a.k.a., Return of the Generation Gap

I’m a cartoonist, columnist, writer and editor. So most of my friends are cartoonists, columnists, writers and editors. And a few publishers. One topic towers all over all others in my circle of friends: the future of journalism. Print media is in trouble; online media is ascendant. But consumers don’t pay for online content and online advertisers pay much less for x readers online than they do in print. As NBC CEO Jeff Zucker famously warned last year, the media is “trading analog dollars for digital pennies.”

But not everyone is worried. Many aspiring journalists and cartoonists in their twenties have embraced the Web. They don’t dread a future without print—they welcome it. If newspapers and magazines are going under, say these e-vangelists, they have no one to blame but themselves. “Considering most political journalism is editorializing disguised as reporting, what would be the big deal,” asks Shawn Mallow, a blogger at Wizbang.com. “Does anyone have any illusions as to which way the New York Times leans in its political reporting?”

At Techcrunch.com Erick Schonfeld adds low quality to the list of old media sins: “The newspaper industry wants to go back to the world before the Web, when each newspaper was a small media bundle packed with stories, 80 percent of which sucked…News sites can no longer capture reader’s attention with 20 percent news, and 80 percent suck.”

Remember the “generation gap”? In the 1960s and 1970s, it described the cultural chasm between rock ‘n’ roll-loving hippie Baby Boomers and their stodgy Lawrence Welk-watching parents. It came back in the 1990s, when snotty twentysomethings wrote books like “Generation X” and “Revenge of the Latchkey Kids,” deriding their Boomer elders as sentimental, selfish and unaware.

Generational détente has prevailed since then. Gen Xers born in the 1960s and early 1970s are now in their 40s, America’s culturally dominant age group. Sure they’re inheriting the country just as it’s collapsing. But whining is unbecoming when one of your own has just been elected president. Laid-off Xers (many of them canned by media companies) are coming to grips with failure, causing them to go easier on Boomers, whom they’d previously blamed for everything from global warming to blowing the chance for a revolution back in 1968. Stuff happens. We get that now. How’s that alimony payment working out for you?

Besides, we Gen Xers get along with Gen Y types, who are roughly 25 to 35 years old these days. We’re both cynical, distrusting of authority, pessimistic about our economic prospects, and dig a lot of the same music and movies. Generation gap? We’re too cool for that.

Now here come the Millennials to wipe that smug we-still-listen-to-the-Dead-Kennedys look off our faces. Generational demographic gurus William Strauss and Neil Howe define the Millennials as Americans born after 1982—at this writing, people under age 27. Gen X never saw them coming. Now they’re challenging Xers—and the generation gap is back.

This generation gap is the opposite of previous versions, in which young insurgents attacked their elders for being too arch and moralistic. Like Mulder in “The X Files,” they desperately want to believe: their leaders, their government, their corporate executives. And they really want to believe in technology. In my little world of journos, they toil on blogs like the Huffington Post for pennies or nothing at all, perfectly happy because they’re sure it will pay off someday. How? They don’t know, but “someone”—some tech company, some entrepreneur—is bound to figure it all out. When those of us in our 40s point out that there’s no evidence to support contentions such as theirs—my favorite is that online ad rates are bound to go up someday, just because—these Young Turk Millennials mock us as washed-up has-beens.

Young people mocking old people for being too cynical is weird.

According to Mssrs. Strauss and Howe, however, this clash was inevitable. Xers are one of four recurring generational archetypes in American society and in Great Britain before the colonies. (They trace these cycles back to the War of the Roses in 1459.) Gen Xers, they argue convincingly, are a “nomadic” generation. According to Wikipedia: “Nomads are ratty, tough, unwanted, diverse, adventurous, and cynical about institutions. They grow up as the underprotected children of an Awakening, come of age as the alienated young adults of an unraveling, become the pragmatic, midlife leaders of a crisis and age into tough, post-crisis elders…” Serious columnists aren’t supposed to quote Wikipedia, but I’m Gen X. I’m ratty. I break rules.

Millennials are a “heroic” generation. They “are conventional, powerful, and institutionally driven, with a profound trust in authority”—i.e., perfectly programmed to be intensely disturbed by Xers. If you’re the gullib—er, trusting—type, what could be more threatening than to have a generation that doesn’t believe in anything be your elders? “They grow up as the increasingly protected children of an unraveling, come of age as the heroic, team-working youth of a crisis…” That last part is dead on. When U.S. society came apart at the seams in the 1970s and 1980s, Millennials’ Boomer parents smothered and coddled them. Now they’re working for Teach for America. Or at a paid internship. Something will work out. Someone will think of something. Besides, with Boomer parents, money isn’t a big worry.

A recent blog post at DailyCartoonist.com brought it home for me. “I’m starting to not comprehend Ted Rall’s politics at all,” wrote Jesse Levin, almost certainly under age 27. “His current slate of strips basically targets Obama’s lefty ineffectuality. His blog rails against Bush…Things may not be black and white, but where on Earth do ya stand as a political cartoonist? Unless you’re just an independent spraying hateful buckshot at all authority figures, I think Ted’s logic centers are failing on several levels.”

