at the tail end of the generation never got our “Members Only” jackets, after all). Is this just a defense mechanism resulting from the over saturation of millenial-bashing, millenial defending and millenial navel-gazing cultural grafs?

According to Pew, I’m a millenial. According to the U.S. Census Bureau I’m an Xer. I’m not the least bit interested in being grouped with the younger cohort, so I stand up and cheer when the narrator of American Horror Story Season 3 says ” I am a Millennial. Generation Y. Born between the birth of AIDS and 9/11, give or take,” because everyone knows the birth of AIDS was July 3, 1981, heralded by the New York Times headline “Rare Cancer Seen in 41 Homosexuals.” I cringe when Jessica Alba, who is less than one month my senior, gives Stephen Colbert a “hipster millenial makeover“

Of course this works against me as well. When Rep. Eric Swalwell unleashed a canned line about Joe Biden passing the torch to a new generation, Mary Clyens looked up his birthday and found out that he was born in November 1980. Not wanting to be a part of any generation that would so blithely demand their torch-as-birthright, she redrew the lines and relegated Mr. Swalwell, to millenial status. I was an innocent victim. Collateral damage.

Still working on the next part of Liberals and Heretics but I wanted to link to this TAC article posted today. The idea of the dissolving and re-forming conservative fusions is interesting and the short-lived alliance between libertarians and populists reminded me of Ben Domenech’s thoughts from a few years ago.

Mary and I were digesting these five items, culled during the week, with our Saturday morning coffee.

1. Michael Warren Davis – Make America Good Again (The American Conservative, 7/4/19)

Love America the way we mortals can only love when we’ve grown old enough to accept that our mother is flawed, as we are. Love her all the more because she won’t be around forever.

2. Michael W. Hannon – Against Heterosexuality (First Things, March 2014) – Discussion of the creation of homosexual and heterosexual categories and the beginning of equating non-sanctioned behavior (same sex sodomy) with identity and giving some social sanction to opposite-sex sodomy in the process. This was a real eye-opener for Mrs. C., expect a good discussion next week if not sooner. I was particularly taken with the substitution of a gag reflex, or the instinctive physical revulsion, as a proxy for considered moral judgment.

3. Cassie Owens – To end fatphobia, we need to dismantle Western civilization, says Philly therapist Sonalee Rashatwar. (Philly Inquirer, 7/3/19)

I can get behind the idea that the western diet, and consumer culture more broadly, divorce nourishment from joy, farmers from eaters, and feasts from family occasions. But that’s not Ms. Rashatwar’s thesis. “Fat acceptance” as a movement isn’t far, thematically, from the reductionism of same-sex sodomy into a homosexual identity. A person with an unhealthy eating pattern can choose to see himself as a person engaged in a changeable behavior, and shine the harsh light on those areas he wishes to change. He can also choose to identify, immutably, as a glutton and adopt the language of victimization when informed that obesity has real-life consequences. For example:

I was not surprised that the person who shot up the mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand, was also a fitness instructor. I was not surprised by that because people who are Nazis, people who are white supremacists, people who are trying to think of the perfect race are also super fatphobic. … Oftentimes it’s very eugenic.

4. Andrew Sullivan – The Democratic Candidates Are in a Bubble on Immigration (New York Magazine, 6/28/19)

Courts have also expanded asylum to include domestic violence, determining that women in abusive relationships are a “particular social group” and thereby qualify. In other words, every woman on the planet who has experienced domestic abuse can now come to America and claim asylum. Also everyone on the planet who doesn’t live in a stable, orderly, low-crime society. Literally billions of human beings now have the right to asylum in America. As climate change worsens, more will rush to claim it. All they have to do is show up.

Last month alone, 144,000 people were detained at the border making an asylum claim. This year, about a million Central Americans will have relocated to the U.S. on those grounds. To add to this, a big majority of the candidates in the Democratic debates also want to remove the grounds for detention at all, by repealing the 1929 law that made illegal entry a criminal offense and turning it into a civil one. And almost all of them said that if illegal immigrants do not commit a crime once they’re in the U.S., they should be allowed to become citizens.

