"Kamala Harris and Tim Walz were both born in 1964, the very last year of the Baby Boom."

"Yet many in that cohort feel no identification with baby boomers. But neither are they Gen Xers. They are people in-between. Perhaps in 2024, this status now enables public figures to be 'in between' in new ways, to wear their gender more lightly."

Those are the last few sentences of "Paying More Attention to His Appearance Than Hers/They’re the same age, but pundits and voters can’t stop talking about how much older Tim Walz looks than Kamala Harris. It’s not the only way her running mate seems to be absorbing some of the scrutiny usually heaped on female candidates" by Rhonda Garelick in the NYT.

That's from August 12th. I was looking for something else when I ran into that, and I got engrossed.

The idea of wearing one's gender lightly intrigues me.

What was I actually looking for? I was thinking about the time President Bill Clinton, running for reelection, wanted to use federal spending to incentivize public schools to require their students to wear uniforms.

My search terms — Clinton, school, and uniform — all came up in that Harris/Walz article:

... Hillary Clinton... came to prominence as first lady, as a “wife,” and was assailed for her hair and style, her presumed disrespect for “cookie baking” and for tolerating her husband’s transgressions.

... Elizabeth Warren, a former Harvard law professor, was called “a hectoring schoolmarm” for offering expert policy explanations, and advised to change her glasses and hair.

... Ms. Harris hews generally toward a sleek uniform of pantsuit, silk blouse, pearls and heels, which “suggest fashion without being too fashionable”...

"Nine in 10 parents rate their relationships with their young adult children as good or excellent, and so do eight in 10 young adults."

"Rather than feeling worried or disappointed about how things are going in their children’s lives, eight in 10 parents say they feel proud and hopeful. 'These parents, who are Gen X, are more willing to say, "Hey, this is good, I like these people, they’re interesting, they’re fun to be with,"' said Karen L. Fingerman, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin who studies adults’ relationships with their families. As for the adult children, she said, 'You get advice from a 50-year-old with life experience who is incredibly invested in you and your success.'... In previous research, parents often expressed ambivalence about their continued involvement in their adult children’s lives. But the Pew study suggests that has changed, Professor Fingerman said, perhaps a sign they have come to embrace it."

From "Parents Are Highly Involved in Their Adult Children’s Lives, and Fine With It/New surveys show that today’s intensive parenting has benefits, not just risks, and most young adults seem happy with it, too" (NYT).

Word that doesn't appear in the article: "helicopter."

With Jon Stewart's return to "The Daily Show," I was going to say it's fine, because Generation X did not get its full and fair chance to make its mark on the culture.

But Jon Stewart is 61. He was born in 1962. He's a BOOMER!

Boomers, Boomers, Boomers. We were born to dominate the culture forever. I say "forever," because without us... well, it's all always been about us. What is anything without us? 

Generation X is and was always in our shadow. Eventually, we'll pass on, but it will be too late for them. The Millennials — The Generation Created by Us, the Boomers — have always overshadowed Gen X, and as the Boomers vacate cultural space The Millennials will seize it as their rightful entitlement.

Now, let me cherry-pick from news articles about the return of Jon Stewart to "The Daily Show":

"Can a modern young person ever understand what it was like to simply watch whatever happened to be on television?"

"To explain what life was like in the days of yore, I interviewed a number of people who are (roughly) my age about what it was like being (about) 27 in (around) 2002" (at Slate).

I'll cherry-pick and blend the various interviewees together:

"Our model of social change is still rooted in midcentury clichés. Younger Americans imagine that starting a family and owning a home was much easier..."

"... for previous generations than it really was. They buy the broad outlines of the boomers’ nostalgia and take it to mean they are inheriting a desiccated society. Confronting injustice, they almost unthinkingly re-enact the outward forms and symbols of college protests of the 1960s, generally to no effect.... The vacuum of middle-aged leadership is palpable. There are some politicians of that middle generation... They have not made this moment their own, or found a way to loosen the grip of the postwar generation on the nation’s political imagination. A middle-aged mentality traditionally has its own vices. It can lack urgency, and at its worst it can be maddeningly immune to both hope and fear, which are essential spurs to action. But if our lot is always to choose among vices, wouldn’t the temperate sins of midlife serve us well just now?"

