On “Generation Jones” and Social Change

Dear Rick,

As you and I have kept in touch over the decades since college, I have always expected that our professional paths would converge at some point. When the sponsors of a conference on Generation Jones contacted me for a possible session on social change, you came to mind as the perfect collaborator.

With roots tracing back to my campus activism in the nuclear weapons freeze movement, my stock in trade has been exerting pressure in the realm of politics and governmental policy. So my tens of thousands of hours have focused on questions of how to achieve change.

Spurred by the conference organizers, I could use your help with an underlying question: clarifying the link between a certain perspective on change-making and a generational sensibility. I’ve had this nagging sense that my own intensely pragmatic approach to change stems from being part of the Generation Jones cohort (born between 1954-1965).

Which is where you come in. In your work as a writer, you have been very mindful-and evocative-of the times we’ve lived in. For me, The Ice Storm captured something essential about a free-range youth that characterized many of our lives as 1970s kids. It seems like having to grope our way into adulthood was formative for our cohort. But this is where I need your help. I’m excited for the chance to complement my personal sense of generational identity with your deeper understanding of the zeitgeist and the cultural concerns and attitudes that shaped us.

These reflections also fit our time of life. You noted in the pre-correspondence of this project that we’ve both been deep into eldercare of our parents. Now we’re becoming the elder generation.

I’ll note a few things to get the ball rolling. For a start, what is this generational conceit anyway? Basically Jonathan Pontell came up with Generation Jones because of an uncomfortable fit with our older Baby Boomer siblings. Those of us born in the back end of the Baby Boom are more different than alike to those from the Boom’s first half. Too young to have gone to Woodstock.

In their youth, the “real” Boomers were at the vanguard of impressive strides for justice: ending the Vietnam War and restrictive roles for women. They broke America out of Eisenhower Era conformism. There’s no denying these achievements. To the extent this resulted in a highly optimistic sense of the possibilities generally for societal change, though, those were different times. Somehow, post-Woodstock America gave me a different attitude-motivated to achieve justice, sober about what it takes to do so.

Generation Jones-ers are often described as creatures of the Watergate Era. A time of so-called lost innocence. Given America’s original sins of slavery and the ethnic cleansing of indigenous First Nations, our innocence was never intact to being with. Regardless, the news of those days being filled with Nixon’s (now quaint-seeming) misdeeds no doubt affected our generation’s worldview. Going back to my personal intuition, I feel like the 1970s left me with a general wariness-as distinct from cynicism. Of course a belief that change is possible. At the same time, seeing near-term transformation as a pipedream. A let’s-be-real attitude about what is attainable in the shorter term.

Giving due credit to rising generations behind us, we now have a fuller appreciation of power structures and especially systemic racism. Occupy Wall Street broke the longtime taboo against public discourse on economic inequality (it can no longer be shut down just with shouts of “Class warfare!”) For anyone with a conscience and knowledge of American history, the Black Lives Matter movement made clear as day the need to finally have our country’s ever-postponed racial reckoning.

So what am I saying about pragmatism? I think it’s a matter of avoiding complacency and genuinely hungering for justice, yet at the same time reckoning with the entrenched nature of power realities and the status quo. The socio-economic-political system that we have accrued is flawed and unjust. But it is not held open for wholesale revision. Yes, Medicare For All and single-payer would be a better health care system. No, the Congress will not legislate the private insurance industry out of a job. Not any time soon.

Speaking of eras, writing this during early-Trump Redux calls for a special note. As noted, a key theme of this inquiry is that making change is hard. Given that Trump and the MAGAs are going pedal-to-authoritarian-metal on a truly radical agenda, a refinement is in order. Achieving constructive change is difficult, the system somehow gives more room for a reactionary wrecking ball.

The ascendancy of the far-right took place over the course of decades. The GOP lost any claim to be a center-right party and became extreme-right-anti-government rather than “small government” and nativist / racist. Ours is a generation with one foot in the 21^st Century and the other in the 20^th. So we know the history of the mainstream GOP resistance to the John Birch Society. And now we know who won. (There are many books that retrace this process. The best are by Republican insiders, my favorite is Stuart Stevens’ It Was All a Lie.)

Your pal, David (‘Dave’ to you and a few select others)

Dear Dave,

It’s a couple of weeks later, and a lot has happened in the world since you sent your note, much of directly related to what we’re trying to talk about, yes.

