Come Back, MZ, All Is Forgiven

Whatever you can say in favor of blogs, they have generally not raised the quality of civil discourse. And I’ve been no help there.

In my last post, I observed that there is currently no dominant cultural/media paradigm. Yuppies? Preppies? Slackers? Gen-Xers? We don’t have anything like that. Our decade doesn’t even have a name.

A commenter named “MZ” took me to task:

“Are you serious? The 'naughts' are about the 'hipster.' Have you really never heard either of these terms? You are not qualified to write this article then. At the last marketing conference I went to we had a session on hipsters and their consumer choices. The term is now becoming mainstream which means that it is no longer hip. But that's OK, they have been a major market force for at least 5 years now.”

Following the long-hallowed traditions of the blogosphere, I naturally posted a snarky reply. I won’t repeat it here (though it’s still posted), because I kind of regret it. Not that I think I was wrong, exactly. But my response wasn’t the whole story. For a lot of reasons, I should be grateful to those few commenters I receive.

Besides, although I have heard those terms, MZ is right: I’m not qualified.

Next month, I turn 50. I’m not complaining: These things happen. It’s liberating, actually. I’m no longer obligated to know anything about the latest bands or anything else “cool” (i.e., what white people like).

Nor do I have to pay close attention to “trends” like microblogging. I’m barely hip to macroblogging.

Full disclosure: I don’t have cable. I don’t watch TV at all, except for NFL games. And even that will come to an end in 2009, when digitalization will cause my small, elderly set to burst into flames.

This may sound like bragging. Maybe it is. Or maybe I don’t know what’s really true about my fellow humans. Maybe stuff—wine bar chic, calling purses “handbags,” Barack Obama’s lousy bowling, the buzz being woven around the Sex and the City movie—does point to something deep about our culture and ourselves. Maybe Oscar Wilde got it right when he wrote that there’s nothing more profound than surfaces.

Or maybe a lot of “consumer choices” have nothing to do with real life, but some alternative “life” we imagine for ourselves. Or have been “taught” to imagine.

But again, I’m not qualified to say for sure. I’m certainly not the smartest guy in the room. My point: Who is?

So I say to MZ and anyone else: feel free to harsh my mellow. (See? I am hip, at least circa 1983.) We’ll all learn something. Even when it’s about something that’s not quite real.

Where Have All the Yuppies Gone?

Being almost 50, I’m continually being ejected from more and more cultural loops. So maybe I’m wrong, it does appear to me that currently there is no dominant cultural paradigm.

In the 1950s (and into the early 1960s), it was the beatnik. In the mid- to late-’60s (slopping over into the ’70s), it was the hippie. The ’80s had its yuppie, the ’90s its slacker. There were some short-lived in-betweeners: punks (late ’70s) and geeks (late ’90s).

But now? Nothing, so far as I know. Correct me if I’m wrong.

To be sure, those terms were driven primarily by a satanic alliance of media and marketing types. Not that there weren’t many people who more or less conformed to at least parts of each stereotype. But in terms of numbers, there were all in the vast minority, though many copied their “style” to varying degrees.

But now: Whom are we supposed to copy? Dude, where’s my paradigm?

My TCB colleague Mary Connor argues, sensibly, that the media fragmentation that continues to break audiences into smaller and smaller pieces. This makes creating a dominant cultural idea more difficult. There is less of a common popular culture. There are fewer big movies, fewer big news events, fewer commonly loved TV commercials—and a lot of channels(and Web sites and music sources and blogs and on and on).

Another factor, I think: There are no more decades.

We had the ’50s, the ’60s, and on into the ’90s. But now? What decade are we in? No one has come up with a generally accepted term. We’re just—here.

I guess we still have generations: Boomers, Gen-Xers, millennials. But even they are becoming less important culturally.

I have no big conclusion to draw from all this. I’ll let you draw your own. Besides, you could argue that there should be no big conclusion to draw. Ultimately, this is trivia.

Instead, I’ll paraphrase British writer Evelyn Waugh: There’s no such thing as the man in the street. There are just unique people, with their unique souls.

Super Holidays!

Sure, it was a great game, but why does it have to have such a dumb name?

Well, we’re probably used to it by now. And it does have a kind of nostalgic glow about it, reminiscent of a late 1960s childhood.

