(Originally written/ posted 2004. One of my favorite of my old reviews, of a book I bottom-lined as "Funny, rude, sometimes right, sometimes insightful ... (T)he first 50 pages are both interesting and a blast. Sadly, it's 200 pages long." The review starts with an extract from Queenan's introduction.)
**********
”Late in the summer of the Year of Our Lord 2000, I began to suffer from a nagging cough... [it] had me thinking in terms of lung cancer. Confronted by my own mortality, I began to lament all the things I had not yet accomplished with my life.
“True, I had written a book (several, in fact), planted a tree, and sired a son, so masculine-rites-of-passage-wise I was way ahead of the game. But I had never seen the Taj Mahal, never meandered along the Great Wall of China, never glimpsed (much less scaled) Mount Everest, never stood transfixed scant paces from a white lion on the plains of the Serengeti...
“After I’d taken care of piano lessons and the tai chi and the personal trainer (I wanted to look sharp at the funeral) and the airplane lessons and made the relevant inquiries about a ceremonial trip to Katmandu, I figured it was time I got my wife and children up to speed, mortality-wise. Here I hit some rough sailing. Seeing as I had only just entered my prime earning years and that my career seemed to be going extraordinarily well after hitting a fiscal plateau in the mid-90s, my wife was a little ticked off that I should have picked this time to die. She suggested that I seek a second opinion... when I finally did get the cough checked out, it was diagnosed as a generic allergy attack...
“Look how I had reacted to the thought that I might be dying of lung cancer. Did I say to myself ‘Now might be a good time to help eradicate poverty in rural America’? No. Did I ask myself ‘Why not use your few remaining months to make this planet a better place than the way you found it’? Of course not. Rather, I embarked on a mad binge of self-aggrandizement... I was, if nothing else, being true to the ethos of my generation...
“I watched friends who had been tear-gassed and billy-clubbed the day we levitated the Pentagon now trundle off for two weeks on Martha’s Vineyard, where they could read Under the Tuscan Sun and Toujours Provence while listening to Andrea Bocelli, yet I was silent. I watched my friends sign checks to the Democratic Party and then send their children to posh private schools, yet I was silent. I watched intransigent Maoists once ready to go to the wall in the cause of Chinese freedom now go to Wall Street in the cause of Chinese paper, yet I was silent... I can hold my tongue no longer.”
**********
Joe Queenan, Movieline smart-aleck, had promise as a social commentator – especially in an indictment of himself and his own generation, a book that promised “For the first time in thirty years, I’ve decided to be part of the solution”. Even for his normal role, I’ve called him “the Dave Barry of movie reviewers”, given their similar comic timings, their middle-class stodginess, their dislike of traditional research, and yet their similar willingness to go out and do something strange just to report back. Queenan’s sarcasm bites harder than the amiable Barry’s, but he’s more daring in his experiments as well.
He’s personally tried out movie scenes to see if they had any connection to reality (it seems Pretty Woman is wrong about how easy it is to pass off a recently-met hooker in a business meeting, and White Men Can’t Jump about the odds that a middle-aged broker will play basketball as well as a schoolyard hot-shot, but some other movie was amazingly right that a blindfolded man with a cane could safely cross the middle of a New York City street in heavy traffic). He’s interviewed filmgoers to discover that none of them know (or care) who directed the movie, no matter how loudly the promo posters blare the director’s name. He even tried to make a $7,000 movie after Richard Rodrigues was celebrated for a movie he claimed to have made so cheaply. If Queenan has been eager to learn and teach before, why wouldn’t a sort-of-slightly-near-death experience shake him up for real?
Queenan wasn’t becoming a late-life idealist, but a chastened cynic can make sound arguments an idealist can’t. His thesis is not that the Baby Boomers – defined in chapter 3 as, basically, anyone born between 1943 and 1960 who acts like the people in this book – are to be vilified for selling out. Selling out is a normal part of life (as Winston Churchill arrogantly sniped long before the Boomers, “Anyone who was never a communist before age 30 has no heart, but anyone who is a communist after 30 has no brain”). Rather, the Boomers “were the first generation to sell out and *then insist they hadn’t*”. Instead of being dull, repressive, contented cheapskates like older people should, they raced frantically through their days in a miserable quest to remain cool. They invented forms of hypocrisy and obnoxiousness that no prior generation had dreamed of. Balsamic Dreams is Queenan’s indictment, as specific as he can make it without, y’know, having to look stuff up.
**********
The defining moment of the book may be where he chooses the most important event in the Baby Boomers’ hurtle towards uselessness. He picks the 1971 release of Carole King’s Tapestry, a record which would spend four months at Billboard’s #1 and sell a then-record 15 million copies. Okay, you think, picking on a bland record is a stupid cheap-shot. And it _is_, yet he makes true points in its favor. Rock’n’roll, he reminds us, was a defining change in the world: for all that the Boomers’ parents survived the Depression and helped fight World War II, they listened to really suckass music. Duke Ellington and Count Basie were major cult figures, sure, but Lawrence Welk and Guy Lombardo defined jazz for the public, and their company was “Doris Day, Sammy Davis Jr., Mantovani, sound tracks from idiotic movies... and an endless barrage of novelty songs about using a deck of cards as a Bible... the music was largely hokey. Whatever else they might be accused of, people growing up in the sixties were not hokey.