I’m going to tackle the questions one or two at a time, because they’re really big. First, and this is very much in line with the Generation Jones construct in a way I will address in a second, I have to say I sort of don’t believe in any of the generational reasoning! I sort of think it’s all bunk! I don’t think generations behave in lockstep at all, no more so than astrological signs do, and that when we say they do behave like a group we’re generalizing in a way that’s always slippery and inexact. I was teaching last week (I teach fiction writing, as you know, among other things) and someone said in class, about a certain story, “A man would never behave like this,” and I was filled with utmost skepticism, as always when presented with such a blunt-stick conviction. You have interacted with all the men, have you? And so you are sure based on your 100% response rate from all the men on earth that you have evidentiary support for your generalization? I feel the same way about all the generations, when faced with any kind of social science veneer regarding them. Gen Z kids, of course, are lazy, don’t get up on time, skip classes, don’t know how to use “who” as a pronoun, and are massively entitled. Well, except when they aren’t that way at all, and I regularly see them thus, completely shaking off the stereotypes.

So: I don’t know if I am truly in Generation Jones, at all, and were you (I mean the “you” in general) to assert that I was, I would probably start cataloguing all the reasons I am not.

However, I also believe that I am in no way a conventional Baby Boomer. And as you know nearly all commonplace Boomer dating includes your and my birth year (1961) within its putative boundaries. And boy do I not feel like I identify with the Boomers in any way. All you need is love? That is a really lofty bit of rhetoric until we get into the granular detail about how to bring it about. How to cause the change by which we, as a civilization, realize this very reasonable truth, so ably committed to song. Thus far we have done a shitless job of bringing about all you need is love. Whenever I think about the Summer of Love, moreover, I just think about bad acid trips, unwanted sexual advances from men, systematic oppression of Black students in the wake of the Civil Rights period, the Tet Offensive, the secret war in Cambodia, and so on. Where indeed is that girl with the flowers in her hair?

So: if skepticism, incrementalism, resistance to dogma, and practicality are features of Generation Jones maybe I do in fact inhabit many of its features. (The other day my wife told me about an alternate generational tag she’d heard: Xoomers.)

Indeed, as you point out, if we’re amassing evidence, I did in fact write a book (which then became a movie) that is drenched in Watergate-related anxiety and disenchantment, The Ice Storm, and I wrote it because my memories of the early seventies, from when I was a preteen, are of watching Watergate hearings, reading about Watergate (I read both Woodward and Bernstein books right when they came out), and theorizing about Watergate, and I can tell you exactly where I was the day that Nixon resigned (at summer camp-they told us at dinner that night), etc. Which I think means: I grew up pretty jaded about politics.

Good training for the political present. It seems as though everything we learned in middle school social studies is wrong! There are no checks and balances, and without election finance reform we will never have politics without the perfume of corruption, and so on. I think I have always believed that power always carries with it the potential for corruption. Only the most responsible of politicians and activists manage to evade the corrupting tendencies. Every effective Democratic firebrand, it seems, has his pecaddilo stashed in the closet, just like every megachurch pastor does, just like every family-values Republican congressman does.

And yet: if Watergate is a sort of a starting pistol for the foot race of Generation Jones, what are some of its later articulations? Through which we might make a case for it? Obviously, by profession and taste, I know a lot about culture, and I do think we (Generation Jones) have some very powerful cultural products to adduce as evidence of our achievement. At least for me, our music was (and remains) a real venue in which I have understood myself to be in a generation, with generational concerns. And the time when this was most obvious was, for lack of a better way of putting it, the punk rock time.

Let’s make a list of ten albums! In no order!

Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols

Give ‘Em Enough Rope, The Clash

Exodus, Bob Marley/Wailers

The Specials

Horses, Patti Smith

Marquee Moon, Television

One Nation Under a Groove, Funkadelic

Remain In Light, Talking Heads

I.T.T., Fela Kuti

Solid Gold, Gang of Four

Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, Dead Kennedys

I’m trying to stay in the late seventies here, or the very early eighties, with limited bleed from the groovy sixties, and this I have done because the late seventies (punk and post-punk) seem to me the years when this skeptical/oppositional Generation Jones tendency perhaps really took root and began to mobilize. My list above is not exhaustive, but it highlights musical artifacts that diametrically opposed to what was happening in the feelgood decade preceding. Reactive music, agitprop music, in all the senses of that. In those days, you know, I deeply hated The Grateful Dead, for example (though I sort of like them now), and Little Feat, and the Eagles, boy did I hate the Eagles. I hated anything that was about looking good and doing some self-actualizing with a guru and then snorting a little blow. Punk rock (a catch-all terminology here) was against all of that. I’m including The Clash, of course, because it’s a band I know that you and I both love, and because to me they typify something from the period that is essential. In a way, I can’t understand any political mobilization, any political theory, any idea of change, outside of The Clash and Gang of Four, and the post-colonial voices of Bob Marley and Fela Kuti.

Part of seeing music (and other cultural artifacts) as legitimate political tools is to be skeptical of what, e.g., SDS did, or what the Weather Underground did, and did not do, which is theorize, schematize, at great length, and then sort of get nothing done. Often by making the good the enemy of the great. If that is the formulation, if that is the trajectory, I am still against it. It is so of this moment, e.g., to think Joe Biden is a hack, a premise I mostly disagree with, but this is to forget that it was Biden, a practicing Catholic, who sowed the seeds for Obama’s changed position on gay marriage. The guy inside the machine, the consummate believer in the Senate, got that done, when the Clintons, e.g., were still resisting because they thought gay marriage was too politically costly. It’s not that I think Biden is perfect, but I’m inherently against far left dogma for the same reasons I’m against far right dogma. It’s too dogmatic.

Peace, Rick

Dear Rick,

True enough, talking about a generation in the aggregate comes with a danger of trying to homogenize a very large group of humans. And in looking for conformity, it’d go directly against the nonconformist impulse you observe in Gen Jones’ own cultural expressions.

How do we avoid that trap? Are there observations about our cohort that might hold up and give genuine insight? And insight into what, exactly? Why does this matter? How does it address the country’s very troubled political / societal moment?

Clearly our cohort doesn’t think or vote in lock step. It would be a fool’s errand to try pinning down some kind of collective consciousness. So let’s sharpen the question. Rather than a generational orthodoxy, can we detect tendencies of attitude and approach? Did the tenor of our youthful times give us certain formative cues?

Jonathan Pontell certainly thinks so. Again, he’s the marketing guru who conceived of Gen Jones and is part of the cohort himself. In line with my own sense of it, he’s characterized our generation as “practical idealists, forged in the fires of social upheaval while too young to play a part.”

While the Boomers were out changing the world, Jonesers were still school kids - wide-eyed, not tie-dyed. That intense love-peace-change-the-world zeitgeist stirred our impressionable hearts. We yearned to express our own voice. By the time we came of age and could take the stage, though, a decade of convulsions had left society fatigued. During the game we’d been forced to watch from the sidelines, and passage into university and careers came only after the final gun had long since sounded.

That sense of yearning and striving is integral to Pontell’s idea. Indeed he applies the label Jones to echo the 1970s vernacular for needing a fix (“basketball jones,” “love jones”) as well as “Keeping up with the Joneses.” Personally I think your skepticism about “Love is All You Need” hits closer to the mark. There’s actually more to that practical piece of “practical idealism.” It’s not that we missed out on the world-changing party because society was tired and not in the mood anymore. It’s that we weren’t into utopianism. (Since we are both religious believers, I want to say a bit more about love. It is the highest virtue, the greatest commandment, and a powerful redemptive force in human relations. But to echo the constitutional framers and Reinhold Niebuhr, we have to factor in humans’ more base tendencies in the organization of society, law, and government.)

This is what I mean by saying the societal order isn’t open for wholesale revision. In my own dialogue with the younger generation, my most frequent refrain is “How many things are we trying to change all at once?” For me, seriousness about change means charting a path from here to there-and reckoning with the things (meaning opponents) that stand in the way.

That’s why I like your defense of Joe Biden. You give him due credit for being a public servant, for a record of accomplishment and delivering meaningful help for ordinary people. (You’re also right that events move so fast these days that things change in the short time between our letters. It’s become clear that Biden really undercut his considerable legacy in his handling of the 2024 election.) In contrast, the overall sour mood in American politics has left too few voters who’ll recognize such successes. Recall also that during all the years Obamacare was unpopular and a stain on the Democratic brand-before it became popular-a chunk of that disaffection was folks on the left who felt the ACA didn’t go far enough. Never mind that it’d been 45 years since anyone had managed to pass major reforms.