Every fall, it seemed, the new school year brought a new fad toy to the playground. They were mostly plastic items, and although I can’t remember what most of them looked like now, I can still remember their names: Op-Yops, Click-Clacks, Footsies, Shoop Shoops. Very few kids actually owned them (I never did), but those who did earned a certain brief notoriety.

In 1966, the hot item was the Super Ball. Originated by beloved toy maker Wham-O, it was known for its amazing ability to bounce—and, I found out, to whack unattentive kids in the head really hard while being thrown inside the family garage. At my now-nonexistent elementary school (built in 1959, it was torn down more than a decade ago, a victim of the baby bust), boys used to bounce them over the gravel-covered flat roof. At least, most of them made it. When the building was razed, the wrecking crew undoubtedly found a colorful constellation of old, deplasticizing Super Balls, along with numerous elderly Frisbees (another Wham-O product, by the way).

Wham-O still makes Super Balls, and the package still asserts that they’re made from “Amazing Zectron™!” (Zectron, in fact, is made up primarily of a synthetic rubber found commonly in car tires.) I wonder whether Wham-O gets a significant revenue stream from the NFL. After all, its product inspired the name of its biggest game.

The story goes that in 1966, the National Football League needed a name for the first championship game between the top teams of the NFL and what was then the American Football League. (The AFL and NFL would merge a year later.) Lamar Hunt, the owner of the Kansas City Chiefs, suggested a placeholder name, Super Bowl, combining the terms of a college bowl game and, it turns out, the Super Ball, which Hunt had seen his kids playing with. (Why are season-end big college-football games called “bowls”? For the first one, the Rose Bowl in California. The oblong Rose Bowl stadium, in turn, was named for the first bowl-shaped stadium, the Yale Bowl.)

In other words, that first 1967 championship game wasn’t intended to be called the Super Bowl, but no one could think of a better name, and it stuck.

The name “Super Ball” probably was inspired by Superman. But I’d guess that the Super Bowl directly inspired the more recent superthings of our time, like “superstars” and “superstores.” And of course, Super Tuesday. I suppose it makes a complicated kind of sense: After all, all of the presidential candidates will be looking for a big bounce.

Unstoppable Meat-Based Assassins!

We are becoming two nations: health-conscious and the-hell-with-it.

The February issue of Condé Nast Portfolio magazine has an uproariously written (but still business-serious) feature on California-based CKE Restaurants (NYSE: CKR), a fast-food company you probably haven’t heard of. If you've dined at a Hardee’s, you’ve been in a CKE place. The article, “Fat Profits,” suggests that CKE has revolutionized the fast-food industry not by going the McDonald’s route—emphasizing “healthy,” like salads and apples instead of French fries—but in a completely opposite direction: piling on the fatty patties and using “meat as a condiment” (to quote the highly disapproving Jay Leno).

Your humble scribe rarely ingests fast food, but on all-day car drives, nothing beats a Hardee’s Sourdough Burger for lunch. Best-tasting cow in the fast-food business, with a flavorful sauce and bacon so crisp—who needs lettuce? (And the “small” soda is served in a vessel the size of an industrial drum.)

I’ll admit it’s not particularly good for me. (And probably not at all good for keeping awake at the wheel.) Still, if I really wanted to clog my pipes, I’d go for the Hardee’s Monster Thickburger, the supersized edition of the Monster Burger. (I’ve always loved that name: Monster Burger! What kind of monster is it made from? I imagine the ads: “We take fresh-ground patties of juicy monster…”) Portfolio breaks down the MT into the four basic food groups: 1,410 calories, 107 grams of fat, 45 grams of saturated fat, and 2,740 milligrams of sodium.

Now that’s eating, brother! Eat enough of those bad boys, and you’re beyond being not health-conscious—you’re just unconscious. That burger’s drooling more than you are.

As other bloggers like to say: Eat—uh, read the whole thing.

There’s an intriguing subtext in this article: Namely, that the USA is a mixture of X and not-X: everything and its opposite. We’re getting healthier—more interested in organic food, for instance—and less healthy. We’re getting more liberal, yet more conservative (just look at almost any legislative body). You name it, it’s a trend. Or not.

So where are we headed as a nation? The answer is yes.

Now, care to join me in the Baconator?

