David Brooks had an essay in yesterday’s New York Times titled “We Are the Most Rejected Generation.” (The headline was a quote from a college student he spoke with.) I read the piece with interest, though my professional experience with rejection, while long – stretching half a century now – is entirely self-imposed, and I can remove it from my life whenever I like: All I have to do is stop writing and submitting what I write to editors. For the current generation, at least the ones who want to get into good colleges, rejection is an inevitable part of life. Brooks wrote that many students apply to 20 or so schools, hoping that at least a couple will accept them. A friend in St. Petersburg wrote an article recently about the difficulty of getting into college in Florida; he began it with the story of a girl from his hometown who had the grades, SAT scores, and extracurricular activities that in the old days would have gotten her into an Ivy League school; she got rejected by the University of Florida. Brooks asked young people if “living in this exclusionary regime affected their personalities,” and the answer was a resounding yes. Though it’s good preparation if they want to become writers.
Hearing yesterday that the new pope was American reminded me of October 1978, when, living in Warsaw, I learned that the new pope was Polish. That choice was more surprising – popes for centuries had been Italian – and probably more political. But there is something beautifully subversive about putting on the world stage right now a compassionate, multilingual American.
On a more personal note, the new pope was a freshman at Villanova University (majoring in mathematics) when I was a senior (majoring in English). So our paths probably didn’t cross, though it’s possible he read me in The Villanovan.
Speaking with Bill Maher last Friday, Dana Carvey told of how he got a call in late 1992 from President Bush – the man he had mercilessly imitated on Saturday Night Live – asking him to come down to Washington to “cheer up the troops,” meaning, as Carvey explained, the White House staff (Bush had recently lost his bid for reelection to Bill Clinton). Carvey said that he immediately thought of booking a hotel; he stayed, of course, at the White House. It was the beginning of a 26-year friendship.
Then this week, reading Jan Morris’s diary Thinking Again, I came across her thoughts on hearing of Bush’s death in 2018:
“I shall be sneered at for saying it, but the values I respected in him were the traditional values of the American Gentleman, and alas they no longer govern his nation and so set some standard for the Western world. He was, everyone seems to agree, straight, frank, brave, kind and friendly – in short, gentlemanly American, and I wish to God he was with us still. Don’t you?”
Neil deGrasse Tyson lost last night on Celebrity Jeopardy! Granted, the questions skewed toward pop culture – the Final Jeopardy answer was about the Muppets – but he failed to buzz in on one rare science question (and got good-natured ribbing from his fellow contestants for that). Later, he didn’t seem to know that Mt. Etna is in Sicily. And when shown a picture of President Grant, and told that his first name was the same as the title of a novel by James Joyce, all of which takes place in a single day, he – like the two actors on either side of him – stood clueless. This seemed especially embarrassing, for all of them, as it illuminated an ignorance not just of literature but of history. True, we weren’t all English majors, but we all studied American presidents. And who can forget Ulysses S. Grant?
Two actors and an astrophysicist can.
We went to the Beaux Arts festival at the University of Miami on Saturday and, as usual at South Florida art fairs, I found the artists more interesting than the art. One older gentleman was from Blue Hill, Maine.
“Roger Angell was from there,” I said.
“He was from Brooklin,” the man said, naming a nearby town. They had been friends. “What a dynamic man,” he continued. “Well into his 90s. He couldn’t see a thing, but he told wonderful stories. I miss him.”
One of the worst cliches in travel writing is “land of contrasts,” for it can be used to describe any number of places. But perhaps no place fits the description better than the United States. We have some of the world’s most overweight people and some of the world’s most health-conscious. We have terrible schools and great universities. For presidents, we’ve had Jimmy Carter and Donald Trump. Though it’s not clear if this last one is an example of our many national dichotomies or an indication of our national decline.