Writes Yuval Levin, in "Why Are We Still Governed by Baby Boomers and the Remarkably Old?" (NYT).

This gets my "gerontocracy" tag, which you can click to read what I've said about it. Hint: I don't like it. But Levin is making the additional point: It's not just that the old Boomers are clinging to power. It's that the generation after them is terribly weak and empty: "The vacuum of middle-aged leadership is palpable."

I was sad but also amused by the notion of a palpable vacuum. Can you palpate a vacuum? It reminds me of the old childhood revelation: Nothing... is... something.

"I like what one touches, what one tastes. I like rain when it has turned to snow and become palpable" — Virginia Woolf, "Waves" (1931).

"Generation X—as presented through albums like 'Nevermind' (1991), novels like 'Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture' (1991), and films like 'Reality Bites' (1994), and then amplified ad nauseam..."

"... by a vapid clutch of contemporary trendspotting articles.... Klosterman has come not to bury these stereotypes but to praise them.... 'Among the generations that have yet to go extinct,' Klosterman writes, 'Generation X remains the least annoying.' Its nihilistic blend of lassitude and disaffection, in his analysis, guarantees a minimum of whinging, quite unlike the 'self-righteous outrage,' 'policing morality,' and 'blaming strangers for the condition of one’s own existence' typical of other generations. For the rusted youth of the nineties, 'solipsism was preferable to narcissism'; later, he contrasts their 'anti-commercialism' (discerning, optimistic) with the supposed 'anti-capitalism' (totalizing, pessimistic) of millennials.... If Gen X disengagement and ironic fence-sitting were brought up short by Bush v. Gore and 9/11 and the rise of social media, he wants to preserve the nineties as a safe space for his cohort.... He has no patience for partisan rashness, for passionate convictions that would break upon his ghostly solitude."

From "Chuck Klosterman Brings Back the Nineties/In a nostalgic tour through the decade, Klosterman defends Gen X as today’s 'least annoying' generation" by Frank Guan (The New Yorker).

"After years of neglect and boomer dominance in popular culture, someone had finally noticed us, in the sweetest way... 'Friends' was comfy, adorable, yet sharp."

"The hate-watch became a secret pleasure and, soon enough, we all had their haircuts... What nobody could have envisioned in the 1990s was the way children in the 2010s and '20s — born after 'Friends" first started to wear off — would form their own fixation on the show... My nearest frame of reference to this sort of cultural inertia would have to be 'The Brady Bunch,' the 1970s sitcom that, in reruns and brief revivals, acted as Gen X’s security blanket.... Irony was the key to it all.... But irony seems to have no place when it comes to the nonstop streaming of 'Friends'... [It is] slavishly re-watched with what appears to be an authentic and uncomplicated sincerity. Nobody watches [it] to make fun of the clothes or mock the message.... 'Friends'... acts as a soothing gateway to a time when people aren’t constantly looking at their phones. They sit on their Central Perk sofas and just talk, maintaining eye-contact. They listen to one another. They hilariously relate, in a constant state of mutual care. Their idea of stress is almost touchingly benign. No wonder people still want to hang out with them.... As the 'Friends' theme song goes, 'I’ll be there for you.' But those words referred to the bond among its characters. They were not an eternal promise to generations yet to come, and they should not have to be your friends forever. Let television take you somewhere, anywhere, everywhere else."

From "Do you really want to live in a world where ‘Friends’ and ‘The Office’ are TV’s most valuable shows?" by Hank Stuever, the WaPo TV critic.

Stuever is over 50, a Gen Xer. He thinks irony is key and these kids today are making a big mistake longing for sincerity and friendship. Something a quarter century old feels too "eternal" for him, and whoever wrote the headline for his column turned his dictate — "Let television take you somewhere, anywhere, everywhere else" — into a question — "Do you really want to live in a world where ‘Friends’ and ‘The Office’ are TV’s most valuable shows?" The market always answers that question. These shows are phenomenally valuable commercially. "Valuable" isn't really what's nagging at Stuever. He's objecting to the feelings and longings of younger people. They're not thinking right. The question — if you want to rephrase Stuever's opinion as a question — should be:  "Do you really want to live in a world where ‘Friends’ and ‘The Office’ are TV’s most emotionally rewarding shows?" And then it becomes easy to see that it makes little sense to tell young people to watch something else on television. The problem is in the real world, which is wearing on people in such a way that "Friends" feels restorative.