Even calling it a “sour mood” probably understates the problem. One refrain of this Trump 2.0 moment has been “Is this what people voted for?” Or, “Didn’t people see this coming, see what Trump is about?” For a distressing number of core Republican voters, the answer is yes. But for the median swing voters who determine election outcomes, they chose candidates based on surface impressions rather than substantive issues and platforms, what younger folks call vibes.

So I’m glad you mentioned what we were taught in social studies. Trump and the MAGAs are indeed trashing those civics principles at every turn, but I think one of our generational duties is to keep hold of them. America’s self-government experiment confronts a truly overwhelming array of problems. Many are fundamental, including an emerging disconnect between electoral politics and the vital “people’s business” of governing. That’s what it means, for me, when elections and mass politics are no longer rooted in substantive issues.

If Democrats have to get better vibes to win elections, so be it. But I think our generation should try preserving that civics textbook idea of voters giving the mandate for what our elected leaders will do with their official powers. Public policy really is a thing. And while voters and other citizens can leave the details and workings to the decision makers, experts, and activists, getting voters’ input and direction at the ballot box is vital. In the few times I was on the local ballot, I was open and public about my ideas and priorities.

Then in terms of music. Your and my very similar tastes have been part of our relationship ever since we I first met in college. I like the way you highlight those key zeitgeist / generational themes in the music: non-conformism and humanism. I also appreciate your focusing on The Clash. Because of my decades as a superfan, it’s the one little corner of the culture I can address with proper rigor and confidence.

You’re pretty hard on the Eagles, but then it is in the nature of cultural movements to shift away from what came before. Perhaps our main critique of pre-punk music is that it wasn’t well grounded in the common struggles of life.

From the Clash side of things, I would vouch for relevance as a distinguishing characteristic. Many years down the line, I’ve gotta admit that Bernie Rhodes deserves significant credit. The band’s original manager was well known for his obnoxious pushiness and leftist militancy. Above all, though, he pushed the Clash to write songs that spoke to what was happening in people’s lives and the society around them.

But as good as the Clash were as trenchant critics and commentators, they shied away from too much advocacy and prescribing solutions. They just didn’t view it as their job-or didn’t want the job, or both. A pair of passages from Joe Strummer’s interviews make the point well:

People say our songs are political now because we deal in things that affect daily life, but I ain’t got no major plan to change the world.

We’re all looking for the great solution, but a bunch of loonies high on speed aren’t the people to supply it.

What interests me is the acknowledgment that changing the world is a tricky business. In these and other statements, the Clash resisted ideological orthodoxy or any notion of easy answers to society’s ills. (I remember that humility back at the time very well. To find those quotations, though, I had the help of Gregor Gall’s excellent 2022 scholarly study The Punk Rock Politics of Joe Strummer.)

Stay free, David

Dear Dave,

The really bad omnibus spending bill passed in the House this morning! Just awful! My grandmother and my wife’s mom and my stepfather were on Medicaid at the end of their lives, and it’s hard to imagine how they would’ve coped without it. My assumption is that it’s only a short time before the economic ramifications of this heartless approach to governing is plain to see. I wish we didn’t have to see these cruelties unfold in order to produce movement against the oligarchical forces at hand. But: one way to think about history is that it’s dialectical.

As you know, I’m always really interested in how David Shorr thinks about political change, because you’re really oriented in the direction of how to produce forward movement. I am somewhat in awe of this because of my own astringent feelings about political discourse. I think political thinking requires a veneer of idealism, to amass a group of voters, but is much more composed of strategic and tactical thinking. I am horrible at strategic and tactical thinking!

In a way, what I’m saying about the arts is that I don’t understand rhetorical language as specifically canted toward political speech. There is a sense of conviction that a certain kind of guy-standing-on-the-ramparts with megaphone is the quintessence of political speech. I don’t understand this to be the case at all. All speech is political speech. Maybe the related thought is that some political speech is art. Like the MLK “I Have a Dream” speech. Just an incredible work of art! If, therefore, part of our Generation Jones tendency is being anti-dialectical, then I bear this mark-that I don’t believe political speech and artistic speech are opposite or mutually exclusive.

