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When I was young, I knew a lot about old people. Especially about old people I knew personally: members of my family, my mother’s contemporaneous older friends, teachers, clients on my paper route.
It wasn’t a choice. When I was young, no one asked whether I was interested in events that significantly preceded my birth. They just talked. My mom told me countless detailed stories about her childhood growing up during the Nazi occupation of France; many if not most of these tales of woe were repeated despite my reminders that I was already familiar with them. I was expected to listen as the schoolteacher got shot, the cat was abandoned and the Allied tanks rolled in.
Children, teenagers and young adults were expected less to be seen and not heard than to listen politely, nodding their heads as their elders described watching the Beatles arrive at Idlewild (on black-and-white TV with rabbit ears, natch), where they were when they heard that JFK had been shot and, in the case of my seventh-grade homeroom teacher, what it was like to be in the convention hall when FDR accepted the Democratic nomination.
Pop culture, politics and personal histories from decades prior persisted in a way that doesn’t seem possible today, when youth culture and the internet have delivered a clear message to older generations like mine (I’m an old Gen Xer) that our stories are neither wanted nor sought out.
And sought out they would have to be. Unlike my baby boomer babysitter, who taught my 9-year-old self hippie slang, how to curse and how much fun she’d had at a free-love commune, and also unlike my Silent Generation father, who schooled me on Jack Benny and Benny Goodman, we members of Generation X survived our histories of childhood neglect and adulthood underappreciation only to graduate into our later years assuming that no one cares about us and no one ever will. So yeah, there was that time I stood 3 feet away from Johnny Thunders when he gave his last concert and the hilarious lunch I had with Johnny Ramone and the time Ed Koch gave me the finger after I bounced a bottle off the roof of his limousine, but I’m pretty sure nobody under age 45 cares.
As the author and psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist says: “In the old days young people went to university to learn from people who were perhaps three times their age and had read an enormous amount. But nowadays they go in order to tell those older people what they should be thinking and what they should be saying.”
Or maybe younger people would care. But they’d have to ask. And I’d have to be convinced that they weren’t just being polite. Probably not going to happen.
Whatever the cause is, and what I’ve written so far is no doubt only part of the reason, there is probably less familial, cultural and popular history being transferred from older generations to younger ones than ever before. Changes in technology and education are contributing to our failure to pass on knowledge and wisdom.
If you don’t know where you came from, you don’t know who you are.
Generation Z, for example, never learned to write in cursive. Which means they can’t read it. In the same way that Ataturk’s decision to abolish Arabic script in favor of a Latinate alphabet suddenly made hundreds of years of incredible literature inaccessible to Turks after 1928, and Mao’s simplified Chinese characters meant that only scholars can read older texts, newer generations of Americans won’t be able to read an original copy of the Declaration of Independence or a letter from their grandmother.
Similarly, the dark ages of photography are well upon us. Though it has never been cheaper or easier to take or store or transmit a high-resolution photo, the number that are likely to pass from one generation to the next has never been smaller. When mom dies, her smartphone password usually dies with her. Even when obtaining a court order is not required, how likely is a grieving child to sort through an overwhelming volume of photos, few of them worth preserving, and have the presence of mind to carefully store the keepers somewhere where their own children will be able to easily access them someday? And let’s not mention the digital disasters that can instantly wipe out entire photo archives.
For all their shortcomings — fading, development costs — film-based photos survived precisely because they were more expensive, which made them precious, which prompted people to store them in albums. We’ve all read stories about how victims of a flood or fire sometimes only escaped with one possession: the family photo album.
I’m grateful for all the old stuff old people told me whether or not I wanted to hear it. Some stuff was pretty enlightening, like the couple on my paper route where the husband had fought in World War I and still had his gas mask on which he had written the names of each little French village through which he and his squadron had passed. They invited me in for tea when I came to collect my money. It’s one thing to read about the horrors of mustard gas. Holding that contraption in my hands made it feel real.
Other things I picked up probably didn’t teach me much of anything at all. Still, it was pretty interesting to learn how to use an old-fashioned adding machine, Victrola record player and self-playing piano one of my neighbors had in her garage. My mom taught me how to use carbon paper; recalling the fact that businesses and government agencies routinely made numerous copies to be distributed to different files proved useful when I researched my senior thesis at the National Archives.