"Time’s up, baby boomers. It’s Gen X’s turn now."

That's the headline for a column by Petulia Dvorak (in WaPo). It's kind of a great headline, but (as Dvorak does at one point admit), Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are not baby boomers.

You might think it's time for the baby boomers to shuffle off stage and let the next generations take charge, but Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders are from an even earlier generation, an they're acting like it's not the baby boomers turn yet.

President Trump was 70 when he was inaugurated, the oldest man to take on the job of president in U.S. history. (Ronald Reagan was 69.)

And now we’re fixing to talk about Sen. Bernie Sanders at 77 and Biden at 76 in the driver’s seat of a divided and complicated nation? They are even older than the baby boomer generation, which started in 1946.

All three white men leading the polls are too old to even renew their driver’s licenses in California without retaking the test.

Who's the other white man??

Anyway, it's so Gen X to think that competition must back down and let you have what you want. Sorry, but even if there's some ethic of generational equity worth invoking, the Boomers haven't had our full share of Presidents yet, and we're still blocked by the older generation. As long as they're still participating, you can't disqualify us yet.

And as for your driver’s license analogy: Presidential candidates do take a test. They have to work like mad and travel and speak and submit to tough interviews and debates for over a year right in front of our eyes. And there's only one license to hand out. We'll see who gets it.

"The collective outrage over 'American Psycho' provides a context for the essays in 'White,' whose topics range from [Bret Easton] Ellis’s unsupervised 1970s childhood..."

"... in upper-middle-class Sherman Oaks, Calif., to his critiques of movies and movie stars, to President Trump and the digital echo chamber. His points are not always agreeable, but that’s never stopped him. In one essay, 'Liking,' Ellis indicts the 'horrible blooming of "relatability" — the inclusion of everybody into the same mind-set … the ideology that proposes everybody should be on the same page, the better page.'... He’s complained about liberals who think he’s a Trump apologist.... 'Lately what’s bothered me is the tweeting world, and how, since there’s no context, no nuance, and since everyone’s so hysterical, you are tagged things that you are not,' Ellis said. 'The language police is a hard thing to deal with if you are creative.' He really wishes everyone would just calm down...
[He prefers] to treat the news cycle as fleeting entertainment rather than the end of the world ('Really, Jared Kushner looks great in a bathing suit')... Ellis finds himself now in his longest relationship to date, with a 32-year-old musician named Todd Schultz.... He described their post-2016 household as 'a bad sitcom of a crusty old Gen X-er, who’s kind of a lapsed liberal centrist, and my communist gay boyfriend.'... Todd’s a 'political monster' who 'sits in front of MSNBC having meltdown after meltdown … yet his bounce-back time is pretty good.' If Schultz stands for the melodramatic, media-obsessed millennial, then Ellis identifies as 'the old man on the porch,' whining over the cultural profundity of decades past."

From "Bret Easton Ellis Has Calmed Down. He Thinks You Should, Too. In the 1980s and ’90s, the novelist was seen as a literary bad boy and the voice of his generation. Now 55, he’s about to publish his first book in nine years" (NYT).

Here's that book of essays: "White."

Why's it called "White"? Is it racial? The article says that the original title was "White Privileged Male" and that it means to acknowledge the great old book of essays by Joan Didion, "The White Album."

ADDED: The opposition to the idea that "everybody should be on the same page" caught my eye because, just recently, somebody took me to task simply for using the phrase "on the same page" — "We need to be on the same page." He hated that, I was told.

I'm reading "I'm so, so, so sorry: A Baby Boomer apologizes on behalf of his generation."

By Steven Papamarcos (at The NY Daily News):

Dear Gen Xers and Millenials...

Well, first you're going to have to apologize for misspelling "millennials."

"So I love this commercial because it captures the shared experience of Generation X."

"We like being home to make our kids peanut butter and jelly. You could not sell Baby Boomers with this. They think it’s lame to sit in a kitchen waiting for your kid to be hungry. We like having a male breadwinner and we’re not afraid to say it. And we are surrounded by little boys in love with Star Wars...."