________________________________________________________

Tip of the lid to Greg Beato of Reason Online for today’s headline.

Packed, Crammed, and Jammed!

I may have suggested in my last post that husband-pleasin’, he-man food brands have shuffled off to dude-heaven along with tie tacks and tailfins. So not true! Just watch the commercials during any NFL playoff game. It’s just that appealing to men has gotten a bit more subtle. Or perhaps “subtle” isn’t quite the right word.

Though one of the brands that has disappeared is the “Manhandlers” line of soups (hearty! lumpy! sweaty!), Campbell’s still produces a line of man’s soups, man.

I’m talking, of course, of the new “Fully Loaded” version of its Chunky line. Fully Loaded! These are soups that get medieval on your butts. The cans are bigger than those wussy old Manhandlers—and they’re black!

And dig that kick-ass online copy: “Packed, crammed and jammed with extreme amounts of meat! Chunky Fully Loaded™ takes soup to the next level.” You need a spatula’s worth of Semtex to get it out of the can. (Whaddya mean you don’t have Semtex in your kitchen, girly-man?) Hell, that’s not a can—that’s a cylinder.

(You can also sign up for the Campbell’s Chunky Playbook. A “chunky playbook”—are we asking for trouble here?)

The testosterone level of Fully Loaded’s appeal might not strike you as “subtle.” But note that neither the can nor the ads use the word “man” or its synonyms. (Though the online copy is certainly packed, crammed, and jammed with post–expiration-date man-ad clichés—“extreme,” “next level.” What, no envelope pushing?) I’m not sure what to make of that fact. The easy answer would be such a blatant appeal would be un-PC. Or perhaps Campbell’s doesn’t want to close the market door to women who might go for next-level soup.

Perhaps what it comes down to is that in this modern age, men don’t want to look ridiculous to women. (OK, most men don’t.) Being caught eating a Manhandler would be embarrassing, unless you turned it into an ironic joke.

But Fully Loaded—well, that’s kind of a secret code. Macho, but not blatant. And maybe the missus or the GF even finds it sort of charming.

Man Brands

A fan of this blog, referring to my last post, expresses astonishment that there exists a brand of baked beans called B&M. “That's an unfortunately named product,” she writes.

I’d never thought of that. It’s a longtime brand that’s been in cans and brown pot-shaped jars for decades, often served up back in the ’60s at the old Rebeck homestead with weenies and bacon. But my fan’s comment made me think of other brands of my youth. Hardy brands. Manly brands.

For instance, a perhaps less embarrassingly named species of the genus Phaseolus, Ranch Style Beans. They’re still produced, by ConAgra, whose Web site asserts the following:

“Ranch Style Beans' versatility has endeared them to generations of bean lovers, including the rich and famous. Elizabeth Taylor, Humphrey Bogart, and Grace Kelly have ordered them. According to local lore, Ranch Style Beans were served at President Lyndon Johnson's ranch on many occasions.”

Liz! Bogie! Princess Grace! LBJ! Why aren’t you hoisting a spoonful of them right now? Alas, to me, they’re just not the same. The label, up until at least the mid-‘80s, declared that they were “Husband Pleasin’.” Now that was the promise of good, hearty eating.

Nowadays, Ranch Style Beans declare mildly that they’re “Appetite Pleasin’.” There’s no more poignant example of the wussification of America.

One particularly macho brand has disappeared altogether from grocery store shelves. I refer, of course, to Holsum Ruff’Nek bread, whose wrapper declared it to be “A HE-MAN’s loaf.” (In fact, Ruff’Nek wasn’t notably burly—you could compress the whole loaf into the size of a softball, though admittedly not as compactly as a loaf of Wonder, which can be manually reduced to golf ball proportions.)

Wheaties still exists, of course. But does anyone besides me remember (or care) that one of its TV commercials (circa 1970) had slogan “He knows he’s a man”? Apparently, consuming those crispy wheat flakes with all of the bran was to be considered a bar mitzvah–like rite of passage for young American lads during those socially confusing times.

Ah, well. You can still buy Manwich Sloppy Joe sauce, dang it. 

<<<

Speaking of fine food: Savor writer Greg Beato’s highly comedic screed from the Reason Magazine Web site. Beato tallies up some of the “unstoppable meat-based assassins” found in authentic greasy spoons all across America. “Thank McDonald's for keeping you thin,” he says.

