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

Fort Hood Shootings a Shocker…Why Not U.S. War Crimes?

American lives are worth a lot. So when Americans get killed, it’s a big story. There are lots of editorials. Congressmen call for investigations. We want to find out what happened, why it happened, and how to make sure it never happens again.

The lives of foreigners, on the other hand, are pretty much worthless. Even when they die because Americans killed them, news accounts marking their deaths are short, sweet, and short-lived. Congressional investigations? No way. To the contrary! If anyone is inconsiderate enough to mention the killings of people overseas in a public forum, they get shouted down or simply ignored.

The massacre of 13 soldiers at an Army post in Texas earlier this week places this dichotomy in sharp relief.

The FBI is already helping Army investigators. In addition, Senator Joe Lieberman has announced that his Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee will launch a full investigation into “every angle” of the shooting, including the motives of the suspect and whether or not government eavesdroppers could have prevented it by notifying Army officials of his contacts with a radical Muslim cleric. Over in the House, Representative Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat, has summoned national intelligence director Dennis Blair to answer questions about Fort Hood before the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.

But wait—there’s more. “Other committees may also launch investigations into how the Army missed warning signs about the accused,” reports The Politico.

All sorts of hands are being wrung.

Major Hasan, an army psychiatrist, ministered to victims of post-traumatic stress syndrome who told him terrible stories about combat in Afghanistan and Iraq. Should someone have helped him cope too?

Ordered to deploy to the war zone, he asked not to go—and was refused. Should the Army be more flexible?

Is it reasonable to ask a religious Muslim to deploy to Afghanistan or Iraq, wars where he would be asked to kill his coreligionists?

Then there are the phone taps. “U.S. military officials said intelligence agencies intercepted communications between Hasan and Anwar al-Awlaki, a former imam at the Dar Al-Hijrah Islamic Center in Falls Church, Virginia, a Washington suburb,” reported CNN. “Al-Awlaki, who left the United States in 2002 and is believed to be living in Yemen, was the subject of several federal investigations dating back to the late 1990s, but was never charged.” As jihadis do at the start of an attack, Hasan reportedly cried “Allahu Akbar” before opening fire. Shouldn’t someone have noticed that the nice shrink with the dopey smile had become a radical Islamist?

The shock, grief and soul-searching are all reasonable reactions to a brutal and tragic event. But it’s not hard to imagine how it looks to the outside world. While the media and public obsess over the deaths of 13 fellow Americans, they ignore the deaths of hundreds of thousands of foreigners.

The American military has killed roughly two million people in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2001. Those attacks were illegal—no declaration of war, no UN mandate—and are largely recognized as such by the American public. Many of the victims were killed with chemical and radioactive weapons, and some while under torture. In other words, these are crimes—some of the biggest mass murders in human history.

So where are the Congressional investigations? Don’t we want to find out what happened, how it happened, and make sure it never happens again? Apparently not.

President Obama has chosen to “move forward” instead. No one—not George W. Bush, nor his advisers, nor the military officers who carried out his illegal orders, is being held accountable.

There are no angry editorials. The illegal wars, instead of being brought to an end, are being ramped up. The crimes—yes, including the torture—continues. But it’s OK—as long as it doesn’t happen here in the United States. It’s OK to rain death on Pakistanis using drone planes…gotta spare those precious American lives!

Mass murder is shocking when the victims are Americans; it’s doubly shocking when it happens in America.

Thirteen soldiers die in Texas and it’s all we talk about. Two million die in Afghanistan and Iraq and we don’t notice and we don’t even want to hear about it. Only 12 percent of Americans aged 18 to 24 can find Afghanistan on a map.

The punk band T.S.O.L. wrote the soundtrack to this attitude a quarter-century ago: “We live in the American zone/Free of fear in our American home/Swimming pool and digital phone.”

Still wondering why they hate us?

(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

Failure on H1N1 Highlights a Bigger Crisis

America’s scandalous lame (non-)response to the swine flu pandemic isn’t a big deal. Not compared to, say, the melting of the polar ice cap. It isn’t torture. Or war. It pales next to giving hundreds of billions of dollars to wealthy bankers and nothing to homeowners facing foreclosure. But it sure is interesting.

First the Obama Administration committed the classic mistake of governance: they overpromised and underdelivered, failing to ensure Americans had enough H1N1 vaccine. Summertime estimates of 120 million doses fell to 40 million and then 28 million. In fairness to Obama Administration officials, vaccine production is an inherently unpredictable business; the swine flu antigen simply grew slower than that of other flus.

But here’s what’s weird: Even after the feds learned there wouldn’t be enough vaccine to go around, they urged everyone to demand it from their doctors. Lines reminiscent of the Soviet Union in the 1970s sprang up outside clinics.

At many locations, hundreds of people were turned away. Hint to Secretary Sebelius: they won’t go back.

More telling were the White House’s inability to see the crisis coming coupled with its knee-jerk reliance on free markets. With the air out of the capitalist balloon since September 2008, why on earth would Obama & Co. trust private pharmaceutical corporations to do the job? A pandemic calls for a sweeping response such as temporary or permanent nationalization of drug companies.

Moreover, the decision to outsource most of the production overseas baffles the mind. Four out of five of the vaccine makers hired by the U.S. government were in other countries. CSL Ltd., one of the four and based in Australia, met its own country’s needs first.

Now there’s an idea.

Also indicative of America’s “can’t do” spirit in the Age of Obama is the government’s unwillingness to impose common sense on the cheapest of the cheap: employers.

A hundred years after the rise of unionism, nearly 40 percent of private-sector workers get no paid sick days. Add that to employees at other firms who have already used up their meager allotment, and those who are afraid to take a day off lest they get targeted for layoffs, and you’ve got trouble: tens of millions of people mixing it up at work, many of them carrying a highly contagious, potentially lethal virus.

Nina G. Stillman, a lawyer with a New York law firm that advises companies on sick-leave policy, told The New York Times: “Employers who do not offer sick days are not prepared to offer them now, and they recognize that this may result in not achieving what they say they would like, which is that people who are sick stay home.”

Translation: employers don’t give a damn about health of the country. Well, maybe a damn. Not a nickel.

One of the nation’s largest employers, actually threatens to fire workers who get sick. Reports the Times: “At Wal-Mart, when employees miss one or more days because of illness or other reasons, they generally get a demerit point. Once employees obtain four points over a six-month period, they begin receiving warnings that can lead to dismissal.”

Note to firing squads of the future: see above paragraph.

A country with a strong, well-run government would order employers to give all employees with flu-like symptoms paid time off from work. But Barack Obama, in thrall to and in the pockets of big business, hasn’t lifted a finger to spare us from misery—and deaths—that are totally unnecessary.

One of the most reliable indicators of a country’s political and social viability is its ability to respond to an emergency. Are leaders able to react quickly and forcefully, like JFK during the Cuban missile crisis? Or do they get caught flat-footed? Is the government dysfunctional, with each branch waiting for some other agency to act?

The United States has faced four major challenges in this new century: the stolen election of 2000, 9/11, Katrina, and the Depression that began a little over one year ago. Each crisis metastasized within a different medium (politics, military, domestic governance, economy), each essential to maintaining a successful nation-state. Tellingly, the U.S. failed each test.

Will the H1N1 pandemic rises to those events’ status as signal catastrophes? I don’t know. But it highlights what many of us have suspected for years: the U.S. has entered an irreversible decline.

(Ted Rall is the author, with Pablo G. Callejo, of the upcoming 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