"People are so hard on Kate Gosselin, but I think she is an anthem to Gen X women."

"She has taken charge of her career, and she has a job that accommodates her doing what she's good at, and her making time to take care of kids. She's an homage to the fertility mess Gen X has found itself in. She an homage to the fact that Gen X — not Gen Y — is the first generation to manage their children's online identities, and she's handling the issues with flair. And Kate is the quintessential Gen X mom getting post-baby plastic surgery. I love that she has a husband who is fun and cute and not a demon but yet, the marriage still isn’t working out, because that's what life is like. It's not good and bad. It's messy, and Kate's figuring things out. Gen X is great with messy."

Presented here not with approval but for discussion. The author, Penelope Trunk, is particularly enthusiastic about keeping the children in one house that the divorced parents taking turns living in.

The dumbest Americans: "those born from the late 1950s to the mid-1960s."

WaPo reports:

Compared with every other birth cohort, they have performed the worst on standardized exams, acquired the fewest educational degrees and been the least attracted to professional careers....

Early Xers are the least bookish CEOs and legislators the United States has seen in a long while. They prefer sound bites over seminars, video clips over articles, street smarts over lofty diplomas. They are impatient with syntax and punctuation and citations -- and all the other brainy stuff they were never taught.

Is that dumb or a different way of being smart?

IN THE COMMENTS: Jeff with one 'f' said...

Talk about moving the goalposts. The last I heard the Baby Boom was defined as those born between 1946 and 1964. Now this clown wants to cut the generation in half to make the Xers look bad? Please.

We talked about that back here when the subject was whether Barack Obama, born in 1961, counted as a Boomer. [DATE CORRECTED.] I say he is not. To be a Boomer, you need to have grown up in the post-war afterglow, when parents and communities were psyched about living a normal, conventional family life. You have to have seen what the world was like before the Civil Rights Movement, before the Kennedy Assassination, before Vietnam. If you experienced the Beatles when you were a teenager, you're a Boomer. If you had disco, you're not.

AND: Palladian said...

"Is that dumb or a different way of being smart?"

It's called the influence of the Sixties, man! Even though the Boomers caused the Sixties, they were lucky enough to have had a pre-Sixties education and exposure to pre-Sixties culture. Not so for the poor younger folks, whose brains were permanently damaged by firsthand exposure to the catastrophe of the Age of Aquarius.

I too suspect that the dumbness attributed to the X-ers was produced by the culture of the previous 2 generations. It's not just the Boomers. We were sucking up that culture and promoting it, imbuing it with the power of the young, but people like John Lennon and Bob Dylan were not themselves Boomers. They were born in 1940 and 1941, respectively. Timothy Leary was born in 1920. Allen Ginsberg was born in 1926. Abbie Hoffman was born in 1936.

What am I trying to say? We didn't start the fire.

The reverse gender gap iceberg.

In an update to that last photo essay, I wrote:

An emailer writes, "What, no lovers?" And I answer, "Actually, we were talking about the solitariness of the 'hill people.' There were no lovers!" In fact, at lunch, we were discussing the way the way primary and middle school teachers appreciate the behavior of girls (and don't see their misbehavior) and punish the boys for not acting more like the girls. Girls end up more accommodated to academia and flock to college, which may need to do affirmative action for males to keep the male-to-female ratio in balance. Does this mean that in college, males end up with lower GPAs? What effect does this have on law school admissions? What is going on?

This is one of the main things we talked about at lunch. I described my heartfelt opposition to the way schoolteachers treat young boys, but at the same time, I am utterly opposed to affirmative action for males! There are some big problems that we are barely beginning to notice. The seeming loneliness of the women on the hill is, perhaps, just the beginning of a huge problem.

That brought this email:

I agree with your asessment of boys being penalized for not acting like girls. I live in NYC but grew up in Nebraska and Texas in the 70's and 80's and I experienced it even then.

As for the education gap and marriage, it might interest you to know that NY has a seemingly huge supply of beautiful, accomplished, and single professional women in their mid-to-late 30's. Doctors, lawyers, business owners, you name it. I see them on nerve.com's singles site and meet them in person. Generation X must be just the tip of that particular iceberg.

