Even the people I root for on Jeopardy! are losing.
One of the things I hate about this country is how, if you express familiarity with something from the past – and not ancient history, a period more than 50 years ago – you are not admired for your knowledge but mocked for being old. In the United States, it’s better to feign ignorance than to date yourself.
So I was pleased and surprised to see all the tributes to Tom Lehrer, the songwriter who made a name for himself in the ’60s by singing about Alma Mahler, Wernher von Braun, and Nikolai Lobachevsky. Clearly, knowledge of what came before was not the stigma in the ’60s that it is today. Lehrer’s broad learning – in culture, science, mathematics (his true love, which would eventually woo him away from the world of entertainment) – made him an unlikely star even back then and an unimaginable one today. One obit called him “popular and erudite,” making him probably the last American to be described with those two adjectives.
I stand by what I said about the 4th of July. I'm like those people who, around the middle of December, say they're not in the mood for Christmas.
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?”