“Well, not at the start”.
Tapestry, Queenan says, “introduced the three themes that would dominate the Baby Boomer mindset from that point forward: genteel lameness (‘You’ve Got a Friend’), communal nostalgia for the extremely recent past (‘So Far Away’, ‘It’s Too Late’), and incessant self-repackaging (‘Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow’, a grueling hit King had cowritten ten years earlier, now performed at catatonic speed)”. By the end of the 1970's, there were “classic rock” stations devoted to stopping at the mid-1970's; by the early 1980's, there was nothing odd about bringing back the Davy Crockett craze that had warmed the Boomer’s youth. Not to mention cable TV, which ensured that the Donna Reed Show and Leave it to Beaver would never go away. The Boomers were not the first generation to mourn its past, but they were the first able to recycle it in full color and stereo and inflict it on everyone else.
Youth have short attention spans. None of my middle-school students, in a survey for some math-class project on graphs, named a favorite movie released more than five years ago; when I once mentioned the band Public Enemy, a student reprimanded me with “I listen to rap, not classical”. Even in white-majority Quincy (MA), I saw a high-school teacher play U2's “With or Without You” (a post-Boomer anthem) and have it recognized by four of his students.
But the miracle of repackaging and early nostalgia is that, thanks to the Boomers, _every_ generation can indulge: Family Ties isn’t going away soon either, y’know. The future has been repossessed by cranky over-the-hill dorks.
**********
What is valid in Balsamic Dreams, even insightful? One, it nails how Boomers (and from them their children) have learned to build “personality” out of pop culture. He notes how the Buena Vista Social Club album, made by elderly Cubans, sold millions to white people who, in real life, avoid all Hispanics other than their maid or gardener. He notes how novels by previously-unknown authors suddenly become mandatory reading for a year or two, then return to oblivion. Or, I was reading Pamela Ribon’s novel Why Girls are Weird, a very normal modern romantic comedy, when the boy dreamed a perfect first meeting with an ideal girl:
“She loves Ben Folds Five, knows how to use chopsticks, and has an extensive art collection. She has two dogs and speaks three languages fluently. She can pick up a bar of soap with her toes and knows all the words to the theme song from the Great Space Coaster. She thinks I’m witty, charming, and handsome. I took her back to my apartment and we made love slowly until the sun came up, where she made me crepes while wearing only a pair of high-heels. She fed me breakfast as she sang all of the songs from Bob Dylan’s Blood on the Tracks in order”.
Queenan helps show how feeble this is: there’s no person in the fantasy, any more than when ZZ Top insist that their ideal girl has legs and knows how to walk. This boy, a true child of the Boomers, has instead picked out what purchases his ideal girl will have made, what classes she’ll have taken. People didn’t dream like that in romances from the 1920's (and yes, thanks to Mom, I know whereof I speak). This is new, and expensive, and empty.
When I write about my favorite songs, which I do a lot, I'm sharing how I've related to them, what I've learned from them, what kinds of joy I've discovered from them: experiences and feelings and questions and tentative answers that you might recognize from entirely different subject matter. I'm delighted if you learn new songs from me, but I'm never trying to give the impression that your worth as a person requires having a similar list.
Two, Queenan beautifully captures the decay of the English language – in our world where the speaking vocabulary of the average English-speaking American has declined 2/3 in the last 100 years, even with brand new words like “incentivize” – and our tolerance of obvious nonsense. Bad enough to imagine Captain John Paul Jones in the War of Independence, warned to surrender, replying “In your face”. Queenan also Boomerizes the Gettysburg Address:
“My sense of it is: the battle is kind of a mixed bag. Clearly, the Confederacy and the Union were not on the same page, yet even though 51,000 men got waxed, I view it as a win-win situation because everyone showed grace under pressure despite casualties up the wazoo, and Gettysburg will now be the benchmark against which future battles will be judged.
“Speaking for the entire Lincoln family, I’d like the congratulate the Confederacy for taking things to another level. So could you all put your hands together and give it up for Mister Robert E. Lee and the Army of Northern Virginia? Personally, I think that we have all learned a lot from this as a people and that the experience will only make us stronger. We will go forward, rather than backward. We will put this thing behind us. We now realize that a starter house divided against itself cannot stand”.
If you’re dubious, let Queenan remind you that basketball star Julius Erving, when his missing son’s dead body was found, announced that the ordeal had made his family stronger and that he was grateful for closure. Before the Boomers, people didn’t talk that way, and in a very real sense, those were the days, my friend; we had zero tolerance for the idea that they would ever end.
Three, he indicts the Boomers for inventing “ironic” nostalgia, which is far worse than real nostalgia, since it’s a joyless exercise that doesn’t give real creativity even a fighting chance. He recounts hearing a CD by the 3rd-string post-WWII crooner Jerry Vale on a cafeteria stereo, and making a dumbfounded inquiry to the staff – none of whom had ever heard of Jerry Vale. Apparently some night-shift clerk had been playing it as a joke, and someone on day shift slipped it in unaware of the “boundless satirical connotations”. Connotations which, of course, never existed: if you’re playing Jerry Vale music at a cafeteria, the only connotation is that Jerry Vale’s estate gets royalties.