[Name Omitted]

PS- I'm a photo editor, overeducated for what I do, but I would NEVER date a lawyer, much less a doctor. Career imbalance in relationships is largely a one-way street.

Yikes! Well, this is kind of what "Sex and the City" was all about, except that in "Sex and the City," the women kept finding men who were reasonable prospects.

For you men who are lawyers, though, and are therefore equally matched, NYC is, apparently, full of beautiful women for you. And the photo editor guys have voluntarily removed themselves from competition.

UPDATE: Richard Lawrence Cohen (AKA my ex-husband) makes this contribution:

Just a couple of quick thoughts on that gender post:

1. Nifty jab at that photo editor fool!

2.. The "no lovers" phenomenon may have something to do with my old bugaboo, the repressive culture of the Midwest. When I moved out there (MI-WI) from NYC, I was surprised at the absence of two things: 1. people showing affection in public; 2. street fights. I remember walking on South U. in Ann Arbor in Oct. 1969 and thinking, "Wow, I haven't seen a street fight in a month!"

(Also no dogs running around the campus in Madison, as opposed to many in Ann Arbor.)

"In France they kiss on Main Street."--J. Mitchell.

3. I'm glad women are becoming aware of the problem of the anti-male ethic in schools. (Probably because many ex-feminists have become the mothers of sons.) As a father of four boys, some of them rather exuberant, I have carefully chosen elementary schools for my sons where the effects are somewhat ameliorated.

4. One reason there are all those brilliant lonely beauties running around loose in New York is that for a generation American college women have been trained to assume that men are their enemy and oppressor, that any man they date will be inferior to them in intellect and sensibility, that husbands are buffoons, etc. Sleeping with someone you think is the enemy doesn't really work. The putative enemy doesn't want to be treated that way. The result is the Maureen Dowds of this world writing whiney columns in which they bemoan the absence of men in their lives -- men whom, as a group, they never miss a chance to insult.

Ciao, Richard

I don't necessarily agree with all that. For one thing, I don't think standing up for boys makes one an ex-feminist. But since you quote Joni Mitchell and fondly remember the dogs in Ann Arbor, I'll do a Bob Dylan quote from that album we used to listen to all the time:

If dogs run free, then why not we
Across the swooping plain?
My ears hear a symphony
Of two mules, trains and rain.
The best is always yet to come,
That's what they explain to me.
Just do your thing, you'll be king,
If dogs run free.

Day 2 of the Republican Convention.

Okay, here we go again. I'll simulblog and keep all my comments in one post with numbered paragraphs to indicate updates.

1. Observation #1: My first observation last night was about the look of the set, and there's one other thing I've been wanting to say about the set, so I'll begin with this. Look at that humble wooden lectern! What is that all about? It's like a pulpit in a Protestant church that puts great stock in avoiding ornamentation. I can't remember what the Democratic Convention lectern/pulpit looked like--I tried to find a picture--but I think it was extravagant and florid and flag-oriented. The Republican lectern is aggressively plain, perhaps to avoid upstaging the speaker or perhaps to avoid upstaging the dramatic video screen behind the speaker. Maybe they considered using one of those almost-invisible plexiglass lecterns used in Hollywood awards shows, then rejected that as too reminiscent of Hollywood awards shows, and plain, plain wood was the fallback alternative. [ADDED: Here are some shots of the Democrat's lectern.][ADDED 9/4: I finally got a good look at a photograph of the Democrat's lectern. It has a large medallion right under the speaker's microphone that says "America 2004" on top and "A Stronger America" at the bottom. In the center is is a waving American flag, and there are little stars circling the whole arrangement.]

2. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson introduces the singer of the national anthem, Gracie Rosenberger, and my initial reaction is: what is this saccharine, sentimental, mawkish glop? But twenty seconds into it, tears are rolling down my cheeks. Damn! Stop that! The undulating flag on the giant video and the C-Span closeups of guys in VFW hats complete the effect.

3. A Christian minister does the invocation tonight and doesn't stop at just praying in Jesus' name (which I can understand might be necessary for some ministers in order to make the words a prayer), he goes on at some length about the crucifixion and the need to believe in Christ. Afterwards the colors are retired, and on the big screen we see the Statue of Liberty, with the words "Live--Statue of Liberty." Chris says, "Why do we need live footage of the Statue of Liberty? It's not going to do anything."