A third way is just what I’m always after, just what I’m lobbying for here, and an essential trace of the Jones philosophy, at least as I understand it. In part, this emerges from my studies in theory back at our university. One could schematize this like this: continental philosophy and French critical theory had existed since May ‘68 (and my recollection of college time was that people were almost constantly talking about May '68), since the existence of the French journal called Tel Quel, but it wasn’t until Generation Jones came of age that it became de rigeur, intellectually, in the U.S. And a central tenet of critical theory, and thus a plank in the platform of my education, was the post-Hegelian idea that no dialectic is accurate. It’s never either one thing or the other thing, it’s never which side are you on, it’s never Republican or Democrat, it’s never man or woman (boy, does this one ring true right now), it’s never capitalist or communist, it’s never day or night, black or white, never sacred or profane, never American League or National League, it’s never East or West, never Oriental or Occidental, it’s never one or zero, there’s always a third term, a gray area, a space between. This is how I understand the theory of Generation Jones.

Jacques Derrida has a really interesting way of talking about this, as shown in his “principle of contamination.” The image that he used (somewhat reliant on Sartre’s Anti-Semite and Jew, as it schematizes oppositions) was that the French language, which wanted to be pure, was always already impure, and that there was no pure state for it to return to, especially in its reliance on English words. For me, the implication is further that there is never any purity, never ideological purity, ever, and this is especially true in, say, American politics. We are all ideologically corrupt.

The contamination principle frees us from the notion that there is lockstep which is required for accomplishing the political. We are all already contaminated. But at the same time nowhere in the contamination principle does it say that your political or ethical feelings are invalid. What has moved me, most powerfully about the pro-Palestinian student movement in the last year and a half has been the clarity of students’ feelings about the subject. They know exactly what they feel. (And, in way, Greta Thunberg is someone I really trust in this way. Thunberg feels what she feels and is apparently unwilling and unable to fake a conviction. And this is valuable.) And the reason that the iron fist of authoritarianism will have no ultimate ability to arrest completely this movement, I suspect, is because people are going to have their feelings whether they make an encampment or not. Bringing the police onto campus does not change that. On the contrary, force produces a powerful abreaction.

Peace, Rick

Dear Rick,

I spent last Saturday at the Wisconsin Democrats’ state convention, where everyone was absorbing the news of the spree of political violence and assassination in next-door Minnesota. In synchronicity with your letter, there was also a lot of discussion of narrative and its persuasive power. Sure enough, both of us have toiled in the realm of language and speech. One way to answer you is to look at narrative, in two senses of the word.

It feels silly saying this to a fiction writer, but personal stories land on each of us with truly neurological force. Humans make sense of life through stories. The Democratic political tribe, though, really needs to be reminded of this. The culture of our party has an overdeveloped sense of intellectual responsibility and bad habits of communicating in wonkish facts and figures. (I’m a Democrat, stop me before I put out another ten-point plan.) As an antidote, the Party’s been training us to elicit stories from voters, couch our key points in terms of stories, and share our own personal narratives.

But there’s second, important, meaning of narrative in the political realm. We talk about the prevailing political narrative as the entrenched perceptions and assumptions that pervade our discussion of so many issues. For the most part, this is to the great disadvantage of progressives. That’s because for most of our lifetimes, the American right wing has hammered a set of truisms. They’ve become lodged in the brain of the body politic, and we’re living with the consequences:

• Government takes our hard-earned money and fritters it away.
• Private businesses are the only economic engines we need.
• Just let the private sector do their efficient thing, don’t shackle them with bothersome regulation to protect the public’s wellbeing.
• Government shouldn’t be involved in our healthcare.
• Undocumented migrants are criminals and social service parasites.
• Republicans are the party of business and know how to run an economy.

Again, the point isn’t the truth or falsity of the narratives. The nature of their political power is that it doesn’t matter that they’re false. Just consider the last one and the fact that Democrats had to dig the economy out of the deepest ditch after the 2008 meltdown. And that Democrats have a clear record of presiding over stronger economies. Bill Kristol made the same point recently on a podcast, saying a branding problem like this can’t be solved in a year or two.