Four, he points out how Boomers blame everyone else for sins they caused. E.g., “They know that the urban crack epidemic is a direct outgrowth of enlightened sixties attitudes towards recreational drugs, but they prefer to blame it on a pathologically self-destructive underclass”.
Five, and most damning, is what he calls Suffering by Association. “Unlike their parents, who actually lived through the Great Depression and in many cases actually fought World War II, Boomers tend to claim as their touchstone experiences events that actually happened somewhere else to someone else: Mai Lai. Woodstock. Altamont. The Tet Offensive .... there is the classic Boomer parlor trick of revealing where they were when JFK died. ‘I can still remember it, like it was only yesterday’, they love to say. Yeah, well, so can Caroline”.
If Queenan had pressed this last – which he did not – he could have explained many of the most destructive trends in this country. If you define yourself by association, then watching the Great Space Coaster is better than doing things. If you define yourself by association, then sending your kids to Harvard is better than raising them to be kind or happy, and it’s also worth sending them to private schools while voting against school taxes. If you define yourself by association, then you shouldn’t be taxed for “capital gains” income off the stocks you sell: hey, someone worked real hard for that money, and that was a defining moment for you. We’ve had two Boomer presidents in a row, and taxes are down on every possible activity except working.
*********
So why, ultimately, is Balsamic Dreams a tragedy about the author? Why, at 200 pages of good-sized type, did it drag painfully on?
The problem is that Queenan’s a hypocrite: he sells the promise that he’ll turn the big guns on himself and his friends, but no. He’s a smug, wealthy white jerk obsessed with cool, and the fact that he’s funny is the only line separating him from the Maureen Dowds and Bill O’Reillys and Tim Russerts who actually (God help us) write the stories our country tells itself.
Music, to start with a tiny example (that he keeps going on about). Queenan insists that the Carpenters and Leo Sayer and Yes and Blue Oyster Cult and Cats and Dar Williams and Richard Shindell and Grand Funk Railroad and rap music are evil: not just unappealing to him personally, soul-degrading. But there's no possible principle there: if love, sex, ecology, phony fascist swagger, elaborate fantasy worlds, introspection, telling the stories of others, and primitive shouting are all too preposterous for words, then why does he love the Beatles, Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, the Doors, David Bowie, and Pearl Jam? If classical music is (as he insists) real culture, to be valued above pop culture, then how is it self-evident that King Crimson, Jethro Tull, and Andrew Lloyd-Webber’s intricacy should never have been tried? There’s no good answer: Queenan just knows how to pick on easy targets. The people who made Emerson Lake and Palmer rich aren’t owning up anymore; if Queenan attacks hard enough, maybe we won’t suspect he was one of them.
Race, to pick a bigger example. Queenan is pro-Civil Rights Act and anti-lynching and pro-public schools and pro-James Brown and Funkadelic, true. But he straight-facedly recalls American Indians as primitive rapists and headhunters who barely occupied the continent until Columbus brought civilization. He neither knows nor cares that they outnumbered Europeans until city germs came overseas to them; that their governments in many ways were more sophisticated than Europe’s; that their behavior was exactly as fair-minded and peaceful as that of the incoming whites. He dismisses black novelists who write about black characters, while insisting that white novels about white characters remain universal and classic.
He thinks it’s insane to criticize U.S. founding fathers for slave ownership... I mean, yes, I think Washington and Jefferson and Madison were great heroes too, on balance, risking their lives to set up an idealistic new form of government. But Queenan can’t imagine it as an issue. Why should he? He never met any slaves. Not even the ones who probably made his clothes.
There’s also religious intolerance. “You may not be terribly comfortable with the term ‘God’, preferring ‘Higher Power’ or ‘Prime Mover’ or ‘Life Force’. But God Himself prefers the term ‘God’”. Um... He told this to you when, Joe?
The message of Balsamic Dreams is meant to be gritty and old-fashioned: be responsible for your own behavior, respect the past, accept aging and death, think for yourself. But the messenger is a man who – even at 52, even after a brush with mortality – is scared of looking foolish in the eyes of others.
He can admire George Washington: George Washington won. But Ben and Jerry, though they have improved the lives of hundreds of workers, and introduced a sensible way to enrich rain-forest natives without destroying their forest, have not actually saved that forest or ended poverty; so Ben and Jerry must be repeatedly attacked. He can enjoy the Rolling Stones, because “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction” (which has no depth) will never sound any different than it did when he first loved it; but Jethro Tull didn’t care if they looked silly, so Queenan must say “They were silly!”. Moderate Republicans are pathetic, because they are torn, but Bush's Republicans are fine, because they have the balls to enjoy bullying us.
Balsamic Dreams stars a winner who I honestly think began to re-examine his own life. But he flinched, because self-examination is "hokey". The dust jacket says he'd become a columnist for the New York Times. It was too late for risky thoughts, then; I should have known.
No comments:
Post a Comment