“An independent spraying hateful buckshot at all authority figures.” Sounds like the perfect definition of a Gen X pundit to me. And perfectly calibrated to piss off up-and-coming Millennials.

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.” He is also the author of the Gen X manifesto “Revenge of the Latchkey Kids.” His website is tedrall.com.)

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL

Right-Wingers Have Reasons to Worry About Trying KSM

One of my favorite books is by a conservative. Every American should read Stephen L. Carter’s 1996 primer on ethics, “Integrity.” Carter writes that integrity requires doing the right thing, “even at personal cost.” In the world of politics, the example of Al Gore’s father comes to my mind: a senator from Tennessee, Al Gore, Sr. openly opposed segregation and the Vietnam War even though he knew his outspokenness would cause him to lose his 1970 reelection campaign.

Faced with the choice between integrity and expediency, Republicans are taking the low road. Principles? Only when they’re convenient. Never mind the Constitution, the Geneva Conventions or common decency—on the question of what to do about POWs rotting away at Guantánamo Bay concentration camp, right-wingers’ concerns are purely practical.

We are talking, of course, about Attorney General Eric Holder’s decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in federal court in Manhattan, within walking distance of the World Trade Center Memorial Hole, which marks America’s resilience.

Note: I don’t refer to Mohammed as “9/11 mastermind.” Unlike most Americans, I don’t believe that something is true just because the government says it. Until a jury and the media examine the facts, we have no idea whether Mohammed is guilty of anything. As far as we know, he could be nothing more than a poster child for Pakistani bed-head. Moreover, my distrust multiplies in direct proportion to the number times a suspect has been waterboarded (in Mohammed’s case, at least 183).

Anyway, it’s interesting to watch “law and order” conservatives like Rudy Giuliani talk away basic legal rights like habeas corpus. “[Mohammad] should be tried in a military tribunal,” Giuliani says, “He is a war criminal. This is an act of war.” No, Mr. Mayor, he’s not. And this is no war. Had an actual war been declared, a nation-state would have attacked us. 9/11 was a criminal act, and a terrible one: mass murder, air piracy and property damage. Until Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is tried and convicted in a court of law, however he is an alleged criminal, innocent until proven guilty. Where’d this Giuliani guy go to law school, Wal-Mart?

Among Giuliani’s other worries: “security concerns.” “Just wait and see how much New York City spends on this in order to protect him,” he warns. While we’re at it, think of how much money the government could save by eliminating the criminal justice system! Why not just let the cops shoot anyone they want?

The attorney general’s decision should be commended. He was correct to act independently, without consulting with Obama. It is a long overdue course correction for a government still careening down the road to moral illegitimacy. Still, Holder’s pseudo-conservative critics—wouldn’t a real conservative favor strict adherence to the law, practical concerns like the cost of security be damned?—have good reasons to worry about how the trial will unfold, if and when it actually comes to pass.

For example, Republican Rep. Pete Hoekstra of Michigan fears accused terrorists will exploit their trials. He worries they will “disrupt it and make it a circus and allow them to use it as a platform to push their ideology.” Well, yeah. In political proceedings, the defendants always try to put the state on trial. Unfortunately, the military, CIA and Bush Administration made that outcome inevitable by refusing to treat 9/11 as a crime. Mohammed and his comrades ought to have been turned over to The Hague, where the dull murmur of transcription machines has a way of sucking all the drama out of the most political of trials.

John “Torture Memo” Yoo frets in The Wall Street Journal that “KSM and his co-defendants will enjoy the benefits and rights that the Constitution accords to citizens and resident aliens—including the right to demand that the government produce in open court all of the information that it has on them, and how it got it.” Though self-serving, it’s an excellent point. The whole sordid story of America’s post-9/11 torture program will be internationally televised.

At Mohammed’s trial the whole world will hear how U.S. soldiers and intelligence agents stabbed, suffocated and sodomized detainees, including kids, most of whom were later determined to be innocent and set free. So much for the Obama effect; traveling overseas is going to suck for Americans from now on.

The government could have avoided this unpleasantness by, oh, not torturing. And, when we citizens heard and read and watched reports that our government was torturing, we could have racked up some integrity points by taking to the streets by the million to demand that it stop. But we had football and “Battlestar Galactica” and reality shows to watch instead. Oh, well.

Now it’s time for America to take its lumps. Even if that means putting KSM on a plane back to Pakistan and watching him arriving home to a hero’s welcome, that’s too bad. Release is how a judge and jury typically treats a man who has been tortured while awaiting custody.

What does Stephen L. Carter think about this? I don’t know, but I’d like to think that (as a conservative) he would agree with me. Integrity requires one to accept responsibility for one’s actions.

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the new graphic memoir “The Year of Loving Dangerously.” He is also the author of the 2002 graphic travelogue “To Afghanistan and Back.”)

COPYRIGHT 2009 TED RALL