Slate's Bizbox
the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Christopher Caldwell and Jonathan Mahler

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Christopher Caldwell

Permanent Adolescence

Posted Monday, Feb. 28, 2000, at 3:20 PM ET

Dear Jonathan,

For all the clichés about the speed of cyberliving, gimmicks like GaryColeman-dot-com are signs that the Internet slows things down, too. It can turn adolescence from the alarmingly prolonged stage it already is into everyone's permanent mindset. I'm amazed at the emergence in the 1990s of a nostalgia market aimed at young people. The first sign was that silly, circa-1992 Bud commercial where a bunch of guys sit around shooting pool and saying "Ginger!" ... "The Professor!" ... "Thurston Howell III!," with every invocation of the dramatis personae of Gilligan's Island met with a complacent snigger.

Why a 30-year-old show like Gilligan's Island in the first place? The people who would have felt real nostalgia for Gilligan would have been 50-ish in 1992, as indeed the people who designed the ad probably were. The commercial has 22-year-olds in it because the ad's 50-year-old producers think they're still 22. (And they surely have the tiny little dork-knob ponytail, pulled strenuously back from their balding heads and captured, just barely, with an elastic band, to prove it.)

Another example: the movie Clueless, where the high-school girls listen to Squeeze's "Tempted." Sorry--it's the 35-ish movie execs who listened to that in high school. If '90s high-schoolers have heard of Squeeze, it's from listening to oldies stations, or by pulling out their parents' records to show their friends what a record looks like.

I blame the Internet for a lot of this. If I wanted to feel like I was 12 again, I could go home tonight, watch the 1975 World Series, read the papers from the following day, and shop for an AMC Gremlin. Not healthy.

• • •

"The Holocaust on Trial" has a legitimate and an illegitimate sense. Sense No. 1: There are important arguments to be had, for example, about whether the Holocaust's evil a) fits into the picture of human evil that you find in the Bible and in the moral philosophers--or b) presents something heretofore unsuspected about the ugly side of the human heart, which we must learn to take account of. There are excellent arguments on both sides. That's the sense in which the Holocaust can be "put on trial."

Sense No. 2 is outright Holocaust denial, which is about as productive a subject as "The Mississippi River on Trial" would be if it meant examining whether that body of water was a hoax perpetrated by Mark Twain and the governors of the Midwestern states. Most people who apply the "Holocaust on Trial" probably think Irving/Lipstadt is about Sense No. 1 rather than Sense No. 2.

That's just a guess. I haven't read a word of the trial coverage, largely for those reasons and the ones you alluded to: It's an argument over a non-issue made possible by a stupid law. I read D.D. Guttenplan's piece (which did use the dread H-on-T trope) in the Atlantic. Found it hard to penetrate. It included one of the most opaque passages I've ever seen:

There is, Christopher Hitchens once argued, 'no obligation, in defending or asserting the right to speak, to pass any comment on the truth or merit of what may be, or is being, said.' Indeed, the suggestion of something rank about a speaker's views, as Hitchens gently reminded Chomsky, merely gives those who would defend his right to speak 'all the more reason not to speculate' about those views.

I quickly got the gist of Hitchens, but after five readings I'm still without a clue what Guttenplan means. It's one of those Washington-style sentences, full not just of double negatives but also of semi-negatives and pronouns without antecedents. So you have to read the sentence backwards, casting out pairs of words in the (usually vain) attempt to find a kernel of meaning underneath. As in: "He was not among the least likely to be skeptical about repudiating the override of the veto."

Best,
Chris

the breakfast table
entries
12345678910111213141516
from: Christopher Caldwell

Permanent Adolescence

Posted Monday, Feb. 28, 2000, at 3:20 PM ET
Print This ArticlePRINTDiscuss this in The FrayDISCUSSEmail to a FriendE-MAIL
Share on FacebookPost to MySpace!Share with MixxDigg ThisShare with RedditShare with del.icio.usShare with FurlShare with Ma.gnolia.comShare with SphereShare with Stumble Upon
Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at the Weekly Standard and a columnist for New York Press. Jonathan Mahler is a senior editor at Talk.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?
POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

Highlights from The Fray:

[The Breakfast Table participants covered a wide variety of serious and political subjects this week, and as usual Fraygrants knew which were the really important topics, and were keen to participate in the life of the mind:]

The reason the quoted verse of the Steely Dan lyrics makes no sense is that you have omitted the central line:


Any major dude with half a heart
Surely will tell you, my friend
Any minor world that breaks apart
Falls together again.
When the demon is at your door,
In the morning he won't be there no more.
Any major dude can tell you

Doesn't that make it crystal clear?

--Ralph Bartlett

(To reply, click here.)


I rather think that Jonathan missed Chris' main point. Baseball teams shouldn't be adopted for their success, or for their failures. There's something mightily strange about growing up in California and rooting for the Yankees. After all, there was hardly any shortage of New York teams on the West Coast - whence the need to appropriate the only one that remained where it belonged? I'm a Red Sox fan because I was born and raised fifteen minutes from Fenway Park, because one of my strongest childhood memories is the glory of '86 (and yes, the pain), and because hope springs eternal at the end of winter. I do, however, want to compliment Chris. He may not be a native New Yorker, but he seems as smugly superior as any Yankees fan whom I have ever met.

--Yoni

(To reply, click here.)


Maybe it's one of those "you had to have been there" sort of things, but I thought The Sure Thing was charming. It was funny without being crude or stupid. And the punchline you were strugling with? After a series of catastrophes, the protagonists find themselves locked out of shelter in a downpour. The girl suddenly recalls that she has a credit card, but "I'm only supposed to use it for emergencies!"

--Bill Altreuter

(To reply, click here.)


To Bill Altreuter:
Actually that was the set-up line. The punch line followed: "Maybe one will come up."

--B.Roman

(To reply, click here.)


You should start and post a list of phrases to be banned from the press henceforth. My three nominees (for now): 1) sloe-eyed; 2) tsunami; 3) "I knew (blank) and you're no (blank)."

--Matt Murray

(To reply, click here.)


Here are some more proposed Taboo Phrases: 1) Its the *******, stupid! 2) Risky tax schemes 3) Move forward 4) Media savvy 5) Sole remaining Superpower 6) Outside the mainstream 7) Go negative.

--John McGraw

(To reply, click here.)

Washington Post
The Washington Post
OPINIONS
Imagine if...
Hiatt | What if McCain had waged his campaign based on respect?
Editorial: Meddlesome PalinKing: The Danger of Palin Power