Reflecciones contemporáneas

I cannot resist dogging on people our age who are not us. I know that to mourn the yellow-heartedness and flaccidity of our fellows as against the muscularity of past generations is a sport played since time immemorial, and I confess that I do it with glee. It's just so easy!

It's fairly commonplace for people who are older than us, but for whatever reason have never fully adjusted to exiting their twenties, to spend much of their time focused on assembling a definitive list of our characteristics. This process can go one of two ways: either we're despicable atomized cretins, or we're the vanguard of some new paradigm of educated, socially-aware individualism. I tend to stumble over the latter a good deal more than the former. You've gotta be pretty blithe--or pretty something--to see the seeds of representative politics in bittorrent.

But here's a great example of exactly that blitheness in the FT, in the form of some brand (no pun intended) of marketing creep chastising the old about their misguided attempts to understand the young. I present you with a couple of his more memorable reflections on us, all delivered amiably and with tongue not at all proximate to cheek:

Carol Phillips, a US marketing specialist who teaches at the University of Notre Dame, says Millennials like and respect their parents (which might come as a surprise to the parents). But one of the mistakes baby boomers frequently make, she says, is to assume their children are more like them than they are.

...

Ms Phillips says she has observed differences in the way her students absorb information compared with their parents’ generation. Her students are visual, she says. She has ditched a word-heavy textbook in favour of one with more pictures. Research she has done comparing responses to an edition of Vogue magazine showed that younger people concentrated on the design, colour and font, whereas older readers focused on the content.

Others have noticed a difference in the generations. Lord Judge, the lord chief justice of England and Wales, said recently the way juries received information might need to change. Lawyers might have to provide evidence on screens so that jurors could download it.

“If a generation is going to arrive in the jury box that is totally unused to sitting and listening, but is using technology to gain the information it needs to form a judgment, that changes the whole orality tradition with which we are familiar,” he said.

Things that I find concerning but the author does not are in bold.

Birthday Sex and boat shoes aside, what the actual characteristics of us guys are I don't wanna hazard. I will say that if I was some sort of educational administrator, something more than a high school principal but less than a Board of Ed warlock, and I was asked to modify my curriculum so that it supported students who like pictures than words, I would probably be felled instantly by strokes in every single part of my brain. My answer to Lord High Clancius P. Judgingsfield is no, you should under no circumstances modify jury arrangements for people who are "totally unused to sitting and listening." No, I would say that a cheaper and less degrading solution would be cut you a switch and scare them sasses out the way momma done.

And on a subject that is in no way related to children or the corporal punishment thereof, has anyone else heard that water deliveries to farmers in California's Central Valley are to be slashed between 85 and 100 percent? That assertion is made by Rebecca Solnit, the author of the LRB article to which I just linked. Knowing little about Californian agriculture, except that is is catastrophically wasteful and is totally dependent on cheap water subsidies from the federal government (which have helped exhaust the Colorado River entirely), I can't say concretely what effect this would have on farmers. I'll hazard a guess that it would be, I don't know, the knockout punch?

I'd keep my eyes on the west's water crisis in coming months. It's been coming to a head for a long time, but exacerbated by climate change--California's been suffering a three-year drought, for instance--and no doubt imperiled in the future by Washington's poor finances, those already diminished stocks have nowhere to go but down. The aquifer that feeds most of the midwest's corn belt is damn near depletion, too. As Major John Wesley Powell warned his fellows in 1888, when he completed the first survey of the west's rivers and lakes for the federal government, "I tell you, gentlemen, you are piling up a heritage of conflict and litigation over water rights, for there is not sufficient water to supply these lands." The fight will be between the midwest and the west, and it's bound to be ugly--how can we choose between Iowa cornbread or California fruit salad?