How, I ask, is that not practically open borders? The answer I usually get is that all these millions will have to, at some point, go to court hearings and have their asylum cases adjudicated. The trouble with that argument is that only 44 percent actually turn up for their hearings; and those who do show up and whose claims nonetheless fail can simply walk out of the court and know they probably won’t be deported in the foreseeable future.

5. Emily Dixon – https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/ireland-arranmore-island-scli-intl/index.html CNN, 6/14/19

If America isn’t becoming good enough, fast enough, the Irish island of Arranmore is trying to tempt us away with high speed internet and picturesque rocky Atlantic cliffs. It’s too bad I didn’t specialize in international law (or go into finance). They’re looking for Manhattan expatriates especially “for it’s money they have and peace they lack.”

I guess you could say I failed at grown-up blogging, and that failure certainly stings.  With a new job, a wedding to plan, and the adjustment to not living alone, finding time to post became quite the challenge.  The nerves I felt waiting for that first comment caused me to be increasingly perfectionistic about what I wrote, and the more polished the posts, the greater the fear that the comments would roll in, and that I’d be exposed as being not particularly original and not particularly good with words (and certainly not with using them economically).

One of my co-bloggers wrote me early on that after a while, the anxiety of posting would diminish; it didn’t… or at least hadn’t by the time I took my accidental hiatus. First I just hadn’t posted for a week, then two, then I wrote a post out long-hand and never typed it up, and after a little while, I just took post-writing off my daily “to-do list.”

So here I am, back to the place I can write without readers, back to the place I don’t feel the need to apologize for long absences.  I hope to go back to “real” blogging (the kind that requires risk) at some point – and hopefully in the not-too-distant future – but for now, I feel like it’s just important for me to get some of my ideas out whatever the forum.

Simultaneous to the real-world changes I’ve gone through over the last six months are changes of heart and mind, and things I’ve tried to work through without over-analyzing or over-intellectualizing.  That’s not an easy mission for me.  I’ve always had a tendency to turn a subjective feeling into a theory.  For months, I’ve worked against that tendency.  Not only have I not written any posts, I’ve scarcely read blogs, and I’ve kept my news consumption to a minimum.  My experiment failed.  I may have re-channeled my theories into more personal outlets (marriage, family, religion, education…) but they’re still theories – theories that I know full well have nothing more than that same subjective feeling as their foundation.

When I can (and frankly, when I feel like it), I plan to post some of these thoughts.  I’ve been reading quite a bit about homeschooling recently, and feel like I’ve written a dozen posts on the subject in my head.  Maybe at some point, I’ll put them in writing.  And I’ve started visiting a church that I’d like to write about.  As always, I’ve thought a lot about place; not only abstractly (which is so un-place-like in itself), but also the ways in which where we decide to live as a family will impact the pace of our lives.

Many of these the things I’ve decided have contradicted parts of my politics, and I suppose that’s okay.  I’d rather my personal beliefs shape my political beliefs than the other way around.  It’s something I’d like to explore, even if it is in this risk-free blogging environment.

Last day of the month, and again, I’ve been absent for quite some time.  Plenty a good reason for it though – just after the election, I got engaged.  Suddenly, the energy I had put into reading and watching politics has been put into planning a wedding, looking for a house, dreaming about the future.  And while it has all been exciting independently, it’s also become amazing how the things I argue in the abstract (either politically, philosophically or whatever) have an impact on major life-decisions.

For instance, it’s one thing to talk a good game on loyalty and devotion to family; quite something else to deliberately look for houses that have extra room for an aging parent to one day live in.  Or thinking about having children close in age so that none can have the undivided attention of their parents, none can feel that the world revolves around them, all will learn cooperation, humility, and the art of having to talk over each other at the dinner table.  I’ll have a lot more to say about this in the coming days; for now, I just wanted to make the November deadline. 🙂