“Why so pessimistic, Dave?” you might ask.

As we take stock of generational sensibility, I guess I see our cohort equipped for a very particular form of realism. Usually realism connotes cynicism and world-weariness. Echoing what I said back in that initial letter, I think the Gen Jones sensibility wants a more just society, will press for it, but aren’t deluded about what we’re up against. That it’ll be a fight, rather than something that should happen tomorrow.

Is wanting a third way part of it? Maybe. I think you’re saying Gen Jones puts a premium on individuality and the essential freedom of being authors of our own lives. And hey, I’m an existentialist. Truly. [For us Kierkegaard fans, with our animus toward Hegel, we have our own problems with dialectics.]

If we’re talking about a third way between all-or-nothing demands for transformation and cynical plague-on-all-houses defection from sober self-government, yes that’s exactly what I have in mind. Personally, the attitude of ‘transformation or bust’ annoys the hell out of me. G-d if only it were that easy.

So I’ll close with my favorite President Obama quotation

Better is good. It might not be perfect, it might not be great, but it’s good. That’s how progress happens in societies and in our own lives.

Dear Dave,

I was thinking this morning that the Jones issue is partly about naming and about who gets to name a thing. This subject has arisen in a series of emails I exchanged with a former student of mine, Yoon, who is now at the divinity program at Harvard. Yoon uses they/them pronouns and was, while at Tufts, a fantastic living example of how to think non-binary, and now they are at Harvard and are studying theology while refusing to name a denomination as an area of study. They are studying religion but refusing to name a religion. All this while, on that campus, the post-October 7 debate rages on, with, as you know, enormous implications for higher education in this country. Where, it seems, you absolutely have to be binary, in terms of sides. There’s either the one or the other. I have found the discussion with Yoon incredibly interesting, and of course at some point we ended up quoting from that opening line of the Tao Te Ching, “The way that can be named is not the true way.”

Partly, the Jones narrative (the narrative that “we” are a separate generation) derives from a similar refusal to be named.

The Trans community is the leading edge of this revolution, and that’s why, one suspects, they are coming in for the absolute vilification that they are dealing with presently. Self-evidently, the vilification is appalling, and, though today I’m trying to avoid sectarian anything, powerfully anti-Christian. That is how it seems to me. Jesus of Nazareth never mentions the Trans community, etc. (And all the alleged passages in the Bible about homosexuality are arguable.) But he does mention the poor and afflicted, in the most loving ways-and maybe no community is more afflicted right now.

Maybe in a way that’s what you’re talking about. You get that small stuff done, and then, bit by bit you get the bigger things done. With stories. And without needing a label.

Happy third of July!

Rick

Hi Rick,

So let’s talk about the problems with ideology and the supposed uninfected purity thereof. I’ll start with the big ones. I don’t identify as a capitalist even though, by some definitions, the label might fit. Mainly because I see a place for the marketplace. For me, the right approach is a mixed economy with private and public sectors playing their proper roles. Here I take guidance from some of the most basic precepts of economics. The dismal science says markets do a serviceable job of distributing private goods. But only the most doctrinaire free market fundamentalists deny the crucial correlate: markets do not generate public goods such economic equity, health care, environmental protection, consumer safety…

Meanwhile our political culture has been venerating business tycoons and disparaging civil servants (aka bureaucrats) for decades. With the result that Trump and Elon Musk are getting away with dismantling the federal government through mass firings of civil servants.

This is where the unrelenting extreme rightward drift of one of our two major parties has brought us. In their unprincipled drive for plutocratic power, the right wing has gamed the American governance system for entrenched rule by a political minority. And the same has happened in the discourse-the public square that’s been my habitat and fascination. Which is why I want to clarify the nature of the right wing bullet points listed in my last letter.

Crucially, all of those lines are dominant narratives rather than talking points. In a way, they’re a result of talking points. That is, when talking points have been jackhammered home in public halls, TV tubes, and dining rooms insistently for years and years. The narratives I listed have all become embedded in our politics as the prevailing assumptions about government, society, and the economy.

Just think of all the times you’ve heard someone say recently “Of course there’s a need for reform and greater efficiency in government, this just isn’t the way to go about it.” In other words even as Musk and Project 2025 are burning down the Social Security Administration, many opponents of MAGA still feel compelled to acknowledge problems with government.

