Things Younger Americans Should Know

What's linotype?

 

It also freaks me out to find out what younger people don't know... but it also reminds me of this:

In 1984 I was about to go into my senior year in high school and was taking part in a two week journalism camp/seminar thing at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. It was (and, I'm sure, still is) a great program.

One afternoon was spent at the newspaper in San Luis Obispo. An editor there gave us a little talk, and then asked if anyone knew who Dick Gregory is. No one did.

He then launched into a tirade about how teens today had no sense of the world and history, and how it was inexcusable that teenagers who wanted to be journalists could be so ignorant they would be unfamiliar with someone like Dick Gregory. He essentially told us we should all find another line of work.

For those who are unfamiliar, Dick Gregory was a comic/activist in the 60s, whose cultural impact by 1984 was non-existent. He was a weight loss huckster by then. He couldn't have been a smaller pop culture footnote in 1984. If it weren't for that asshole editor I still wouldn't be aware of Dick Gregory and it wouldn't affect my life or work in the slightest.

By the way, I asked that editor if he knew who Simon LeBon was. He didn't. Again, it was 1984. Tell me which name had more cultural significance at that point.

 

There was life before the Internet.

Also, the art and the thoughtfulness of a hand-written note; there are still those who find e-mail and IM impersonal.

Respect for elders, despite the cultural gap between them and us. At a recent college reunion I met a woman who graduated from my alma mater in 1940 and she is now almost 90 years old. Margaret competed in the 1936 Olympics, lived in Paris during World War II, was one of the first advertising saleswomen in television, was a publicist for the Kennedy Family ... I could go on. Before lunch we were talking about politics and one of the most resonating things she said to me?

"I just can't believe how I'm watching history repeat itself."

 

IJAG,

I'm the guy who brought up the "Interstate Love Song" thing on the other thread, but I meant it not as an indictment of today's youth nor as a celebration of Stone Temple Pilots, who I thought were a decent-but-overexposed 1990s band and nothing more. I don't think less of anyone just because they've never heard of STP, just as I don't think less of anyone because they've never heard of Scott Baio. Winston Churchill they ain't.

My point in relaying that story was my amazement at how quickly generations of pop culture mutate (as Songbird put it). The kids at the show I mentioned were all fans of guitar-driven music. Fifteen years ago, they would have been the kids at a Stone Temple Pilots show. But when that song -- which had once been overplayed on the airwaves to the point that everyone was sick of it -- came on the loudspeakers, there was no hint of recognition. For me, a guy who just turned 30, it was simply one of those, "Wow, I'm old" moments. I didn't think the kids were poorly raised or undereducated or that the world was going to hell in a handbasket just because they didn't recognize Scott Weiland's voice. In the grand scheme of things, they're probably better off.

I just figured it was a scene some of the 30-somethings on the board could appreciate. Certainly didn't mean to ruffle anyone's feathers. Just wanted to make that clear.

 

This is an interesting one to me, because I remember when it was a big deal when my elementary school had two computers in each classroom my 6th grade year and when they had full-on computer labs at my junior high.
Even though I spent a chunk of my growing up years without the internet and computers, I can't seem to remember it. It is like the internet and computers are so ingrained in me that it seems like it was always there.

I guess that is why a lot of people my age can type so well and at both of my shops there were older newspaper guys who still peck at the keyboard, because they didn't grow up with computers.

 

I don't know anybody who thinks that. But if Americans can be "territorial" and "arrogant," certainly just as many Canadians can be "smug" and "condescending."

 

Hold to these truths for they shall outlast the false gods:

Robert Johnson did sell his soul, and we are better for it.

Willie Mays and Hank Aaron are the message. Barry Bonds is a footnote.

The Four Tops, Everly Bros and the Righteous Bros are melody and harmony. The rest are just noise.

Dylan is neither harmony nor melody. He definitely is not noise.

George Thoroughgood and the Delaware Destroyers are rock 'n' roll.

There is much good from back in your parents' days. Make some good in your own. By your Pops a beer and a shot. He raised you. He deserves it.

 

I can touch the Rock 'n Roll suff, other than to add that you owe it to yourself to have listened to, and be able to identify, some songs by Sinatra, Dean Martin, Pasty Cline and Johnny Cash. There are really too many things to list for this. It's just such a huge category that you could really go on forever and still come up with valid suggestions. But I would say, just from the perspective of capturing the American experience, that everyone should have read these novels at least once, (or at the very least be familiar with the the basic plot, unless Faulkner is involved) especially if you want to be a writer:

*Catcher In the Rye
*The Great Gatsby
*The Sun Also Rises (or some other Hemingway book besides Old Man and The Sea)
*Catch-22
*To Kill a Mockingbird
*Slaughterhouse Five
*Huckleberry Finn
*Invisible Man
*Travels With Charley (Or Grapes of Wrath)
*On the Road
*Moby Dick
*Beloved
*Sound and the Fury (or, if you're like me and find it much too confusing, Absalom, Absalom!)
*Portnoy's Complaint (or one of Roth's other books)

(And I'll throw this on here, even though I admit I have yet to get around to it, just because I know Fenian would want me to...)

*The USA Trilogy by Dos Pasos

Non-fiction:

*In Cold Blood
*The Sweet Science
*The Best and The Brightest
*The Right Stuff
*Dispatches
*The Boy's Life

There are probably 200 others, but those are pretty important.

One summer, when I was about 20, I cut a deal with my father that he would advance me three months rent (which I would pay off with my meager salary from the student newspaper) and I would spend the summer reading classics books and watching classic movies. For some absurd reason, he agreed, probably because my mom (who came from a background much more white collar than his own) loved the idea. Having never been much of a movie buff, I watched Godfather I and II, Goodfellas, Citizen Kane, Apocalypse Now, Casablanca, Gone With the Wind, The Graduate, Chinatown, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Taxi Driver, Jaws, All About Eve, Some Like It Hot, Raging Bull and a few others. There are a ton I never got to, but it was a noble effort and Blockbuster was happy for the business (even if the bastards didn't have The Last Temptation of Christ and refused to stock it).

The problem with knowing all the shit "you should know" is that it's always evolving. Like if you start saying you should know TV shows, should you have Mary Tyler Moore on the list and not the Sopranos? Should you include MASH or All In the Family or Hill Street Blues or The Wire? And can you better understand how much silly teenage angst really dominated so much of culture in the 90s and early 00s by watching 90210 or Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

I think the whole point is to asbsord as much as humanly possible, which is why writers need to constantly go outside the comfort zone to experience new stuff.

I do very much like ink-stained wretch's list though. But my mom wants a shot and a beer as well. Because she raised me too.

 

I apologize if I'm not telling this story right. A former co-worker of mine and sometime poster on here relayed the following story:

Back in the early part of the century (let's say '02 or so) he was on a prep assignment. He interviewed some kids, got to talking and mentioned Bo Jackson. The response, I believe, was something along the lines of: Oh, he was that baseball player, right?

So my contribution is this: Bo Jackson was one of the greatest athletes of my lifetime, around No. 4 on my all-time RBs list and not a bad baseball player either. Were it not for the hip injury, he would be on as high a pedestal as you'd find.

 

DD --

You forgot The Things They Carried, but otherwise a fantastic list.

 

Ha, give me some credit, I actually know what linotype is and have machine in action (it's an old-school press).