CSotD: Civilization and My Discontents
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One bit of political commentary before we switch to humor: Wilbur Dawbarn’s piece reminds me of a conversation I had with my father as he pondered his future in the steel industry.
He accused his contemporaries — the WWII generation — of failing to bring younger people into leadership positions, with the result that there was suddenly a whole group of management ready for retirement but with nobody poised to replace them.
It strikes me that, regardless of how you evaluate either major candidate, our national political structure is very much in the same place. It’s not so much that we don’t have younger people who are capable, but I don’t feel they’ve been handed enough senior-level authority to be ready.
The workaround is to pair a charismatic youngster like Jack Kennedy with a savvy old timer like LBJ, or Obama with Biden, or George W with Dick Cheney. But I think we’re running out of savvy old timers and, without them, the charismatic youngsters will be like kites without a tail.
Dylan called for elders to get out of the new road if they can’t lend a hand. It would be ideal if they’d first do some mentoring before gracefully and willingly stepping aside.
BTW, when Dylan wrote that song, Donald Trump was 18 and Joe Biden was 21. As the Pennsylvania Dutch say, we grow too soon old and too late smart.
Juxtaposition of the Day
Speaking of age and of mentoring, the little kids I coached in youth soccer are turning 50, Mia Hamm is 52 and Ivan Ehlers is right that anyone under that age who hasn’t picked up on the Beautiful Game must surely be making an effort to avoid it.
The problem with futbol is that, unlike baseball or football, you have to actually watch it. You can’t just have it on and do other things between plays because there is no between plays and the surest way to get someone to score is to step away from the TV to get another beer.
The other night I watched the England/Netherlands match of the UEFA tournament and, since both my boys were ‘keepers, I was rooting for the 1-1 tie to end in a shootout. However, in the final minute of regulation, Ollie Watkins, a substitute with little playing time, sent England to final versus Spain.
It was magnificent.
I know people who dislike soccer because “there isn’t enough scoring,” but if you understand the game, they sound like the fellow who wondered why the ballet doesn’t just hire taller girls.
Jeremy asks a silly question in today’s Zits (KFS), but, then again, what is he holding in his hands?
One of the disadvantages of life in a small city is that we’ve only got half a dozen grocery stores, and the co-op is about the only place left that actually takes chunks of beef and puts them through a meat grinder.
The chains get what they call ground beef trucked in from corporate headquarters and, while not all of it contains pink slime — excuse me, “lean finely textured beef” — supermarket hamburger comes across too often as pasty glop with no texture and not a lot of flavor.
At least the stuff made out of vegetables admits it’s not the real thing.
I don’t know if our grandkids will remember what hamburgers used to taste like, but Grand Avenue (AMS) has had an arc about Gabby running a lemonade stand and her brother accusing her, here, of using powdered lemonade and then later of using concentrate instead of fresh-squeezed.
There are still booths at fairs and farmers’ markets that sell fresh-squeezed lemonade, so some kids will know how the real stuff tastes, assuming their parents don’t mind standing in line, which by-the-by ought to be a sign of how much people prefer the real thing to instant.
I used to laugh at the commercials boasting “Just like Grandma used to make,” because the crop of grandmas that were moms in the wake of WWII became hugely reliant on the convenience foods that flourished in the 50’s and 60’s, including Chef Boyardee canned pasta and the frozen TV dinners that made Tucker Carlson’s mother rich, and cake mixes and tubes of pre-fab cookie dough, and Tang, which, after all, was what astronauts drank.
There was some pushback and a return to real cooking in the 70s with Julia Child and Frances Moore Lappé and Alicia Bay Laurel and so forth, but then microwave ovens were invented and now, although the canned vegetable aisle has shrunken to nearly nothing, there’s a whole new world of steam-it-in-the-bag delights in the freezer section.
Just like Grandma used to zap!
Dave Whamond’s Day by Dave reminds us that today is Cow Appreciation Day, which he marks with a reference I know my kids would get but I’m not sure their kids would.
I used to play guitar for my boys. They were later shocked to find that Dad hadn’t written Rocky Raccoon or Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da, and that the Beatles’ versions of those songs did not feature the names of our dogs in the starring roles.
Which reminds me of this 2001 Arlo & Janis.
Just like Grandpa used to fake it.
Free Range (Creators) touches on TV that you don’t watch until you’re warned not to.
These warnings used to be rare and often too-little, too-late, after something happened live and was then played back a dozen times in slow motion. As Bill Whitehead suggests, it seems like the trigger warnings do more to attract attention than to deflect it.
I don’t think it’s a conspiracy to boost ratings, mostly because where I hear the most trigger warnings is on NPR news programs. My suspicion is that a medium which depends on listener donations doesn’t like getting angry phone calls from contributors over a news story about war that included the sound of gunfire or a story about sexual harassment in which people mentioned sexual harassment.
I understand not watching violent movies or dramas that include certain topics, but the news is the news and sometimes it’s not pleasant. Put on some music instead.
Readers who have had intimate relationships end poorly may want to turn down their speakers for the next three minutes and fifteen seconds.
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