Peace with honor

Asked my best source in the newspaper biz to estimate the average age of editorial page editors for the major newspapers and syndicates.  My souce puts it at about 50, probably a bit higher.

Boomers.

Depressing to think about the fact that the world is now run by the Baby Boomers with a bunch of Gen Xers as their right hand men and women.  The Boomers are the big bosses and the Gen Xers are the next level of management below but rising fast.

The Worst Generation Ever, having spent its 10 or so years at the top of the ladder attempting to undo everything accomplished by the Greatest Generation, is about to be succeeded by the Most Useless Generation Ever.

But to pull back from the brink of despair to the newspaper business (on the brink of disaster as Nancy Nall can tell you).

The biggest newspapers' editorial boards are run by and are full of Boomers.  People who could have voted for McGovern.  People who but for the grace of college deferments, fortunate lottery numbers, obliging doctors, or, in some cases, a missing chromosome, would have spent the end of their teenage years wet up to the knees in rice paddies in Southeast Asia.

Some of them did spend the end of their teenage years wet up to their knees in rice paddies.

You would think then that anybody from that demographic or who had a big brother from that demographic and watched that brother anxiously watching the mail for a letter that began Greetings would be looking at what's happening in Iraq, listening to the President say Stay the Course, and be wondering if they were having another long-delayed acid flashback.

You would think that anyone who'd had a real draft card would have their arms fall off before they'd type something like this (emphasis added by me):

Bush has painted himself and this country into a dangerous corner from which no exit is in sight, save more years of bloodshed and misery in Iraq on the one hand or, on the other, a hasty U.S. departure that would dishonor America and leave Iraqis to cope with the tragedy visited upon them.

I suppose that could have been written by a precocious Gen Y wizkid for whom Henry Kissinger might as well be Don Kessinger who might as well be Adrian Messenger, and whoever that is was probably a secondary character in a mediocre episode of the Simpsons.  Which is only an excuse if you believe that a knowledge of history isn't essential to an editorial writer for a major newspaper chain.  That's from an editorial from the McClatchy newspaper chain, by the way.

As Greg Mitchell reports in Editor and Publisher, the editorial writers of the bigger and more important papers and chains have come around to admitting the War in Iraq is a disaster.  But that doesn't mean they have concluded that it's time to get out.  In fact, as Mitchell says, they haven't been able to bring themselves to conclude anything.  He writes:

...the editorial boards of The New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, the Knight Ridder collective and others appear to be as clueless about what to do as are Mr. Bush and Mr. Rumsfeld.

Mitchell says these editors are aware that we need to get out but they can't bring themselves to say it.  So their only hope is that there will soon come a "turning point"---something will happen that will allow us to declare a victory and go home.

And it looks to me that that something is the creation of an Iraqi goverment we can hand things over to and then leave in the lurch.

An editor for Knight-Ridder wrote:

We helped make this mess; we have a moral obligation to try to leave Iraq in one piece.

And the New York Times says:

For the present, our goal must be to minimize the damage, through the urgent diplomacy of the current ambassador and forceful reminders that American forces are not prepared to remain for one day in a country whose leaders prefer civil war to peaceful compromise.

It's easy.  We hand them the keys to the country, give them a good stern talking to about the proper running of a democracy, remind them that the owner's manual's in the glove compartment, and buzz off.  And then when what we can now admit is a Civil War, because we're not holding the pink slip on it anymore so what do we care, tears the new goverment to pieces, we can tut tut and shake our heads and say, Well, we warned them.

After that, we can all go about the business of forgetting the names of Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and George Bush so that thirty years from now graying Gen Y editorial writers can tut tut about how we can't just pull out of the war on Mars.

Peace with honor.

Mitchell quotes one Boomer who did spend some time in the rice paddies of Vietnam.  He doesn't work for any newspapers though.  He's a United State Senator from Nebraska.  Chuck Hagel.

And this mindless kind of banter about, well, if we leave, the whole place falls apart; we can’t leave; we can’t even think about leaving. Wait a minute: You just showed on your screen the cost to the American people of the last three years. It’s helping bankrupt this country, by the way. We didn’t think about any of that and not just the high cost of lives and the continuation of that but our standing in the world.

Thanks to Susie Madrak for the link.

Comments

[Shakespeare's Sister]

the Most Useless Generation Ever

I resemble that remark.

[Linkmeister]

Apparently the crusading newspaper editor was an idealized Hollywood construct.

[Jamison]

Amen Lance!

[SAP]

Lance,

Until Gen X comes up with a president half as useless as George W. Bush, I'm afraid that the Boomers will have to be tagged with "the Most Useless Generation Ever" moniker.

[Rana]

Yah, dude. Watch out with the generalizations.

[Michael G]

The first rule of poker is "Don't throw good money after bad." This applies very well to Iraq. In spades. Adrian Messenger and his list made a fine thriller.

[Lance]

Why, Rana, aren't you Gen Y? :)

SAP, calling George Bush useless is complimenting him, don't you think? Franklin Pierce was useless. Warren G. Harding was useless. George W. Bush is the greatest destructive force to occupy the White House except for, maybe, Richard Nixon. Nixon wouldn't have let a city drown, but he killed a lot more people.

And Gen Xers probably will never have a president to call their own, useless or otherwise, just as the Lost Generation and the Korean War era generation (The Silent Generation, my mother calls her demographic) never had their own President. The next three or four Presidents will be Boomers and then will come the first Gen Y President.

[SAP]

Lance,

You're right about Bush (and presidents, for that matter). What was I thinking? :)

As for Gen X being the Most Useless Generation, I think you may be forgetting our generation's greatest contribution to the gene pool.

[Uma]

Thank you Silas!