Nor do Democrats lack for counterarguments. It’s not that we need talking points to push back with, we need to somehow loosen the right wing’s ideological grip. We need to gain an upper hand so that center-left perspectives open more room for center-left candidates, decisionmakers, and policies.

But I should pull the lens back out to our broader subject of a putative Generation Jones sensibility about social change. It seems like we’re saying the opposite of ideology is pragmatism. Maybe the approach of slogging towards Bethlehem in practical, workable ways aligns with our generational worldview. Indeed the topic of this dialogue traces back to President Obama’s political identity as a pragmatist from Gen Jones.

Society and politics alike undergo pendulum swings. The Silent Generation was about conformity, and the Boomers were about breaking free of social convention. For me Generation Jones is about seeking the sweet spot in between rigid establishment culture and all-you-need-is-love counterculture. That, and the way our generational cohort was left to find that sweet spot on our own. Growing up in the wake of sexual and social revolutions-amidst divorce and many of our Silent Generation parents feeling pretty unsettled themselves -meant steering into adulthood with minimal guidance. To give an apt example, my very profession of policy change advocacy wasn’t very well developed as a career field when I got my start in the early- / mid-1980s. I was kind of taking a flyer in my choice of career.

One last thought about ideology and how it tends to oversimplify things. Perhaps our generation understands that situations and issues are rarely simple. Taking the war in Gaza as an example, we can say so many things that are true at the same time. Biggest picture, Israel has long been both militarily dominant and besieged. Too many of its critics have lost sight of the besiegement and the history of antisemitism and genocide that led to Israel’s creation.

But continuing with the idea multiple true things, the October 7^th attack was utterly barbaric, and the Israeli response became brutal beyond militarily justification as time went on. The IDF is liable for war crimes, yet this is not a campaign for genocidal extinction. The war is being run by the most extreme right-wing government in Israeli history-including parties and constituencies who actually do wish for ethnic cleansing of Palestinians-and it was initiated by Hamas, who themselves could stop it anytime. One thing on which there is broad consensus: Netanyahu is a self-aggrandizing asshole, terrible leader for Israel, and has somehow de-professionalized the IDF when it comes to the laws of armed conflict. (As part of my professional development, I was fortunate to take a summer seminar on the laws of war with instructors from the International Committee of the Red Cross.)

As you know, I worked on US foreign policy for several decades-pushing for the United States to be the most benevolent superpower possible. But of course this dialogue about clarifying more basic attitudes about society, politics, and change. And again, I really appreciate your joining me in this.

Your pal, David

Hey Dave,

How are you? How are you feeling? How are your eyes? I could make a good argument that cataract surgery is utterly relevant to our discussion, since it’s about how one observes the world, and, at present, you are noticing colors you did not notice before. It’s relevant! But it (cataract surgery) is also about the fact that the Generation Jones crowd is older, and now we are seeing from the very precipice of social security (recently I really checked very closely that form from social security administration about how much I’m going to make from them). How we see, our ability to see, our ability to be unvarnished in our seeing and evaluating, is what makes us useful, I think. And now you are seeing even better.

You lodge a totally valid critique of dogmatic capitalism, ergo, and mine tracks close to yours. I want no part of it. I think it’s inherently sociopathic, and I think the Marxist critique of how labor is used in capitalism is just exquisite and one hundred percent accurate-our goods and services are never without exploitation. And this is how the sociopathy works. To wear this t-shirt I’m wearing right now (which I had to buy this week because there’s no washing machine where we are staying right now), from Target, I should and ought to think about exploited labor in Asia, which caused my t-shirt to be. But capitalism, and this is especially true in this moment surveillance tech, always wants to conceal its exploitation. The inability to articulate or feel the suffering of others is built in.

I would go further, however, and observe (really speaking like a postmodernist, which I think is the Jones literary position) that capitalism doesn’t entirely exist. In the United States of America, the closest thing to a libertarian, market-driven economy anywhere on earth, the capitalist impulse is admixed with certain kind of government-driven social investment, and this is true even in the lamentable white nationalist theocracy, where now we invest publicly in private schools and churches. (It’s not a diminishment of the “socialist” investment of which the Democratics are accused, it’s simply a redirection thereof.) A similar principle adheres to communism, of course. It doesn’t exist, it never existed. Marx was a truly brilliant writer and critic, but no politician. And so now we have a model of communism, chiefly in East Asia and Southeast Asia, which is simply state capitalism with a centralized autocratic upper layer. Ergo: capitalism and communism do not, in any pure form, exist. They are just ways to try to describe fungible political and economic modalities that are already impure. These economic ideas are contaminated.