Freedom From Fear

One of the greatest speeches made by a president not named Abraham Lincoln was made by Franklin Roosevelt to Congress on January 6, 1941, on the cusp of two of the great defining events in 20th century American history: the Great Depression and World War II.

FDR’s “four freedoms" speech still resonates today, as he “look[s] forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms”: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, freedom from fear. (However sentimental they may be, I still find Norman Rockwell’s famous paintings of these freedoms remarkably moving.)

This last freedom, “translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor—anywhere in the world.”

Later in the speech, FDR indirectly translates this freedom from fear in domestic terms:

For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy. The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:

> Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.

> Jobs for those who can work.

> Security for those who need it.

> The ending of special privilege for the few.

> The preservation of civil liberties for all.

> The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.

FDR’s “freedom from fear” was, in its quiet way, a revolutionary idea in American economic history. It also reflected thinking that would resonate throughout the West—and fueled Western democracy’s triumph over various barbaric despotisms. Historian Tony Judt put in this way:

“Thanks in large measure to the state-provided public services and safety nets incorporated into their postwar systems of governance, the citizens of the advanced countries lost the gnawing sense of insecurity and fear that had dominated and polarized political life from 1914 through the early Fifties and which was largely responsible for the appeal of both fascism and communism in those years.”

This isn’t to say that the West didn’t have its scary moments in the second half of the 20th century—the Korean War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Stalin’s blockade of Berlin, terrorist attacks throughout Europe in the 1970s. But all told, it was essentially a time of confidence and progress, its apex the amazing year of 1989.

But in the 21st century, despite the general “macro strength” of the economy in the past few years, an insidious sense of fear seems to be creeping into our consciousness. Judt again:

“Fear is reemerging as an active ingredient of political life in Western democracies. Fear of terrorism, of course; but also, and perhaps more insidiously, fear of the uncontrollable speed of change, fear of the loss of employment, fear of losing ground to others in an increasingly unequal distribution of resources, fear of losing control of the circumstances and routines of one's daily life. And perhaps above all, fear that it is not just we who can no longer shape our lives but that those in authority have lost control as well, to forces beyond their reach.

“Half a century of security and prosperity has largely erased the memory of the last time an ‘economic age’ collapsed into an era of fear. We have become stridently insistent—in our economic calculations, our political practices, our international strategies, even our educational priorities—that the past has little of relevance to teach us. Ours, we insist, is a new world; its risks and opportunities are without precedent. Our parents and grandparents, however, who lived the consequences of the unraveling of an earlier economic age, had a far sharper sense of what can happen to a society when private and sectional interests trump public goals and obscure the common good.”

With high consumer debt, the subprime mortgage (and foreclosure) crisis, tens of millions without health insurance, and often-exaggerated threats outside our borders, it’s not surprising that many of us feel on edge, and self-medicate through the illusions provided by media, video games, celebrity gossip, and the purchase for unneeded and not-quite-affordable stuff.

All to mask a vaguely perceived fear of falling into a financial and emotional abyss.

At the root of this 21st century fear, I think, is a subconscious belief that we are on our own, surrounded by vague enemies, and that there is no one to catch us when we fall.

I’d never make an argument for excusing personal irresponsibility. Quite the contrary. But we must acknowledge that success in life always requires outside help—parents, mentors, teachers, colleagues, investors, sometimes a government program. And that some people, often due to circumstances they didn’t choose, need a little more. And that providing this kind of help allows us all to prosper, however modestly in some cases.

As our parents and grandparents learned, fear does not bring prosperity. Nor does it bring real security. FDR knew that, too. Confidence, shared values, and an openness to the world’s inevitable changes are what made democracy great.

Freedom is eroded by fear.

Great Pumpkin? Bah Humbug!

Now that it's passed on for another year, I can safely rant (à la Yosemite Sam) on America's stupidest holiday.

Forty years ago, Linus from Peanuts wrote letters to the Great Pumpkin, sending out Pumpkin cards and singing Pumpkin carols. "I love this time of year!" he told Charlie Brown. "Everyone's so full of cheer and good will!"

Now we know: The Great Pumpkin does exist.