When I complain about a problem, I like to offer a solution. But I’m not entirely sure that the fact that billions of yottabytes worth of human knowledge is getting memory-holed, mostly because Millennials and Gen Zers aren’t particularly interested, is necessarily a problem. Maybe they don’t need that stuff to try to save themselves from climate change or killer asteroids.
What I do know, if indeed it is a problem, is that it is one without a possible solution. In the same way that streets would be clean if nobody littered but people always do so they never are, there is no way to convince today’s 30-year-olds that they should take an interest in what today’s 60-year-olds have to say.
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past,” William Faulkner wrote. But he’s so old, he’s dead.
Nowadays, even the present is past.
Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis.
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It is a puzzlement, no? For example, Blacks and others complain about “being held back” while holding in their hands the world’s accumulated knowledge. And it’s mostly all free. Yet they don’t seem eager to avail themselves of such an historic gift.
Plus there are endless new distractions. Once there were just a handful of news anchors on a few TV channels broadcasting just 30-minutes daily. Now “news” is presented around the clock, everyone a Walter Cronkite broadcasting 24-7-365 from his/her own in-home hi-tech studio.
Once students came home from school and either played outside or watched a few TV shows. Then it was off to study. Now students can (and do!) watch TikTok in classrooms.
Swift once mocked kings who hired court head-bonkers. They stood on either side of him, smacking him on the head to make sure he paid attention to supplicants in front of him. Today, a zillion distractions almost preclude listening to anyone…online or off. Online “influencers” use constant camera bumps, changing camera angles, and background “noise” (like unrelated computer game footage) while they bloviate. It’s like watching a male CEO address an annual shareholder meeting. Only he’s hired 2 female strippers to perform onstage with him, 10-feet on either side. How many in the audience will remember a word he said?
Interesting. I never thought of that!
And physical objects. Plus, aside from slides, they needed no special equipment to read.
Ken Burns used “animated” photos in his documentaries. He even spawned the Ken Burns Effect in Photoshop. In the future, however, there’s likely to be no way to do that if software proceeds apace. Already there are digital relics I’m unable to “read” due to soft/hardware having “moved on.”
The same holds true for things like Burns’ use of Civil War-era letters. With so much texting and emailing today, most messages sent (not by snailmail, but cyberspace) will be lost.
Back in-the-day, visits to libraries seldom led…even with stellar librarians…to an overwhelming urge to read every book therein. One was usually content to focus on a few books, not a bazillion. Today, the ubiquitous Al Gorithm keeps feeding us addictive podcasts, youtubes, tiktoks, IGs, etc. Where once Mom cut short kids’s cartoon viewing, sundry college professors have confessed to spending whole days in YouTube limbo, clicking on sidebar suggestions and doom-scrolling.
And that’s not to mention zombie-ing out on current movies, old movies, internet series, and vintage films/TV shows.
In fact, online distractions are so prevalent/addictive that “kids today” have a hard time socializing in-person or staying focused period, in class or out.
So I hope RFK brings back his famous relative’s focus on exercise and the classic Greek stress on healthy bodies and brains. I mean I still can’t believe that schools cut back on or eliminated recess and/or physical education classes.
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That’s why there are littering fines and paid street cleaners.
Just because something is imperfect doesn’t mean it can’t be improved. Important lessons can always be taught. And need to be.
Finding effective ways to impart knowledge, wisdom, and best-practices can be a challenge. Still, there are ways. One might be to teach about the “environment” by making all college admits complete an Outward Bound course before matriculating. Or have them spend a year in a poor town-village-city-region-state-country.
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Perhaps GenXers can revisit once-useful programs to see if they can be updated/adapted for Millennials, Inc.
One of the effects of war is to effect a cultural exchange between combatants. Note the similarities between the above videos and those of the Hitler Youth exercise programs, even going so far as to justifying such with the same dedication, “a healthy mind in a strong body”.
Just another way in which the relatively backwards USA (unwittingly) learned from their superior German cousins.
Add advanced jet mechanics, rocketry and nuclear physics and host of other German-led advances to the list as well.
Now it only remains for Americans to accept that German notions concerning the health of a nation’s gene pool is even more important than any of the above concerns. This is difficult, because Americans are a simple-minded, material, Missouri-mule “Show me”, “I’ll believe it when I see it” type of people and the effects of bad genetics are not revealed for generations.