Suddenly, this week, I started reading like a maniac about the Red Army Faction in Germany. I don’t quite know how I got there, but it had tangentially to do with something I was meaning to do in a short story. I think I had known a bit about Baader-Meinhof at Brown, because it was a thing (like Maoism) that semioticians liked to bandy about, and obviously the tendency of the German media to sexualize Ulrike Meinhof and other people in the group made the RAF easy to glamorize them, such that the glamor version was perfectly constructed for undergrads. But I have been reading a lot about Meinhof now, in the not glamorous time of late middle age, and I have been reading her writing a bit, and it’s just really interesting to me how the rhetoric of political change became so entirely wrong. Meinhof’s original writings in konkret had a pacifist and somewhat liberal protestant vibe, but than, almost all at once, she moved from thinking writing and public debate were somehow insufficient. The argument among the RAF was called counter-violence. It wasn’t really violence, because it was directed at the state apparatus, which had in effect “started it,” and it, “counter-violence” was the way to respond, and the only legitimate route (according to the RAF position) to the necessary results.

After a fashion, all of the Trump/MAGA wailing about “Antifa,” which group I believe does not exist in any substantial numerous fashion at all, is to try to cast any opposition in the same light, as a terrorist group that means to kill people (as, e.g., the Weather Underground did in this country) in order to try to produce its own necessary results. The MAGA diehards see “Antifa” this way because they themselves trust violence as a methodology. In this way they effectively suggest that January 6^th was counter-violence.

The RAF, of course, at one point cites Eldridge Cleaver, “You either have to be part of the solution, or you’re going to be part of the problem.” But to me this dialectical thinking is fundamentally incorrect-this assumes you can lock into a position, that this position is a fixed state, and that you can lock in without variation, and that this position is the opposite of some other countervaling position. Contrarily, a thing I love about Ibram Kendi’s How to Be an Antiracist is that it argues taxonomically backward from an action approach, rather than requiring an orthodoxy of belief in order to get there.

But I note that Kendi was born in 1982! He’s at the threshold of the Millennials right after Gen X!

Anyway, this is what I was trying to say about the Gen Zs and their refusal to name. And now I am going to try to make the point larger. While it’s really obvious that the white theocratic forces in the United States hate the trans community as an extension of their hatred of the LGBTQ+ community, and especially they hate the trans community because they, the theocrats, lost on the gay marriage front and they are worried that it’s going to happen again, what I think they chiefly hate, in truth, whether they are willing to admit or not, whether it is self-evident to them or not, is that the trans community wants to critique the dialectical opposition that goes by the name: men and women. The trans community proves that every cherished opposition is inexact. And anyone can see the light on this. As Derrida might say, every dialect is always already collapsed.

Peace!

Rick

Hi Rick,

Yes, I’m glad I got my cataracts taken care of. At the non-metaphorical level, it doesn’t affect the perception of colors, but it certainly removed the blurring of my natural-born ocular lens. As intended.

Continuing one of the threads of these letters, life in the Trump era keeps going from bad to worse. The authoritarianism has progressed from dismantling the modern administrative state to unraveling the social safety net to thuggish racist mass deportations to thuggish deployments of the military as well as lawless paramilitary ICE and CBP goon squads against American communities. All this after the countless times we’ve heard the right wing’s shrill false alarms about jackbooted government authorities enforcing leftist doctrine.

The country is in a terrible mess. The problems have piled up far beyond any set of dependable remedies at our disposal. One of the few sure things: it starts with winning elections to throw these authoritarian bums out.

As noted, you and I have been around for a while (heck, our friendship itself is in its fifth decade). Along the way, one is bound to accrue a little wisdom. The idea behind this joint writing project is about a kind of shared wisdom-wide-angle perspectives that many of us 1970s kids have as products of our times. And I want to close by saying it’s been a pleasure to add this new dimension of writing / thought partnership to our long friendship.

Meanwhile as the Clash song says…

Stay free, David