Long ago, Halloween was All Hallows Eve, a remembrance of those who'd passed on. (It still sort of is, in some churches, though November 1, All Saints Day, is the bigger deal.) Over time, it became a festival of tooth decay and dressing up.

But in recent times, many people have turned Halloween into—well, I'm not exactly sure. But you've seen the houses: The front yards with the plastic tombstones with creaky puns (I. M. Undead), the skeletal hands "reaching" up from underground, the witch smashed flat into a tree.

Can't these folks wait until Christmas to litter their yards and festoon their homes with cheap Chinese-made holiday crap? (My TCB colleague, Mary Connor, wonders what those Chinese factory workers make of this stuff when it comes off their assembly lines. What's inside these Americans' minds? Or would I like myself better if I didn't know?)

Though I haven't been successful here, I don't want to sound like one of those cultural doomsayers who see the decline of Western Civilization in every aspect of modern life that they find annoying. (Western Civilization has allegedly been in decline for a long time. But remember Gandhi's reply when asked what he thought of Western Civilization: "I think it would be a good idea.")

This is not a mass movement. Most of our neighbors' houses are typically decorated, if at all, with a couple of jack-o-lanterns and some Indian corn on the front door.

Still, I don't think I'm overstating it—okay, I am, but I'm making a point here!—to say that for many people, Halloween is a celebration of death. And don't give me that "So what about La Día de los Muertos, dude?" stuff, tying it to the sugar skulls and skeleton dolls of Mexican folklore. Those are (for the most part) celebrations of life, remembering those who've passed on, whom we hope to meet again.

There's no such sentiment in those overdecorated Halloween yards. Are these people simply trying to resurrect childhood feelings of trick-or-treat and "fun-size" Butterfingers? Or trying to recreate, in a mild way, the sort of grisly thrill some people seem to get from watching a torture-porn film like Saw III? Or some weird admixture of these and other psychological hobgoblins?

Whatever it is, it's scary.

Two Nations, European and American

Local IT CEO Igor Epshteyn, an émigré from Belarus who appears in an article I wrote for the December issue of TCB, summarizes the difference nicely:

“I think that if you just want to work for somebody and take two months of vacation and have a great lifestyle, Europe is probably a better place to be. It has a lot more social programs.” By contrast, the entrepreneurial Epshteyn adds, “If you want to achieve something, if you want to start a business, if you want to build something on your own, from what I know, I think [the U.S.] is the best place to be.”

Igor’s insight made me finally understand something fundamental about the USA in 2007: Our culture is dominated by two very different groups.

“Euro-Americans” are (not surprisingly) generally politically liberal, and generally suspicious of businesses (at least bigger ones). These are the people who referred to the “blue” states that voted for John Kerry in 2004 as the “United States of Canada,” and the “red” states as “Jesusland.” Canada, a kind of honorary European nation thanks primarily to its single-payer health care and civil unions, is free and cool; Jesusland is, of course, dominated by anti-secular prolifers who want to tell people what to do.

Euro-America’s more sober (if no less angry) representatives include New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who calls for a new New Deal; and Yale economist Jacob Hacker, author of The Great Risk Shift, who argues that middle-class and poorer Americans are taking more financial burdens while richer ones are increasingly being relieved of them.

What Americans need, say Euro-Americans, are longer vacations. Paid vacations. 

“Anglo-Americans” emphasize personal responsibility and entrepreneurs. Work and business are more powerful engines than leisure for driving the good life. There is no problem so large that “the market” can’t handle it—as long as taxes and regulations are small enough to let the market do its thing. Euro-Americans want to tell people, particularly businesspeople, what to do. With disastrous results, morally and economically.

In the post–Soviet Union world, the most evil nation on earth is now France, with its long vacations and 35-hour workweek and snotty superciliousness towards all things American, even though we pulled their sniveling bacon out of the frying pan at least twice. (With the election of Nicolas Sarkosy, Iran may be the new France.)

Before he died, my Anglo-American father, who had Yousef Karsh’s famous photo of Churchill standing guard beside his leather chair, was reading a book called Our Oldest Enemy. One guess who that enemy is.

So there it is. Some of us want us to be Europeans (social democracy and better food!); the rest of us would rather die than live on in such an initiative-sapping continent (though visiting is fine, once the dollar strengthens).

And at least for now, it’s probably useless to assert that both sides have their good points. Even though it’s true.