4. Princella Smith, a young black woman, winner of an MTV essay contest, talks about rejecting the label Generation X, which seems to have a lot to do with inspiration provided by George W. Bush. She posits "Generation EXample." Immediately afterwards (unlike any of the other speakers), Smith is interviewed backstage. The interview is projected onto the big screen for the whole hall to see. Smith effuses about her wonderful experience, and in there amongst the effusion is the stray line "I certainly didn't think I'd be twenty years old." She's informed she gave "a fabulous speech."

5. Roll call. The TiVo fastforward function is employed to good effect.

6. Uh! Wisconsin! Stop! The official icon of Wisconsin: a cow. The chairman of the Wisconsin party invokes the names of the "beloved" former Governor, Tommy Thompson, the Badgers (yay, Badgers), and the Green Bay Packers. Wisconsin is the pioneer of school choice and welfare reform, he tells us. Forty votes cast for George W. Bush.

7. Elizabeth Dole offers up a stilted peroration: "blue skies of freedom ... we believe in life ... marriage is important ... between a man and a woman ... those not yet born ... Republicans will defend ... the treasured life of faith ... two thousand years ago ... I have the freedom to call that man Lord, and I do ... activist judges ... freedom of religion, not freedom from religion ... values ... virtues ... truths ... the shared truths of the American people ... " As the speech progresses, she warms up, not like Giuliani last night, of course, but she essentially fills her role of expressing the night's "compassion" theme in terms that are particularly appealing to the social conservative sector of the party that is not to be heard in prime time this evening.

8. George P. Bush: wooden ... something about immigrants and entrepreneurs. He's cute though. Then, "God Bless America," sung by Dana Glover. She's okay, like someone who'd be voted off "American Idol." She's pretty and quite dolled up. Next, Miss America. What is this? The good-looking-people section of the show? The screen banner says "People of Compassion." It's horribly dull. Yes, yes, good people are good. And pretty people are pretty. My TiVo has caught up with the live feed and I can't fast forward. Aaaah! [ADDED: An emailer quips: "What you need is one of those hi-tech TiVos like Lewis Lapham's. "]

9. Dr. Frist: he's tedious and ignored by the convention crowd until suddenly he says the phrase "trial lawyer" and the audience erupts. The name John Edwards comes up. Now he's airing the stem cell research issue. This section of the convention is terribly slow. Oh, good lord, they're bringing out Elisabeth Hasselbeck, the nonentity component of "The View." She's talking about breast cancer. What does this have to do with Republicans? Health care policy is important, but she's not talking about that. She's doing a public service announcement: do self-examinations, get check-ups. I don't get it. Is it just the idea that Bush cares? Because they assert he cares? Compassion night is not proceeding along the confident arc that security night (last night) swept us along.

10. Finally, Schwarzenegger. He starts off with some bad jokes, then the story of immigrating. Amazingly, he praises Nixon. How strange! He heard Humphrey and Nixon debate in 1968 and decided right then, what that man is, I am. Startling! Best press for Nixon in decades. Like Giuliani last night, he stresses that you don't need to agree with all of the party's positions. Giuliani emphasized supporting Bush, despite some disagreement. Schwarzenegger stresses supporting the Republican Party. The core of the party, as portrayed by Schwarzenegger is none of the things Elizabeth Dole spoke about a while ago.

"If you believe that this nation and not the United Nations is the best hope for democracy, then you are a Republican. And ladies and gentlemen, if you believe that we must be fierce and relentless and terminate terrorism, then you are a Republican. Now, there's another way you can tell you're Republican: your faith in free enterprise, faith in the resourcefulness of the American people, and faith in the U.S. economy. And to those critics who are so pessimistic about our economy, I say: Don't be economic girlie men!"

Huge cheer.

11. Jenna and Barbara Bush: They have nice comic delivery. They are fun and self-effacing. They razz their parents. "We had a hamster too. Let's just say, ours didn't make it." They introduce their dad, on the big screen, and he introduces his wife. Laura walks out to the tune of "Isn't She Lovely."

12. The actual speech given by Laura Bush? She seems sweet and pleasant, but there was no content that struck me in particular. She loves her husband.