Their grandfathers bred farm animals and so for them, the wisdom was necessary and self-evident. City dwellers are not tethered to reality, dwell in an artificial, hot-house type environment and so are insulated from careful natural selection with the unfortunate results we see before us today in the survival of so many obviously crippled, mal-adapted people—Democrats.
Every line of the Democratic Party platform is a special carve out for a noisome, genetically deficient group. Sailor’s “coalition of the fringes”, and “spiteful mutants”.
When someone is as wrong as Rall over and over again, people stop listening and realize how full of shit he is.
Credit where credit is due, this is a very good piece, for an old fart.
One of the advantages of our carceral schools, from the standpoint of your totalitarian rulers, is strict age segregation. They can pit youth against adults as illegitimate authorities. Every time a touchy subject comes up here they send 6 million bots to start fights between boomers and the yout’. And they can elevate youth to cultural prominence as writers, performers, “influencers” precisely for their malleability. You can’t possibly know what’s going on at 22 when you get that big-shot steno job at the NYT (Unless you’re Dave McGowan’s kid or something.)
Touching gas-mask story there. Kids today don’t realize that antique gas masks make great bongs.
If someone’s biggest life’s moments are “where I was when JFK was shot”, “seeing FDR’s nomination convention,” or “seeing the Beatles perform in concert” then that person is living passively as a sheep without a life of their own, mistakenly believing someone else’s accomplishments are their shared experiences. Why would any young person show interest in a dull couch potato who sits on a sofa, watching pro-sports, Netflix, or talks about national politics and events they saw on tv or heard on the radio or read in a newspaper? Younger people are naturally inquisitive, so if they have no interest in your past, it’s likely because you had no interesting past.
This is a good ol’ fashioned generation gap article.
Richard Dreyfuss would probably agree with the importance of the transmission of knowledge between generations, the same transmission communism loves to interfere with and replace.
Dreyfusses’ passion is civics.
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The “healthy mind” thing is a misunderstood Latin quote;
the original, in hexameter (i.e. Juvenal was a supercilious prick) goes
“Orandum est ut sit mens sana in corpore sano” lit. “one must pray”
= roughly “Here´s hoping” there is a healthy mind in that healthy body
(on watching athletes, i.e. Juvenal said the diametral oppsite of what they
would have you believe – he doubted it).
In the 1990s Alan Bloom wrote “The Closing of the American Mind” and E.D. Hirsch wrote “Cultural Literacy.” Both books, written just before the explosion of the Internet, lamented that American education was about forgetting not remembering. A culture exists only when it has a body of shared texts. Everyone needs to know the same stories and read the same books. Baby boomers grew up with families who told stories about the Great Depression and WWII. Men of the WWII generation (and Korea) had shared experiences of boot camp. By design, America destroyed the world that gave us that culture. In 1950 when the Baby Boomer kids were growing, most American families still lived in old cities or inner ring suburbs. Homes and lots were small. Families had one car. People walked to stores and school. By 1970s, once we were past the boomer generation, we had suburban sprawl which by the 1990s overwhelmed america. We had broken unions and there were no more “union picnics” in the summer. Kids rode school buses. Families had two cars. All moms worked becuae the family needed that income. Families moved across country. That meant seeing grandma was not an every week thing, that mean seeking aunts and uncles was not an every week thing, that meant you did not see close neighbors because with suburban sprawl you don’t know the neighbors at all. In schools we stopped reading the same books. That is all by design. That means we have destroyed memory. Corporate america wanted to destroy memory because that means corporations can tell you anything they want you to know. For America to get is memory back it must end the corporation and make all business small and local.
Good argument.
“….there is no way to convince today’s 30-year-olds that they should take an interest in what today’s 60-year-olds have to say.”…could be written about any given year in the last 70 years, or more. The progression of sheer change in the last 100 years is startling. With the advent of world wide dissemination of news we have all had a front row seat to this, first by radio, then television, etc. Each year the pace has quickened, and we are drawn to the present, and the predictions for the future.. There is no time to learn about where your family came from or what they did. It’s a symptom, no, a product, of the rush into the future. Full speed ahead, pull up the anchor. When a society doesn’t stop, never plateaus, won’t take a rest, neglects to (honestly) pause and reflect, they’ll never see the cliff that will ultimately do them in.
well…not technically johnny thunders’ last show:
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Old records at courthouses & etc. are unreadable to purposefully dumbed down dimmercrap pubic ejikated youngsters. Some are near unreadable for us old schoolers because penmanship of many old recorders was abysmal. The homeschooled will be in great demand later,.