[Let's Play Two]

Glenn Beckert says hello.

[David W.]

Keeping in mind that the previous President, who did a pretty good job of being President all in all, was a child of the baby boom also, I'd say you're generalization about boomers is off the mark, just a wee bit Lance.

[freq flag]

low lottery numbers

er, that would be high lottery numbers...the higher the number, the lower your chance of getting drafted. I know because the number on my real draft card (which I still carry, by law) says 288.

Jeese-louise, leave it to the blogosphere to serve as a transcontinental petri dish for something as universally unoriginal and overdone in every other medium as Boomer-Bashing. If it makes you feel better though, flame away, I guess. Just sayin'--that ground has been pretty tilled up already.

I guess my feeble justification to wasting oxygen that would be better spent on non-Boomers is that at least I was around to appreciate the '69 Cubs.

[Porlock Junior]

Of course they're the worst generation ever. They took dope, they held big demonstrations against the war, some of them even refused to go, some betrayed their country by going to Canada. Buncha Goddamn traitors. And don't mention that Rock Music stuff!

I mean, wtf is this worst generation shit?

As for that Greatest Generation, they had a damned tough rendezvous with destiny (and what a great title that would have been for the book if watzisname hadn't needed a smarmy kiss-up attention-grabber), and they took it well, by and large (want a list of counterexamples?), and they came home to a life more prosperous and comfortable than anything that had ever been seen, where a guy who worked diligently and didn't squander (and was White, of course) had pretty much a guarantee of building up a nice piece of equity and a comfy retirement. Thanks, of course, to little things like free oil, like using 25% of the world's resources on behalf of 6% of its people.

Couldn't last, of course. The boomers got a piece of it for a while, and of course tended to consider themselves entitled to it just as their parents had -- oh, but they didn't earn it, like the Greatest, that's right! They didn't go down to Mississippi or get their heads bashed in trying to stop Nixon's--

Oh, wait, can anyone tell me what generation Richard M Nixon belonged to? Real Great, he was; as someone pointed out, a real competitor to Bush.

But as I was starting to say, a whole lot of Boomers who don't quite have the Bush money have started to find out how tough the world is when the rest of the world finds out it doesn't owe Americans a living. Kick a middle-aged guy when he's down and out of a job today, it'll make you feel better.

(Since you ask: War Baby, a generation that has had the good fortune never to be a darling or whipping-boy of the media. But we'll give up our rants when you tear them from our cold dead fingers.)

[Lance]

freq flag,

Gack! You're right, of course. Although it doesn't sound right. That's because if you had a high lottery number you were low in the draft and low number you went high. I'll fix it, though.

As for boomer bashing, I haven't succeeded in starting a single blog meme yet, so I doubt I'm going to cause at outbreak.

But you know what I don't like about bloggers? Some of them are smart alecks who have a tendency to say things they don't really believe just to get a rise out of their readers.

Porlock,

Nixon wasn't our only Greatest Generation President. JFK, LBJ, Carter, Reagan, and the first Bush were too. Decidedly a mixed record. The Boomers are 1 and 1.

[Exiled in New Jersey]

My practice is heavy with musicians, artists and writers. Many of the latter are boomers who work for newspapers and almost to a man/woman, they sneer at the current occupant of the Big House, and yet except for one Goldwaterite columnist, none are on the same wave lengh as Hagel. What our crusade over there has become is LBJ's War on Poverty, moved 5000 miles off our shores, and you know how hard it is for liberal boomers to admit that maybe Johnson got it wrong.

Yesterday I sat with an 85 year old man who still collects a paycheck for playing with one of our five major orchestras. His wife is beyond the Alzheimer's vale, in Florida, and to occupy his non-working time, he visits casinos and plays video poker, sometimes amassing IRS gambling winning slips that total in excess of 150,000 in a year, yet that same casino gives him a record showing he has lost far more than that.

As I total these W-2G forms, he says "Why do I have to go through all this crap of filing, David? I'm part of the greatest generation. I went up Omaha Beach and fought my way into Germany, getting shot at the whole way." I drop my head so he won't notice my moist eyes. Good God, this man has done things! Some of my journalist friends don't even want to work to unseat that piece of offal who calls himself a Senator from Pennsylvania, because the Democrat nominee is not to their liking.

[Rana]

Nope. I'm 36, putting me right in the middle of the Gen X cohort.

[Anne Laurie]

I think the "Boomer Generation" really should be broken into two halves. The Front-Enders got all the good stuff, like Woodstock, flowers-in-your-hair Haight-Asbury, the sexual "benefits" of The Pill, and college educations that guaranteed you a good chance at a high-paying job. The Back-Enders... after spending their childhoods making do with parents, communities, schools, politicians, and media already exhausted by the first 10 years of boomer babies... got Altamont, co-optation, tear gas, herpes, and the chance to enter the job market just in time for the worst "market correction" since the Great Depression (1973). Can you guess when I was born? Of course, my immediate cohort is still in better shape than the tag-end boomers, like my youngest siblings (born 1964) who had even less of the Wonder Years and more of the Morning in America crap to live through. The editorial-writing jagoffs you hammer are largely Front-End Boomers, nepotisticly backed by the precious Morning-in-America baby-busters. But those of us born between those two low points in American cultural history are probably overrepresented in the blogosphere. Not that we're bitter, or anything.

[Susie from Philly]

Lance, don't despair - your data is simply incorrect. I was at an event sponsored by the National Association of Editorial Page Editors (or some shit - I forget the exact name) - they were having their convention here in Philly. I was sitting with Famous Sweaty Lunk Duncan Black, and we both noticed we brought the average age down to somewhere around 78. I mean, really, no kidding. Those people were OLD...