You have /5 articles left.
Sign up for a free account or log in.
Thursday was The Girl’s first day of school. Every year we do a photo on the first day of school. This year’s photo involved her sitting at the desk in her room, laptop open.
Somehow, I don’t think it will elicit the same “awww” in the future that previous ones have.
--
This week I did my second-ever turn as a parking lot attendant.
The first time was in the late ’80s, when I was in college. I signed up with a temp agency over the summer and got placed working a booth in a bank parking lot. It was incredibly hot, and my memories of the gig involve mostly listening to the radio and reading novels.
The second time was this week at Brookdale. We’ve gone mostly online, except for a few select programs. We were concerned that some students might get confused and show up anyway, so a bunch of us took shifts in the parking lots near the temperature-check stations to answer questions for any errant students. I did several hours on Tuesday morning and several more on Wednesday morning.
I learned from the first day to bring a chair for the second day, which definitely helped. I also discovered that between the baseball cap and the surgical mask, when I’m sitting down, a lot of people didn’t recognize me until they were within 10 feet or so. In retrospect, that probably opened up opportunities for some sort of mischief, but I let them pass.
To our students’ credit, the anticipated waves of lost souls didn’t happen. The ones who showed up were the ones who were supposed to; apparently, the communication worked. And it was fun chatting with folks I knew as they arrived for work. I wouldn’t want it to be my regular gig, but for a couple of mornings in nice weather? Sure …
--
Have you ever read a book and had the feeling that someone had really just transcribed the monologue that’s been running in your head for years?
I had that with Kurt Anderson’s new one, Evil Geniuses. It’s his take on the last 40 years or so of politics in the U.S.
Admittedly, he had access to some research that my inner monologue didn’t. But other than that, it’s almost an exercise in clairvoyance.
The political angle was relatively obvious, and correct. The part that made me stop in my tracks was the cultural analysis. Compare the popular music of 1930 to the popular music of 1960, and you’ll see major differences. Compare 1960 to 1990, and you’ll again see major differences. Compare 1990 to 2020 and … well … not so much. The same holds true in clothes. And movies. A photo of a city street scene in 1955 looks very different from one in 1975, which, in turn, is very different from one in 1995. But one in 1995 isn’t that different from one in 2015. (I’ll treat 2020 as an outlier, given both COVID-driven evacuations and the Martian skies currently on the West Coast.) Other than electronics, it’s as if we stopped trying somewhere around 1980.
Anderson notes that average middle-class incomes in the U.S. have been stagnant since about 1980, but they’ve climbed by double digits in Canada since then. When we did our Canadian vacation in 2017, I remember remarking to the kids that it felt like what America would have been if it hadn’t given up. It turns out that the data agree.
The book ends with obligatory and forced optimism about a spontaneous change in consciousness; I put more weight on organized movements and catastrophic events, like pandemics, police riots and red skies at noon. But the diagnosis is as spot-on as any I’ve seen. Highly recommended.