Speaking of ‘Resistance to Memory’, why is Ted Rall lying about his age and generation in this article? He claims above
Whereas it is all over the web, uncontested by Ted Rall himself, that Unz commenter and renowned comic strip artist Frederick Theodore Rall III was born 26 August 1963 in tony Harvard-University-hosting Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Ted Rall is a BOOMER under any classification.
Cheesus, Ted, why are you fibbing about this? Maybe Ted is having trouble facing that 36% of boomers are already dead, and that the grim reaper is now on the boomer route? Here, the online real-time ‘Boomer Death Clock’
https://incendar.com/baby_boomer_deathclock.php
Good response. Paragraph breaks help separate ideas.
Rall wrote “If you don’t know where you came from, you don’t know who you are.” and you responded “There is no time to learn about where your family came from or what they did.”
I suggest you check out Finding Your Roots on PBS, Tuesday evenings, where specialists search, investigate and create historical family trees for famous people, usually two per week. Often they discover fascinating historical family members and their stories that would have been lost in the dustbin of history but the people being profiled are now gifted with.
I went on this journey myself using Ancestry, MyHeritage, Family Search (Mormons) and other resources. In the end, when I got tired of all the work involved and put it aside, I had documented a family tree that grew to around 4k people from the early 1800’s forward. I connected with cousins I did not know and much more! For example, the Gershwin brothers are 5th cousins!
All this work did take a lot of time. It can become an avocation for many. But it is much easier to do this work with the online resources today. In the past, people had to journey to search physical records.
Another factor that makes this work difficult is that it requires above average intelligence to do it correctly but as George Carlin famously said:
“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.”
Liberals in American society, at least, want to believe that we are all of equal intelligence with equal ability to learn. ‘Taint so. Too many people are just not intellectually capable and will never advance further than patching potholes or a supermarket cashier. To such people, the past, especially significant history, will always be a haze in the distance.
You fail to realize that within 20 years or less, robots are going to be doing most work and these machines will provide all the essentials of life required for the average person, which are food, entertainment and medical care.
There is huge body of science fiction writing on what such a future might look like but no one knows for sure of course. Perhaps the AI in charge will see no purpose for humans and kill us off. Or maybe not.
Good article Rall!
Appreciate the critique, I could always become a better writer. My brother saved me all the work by compiling our family tree onto a ROM CD some years back, thanks to my mother, who had done her due diligence in a volume. My response was a general comment on, well, average people! I enjoy George Carlin, and I’m glad he left such a legacy of observation behind. I don’t watch TV, however, I am familiar with the program you mentioned, it seems to be one of the few worthwhile programs available; I have seen a few snippets over the years.
You can stream watch via your browser:
https://www.pbs.org/show/finding-your-roots/
Unsure how many of the shows are free to watch but even if you had to pay for a month or two to binge watch past seasons, it would be worth the small cost, IMO.
Officially, he’s a boomer, but culturally he isn’t. I was born in the early 1950s, and for me being a boomer means living through the Kennedy assassination, the arrival of the Beatles, the Vietnam War, and the moon landing, among other things. My wife was born in 1964, so she is also a boomer, and yet she can share none of these experiences with me. Two happened before she was born, and the other two happened when she was a little kid. Neither of us considers her a boomer.
Mr Rall was born in 1963 officially making him a member of the Baby Boom generation [1946-1964.]
Sometimes I feel like I am an anachronism – or maybe you can just call me weird. I have always had a fascination for the past and history. I realize a very important part of history lies not only in books, but in the older people that you have known in one’s younger days. I guess an article could be written concerning the whole psychology of why younger people disdain the past and abhor history. The immediate present is all they seem concerned with. Something could also be said of how pop culture is connected to this and could be served as a side dish. My parents grew up in an era where they went to the movies all the time. That was all they had (30s & 40s). As I said, I am the weird dude. I probably am more familiar with Jonathan Swift than Taylor Swift – and in the words of the immortal Clark Gable “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn.” I have a friend of mine who is my age (late 60s), all this dude gushes about is op culture – but also, he knows very little or cares very little for history or geo-politics. He knows far more about Taylor Swift than Jonathan Swift. The problem with people like him – and they are innumerable- is that when conversations concerning world affairs arise, they want to be included in that conversation, but have nothing of substance to add t it.