Monthly Archives: May 2024

Joe Stands Alone

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Something interesting came up the other day: in conversation elsewhere, I learned that Joe Biden is the ONLY member of his generational cohort (“The Silent Generation,” born between 1928 and 1945) to ever be President, and given the age of that group it’s likely none will follow him.

After Ike, POTUS was always a member of the so-called “Greatest Generation,” born between 1901 and 1927. They fought the war, hence the name. So, after Ike — a member of the prior “Lost” generation, born in 1890 — we had a parade of Greatests for thirty years:

  • JFK, born 1917, took office in 1961, and turned 44 his first year in office
  • LBJ, 1908, 1963, 55
  • Nixon, 1913, 1969,56
  • Ford, 1913, 1974, 61
  • Carter, 1924, 1977, 53
  • Reagan, 1911, 1981, 70 (which was a huge point of discussion at the time)
  • GHWB, 1924, 1989, 65

Then we skipped the Silent folks entirely, and the Boomers took over for nearly another 30 years:

  • Clinton, 1946, 1993, 47
  • GWB, 1946, 2001, 55
  • Obama, 1961, 2009, 47
  • Trump, 1945, 2017, 71

It’s only then that a member of the Silent cohort got elected, in what was really a black-swan electoral event in lots of ways — absent the very specific factors of the 2016 race, it’s easy to imagine a world where no Silent gets elected at all. Instead, Joseph R. Biden, born 1942, was inaugurated in 2021, and turned 79 his first year in office.

It seems clear he’ll remain the only Silent to ever sit in the Oval.

That got me thinking: Why?

Turns out? Numbers. The Silent cohort was comparatively small — especially compared to the groups that came before and after. There are lots of reasons for this, but the biggest ones are probably the Depression and the War depressing birth rates.

Pew suggests the Silent group was “only” about 47M births; compare that to the Boomers at 76M.

All this points me to an uncomfortable realization: my own cohort, GenX, is also a small group sandwiched between two much larger generations (the Boomers and the Millennials). That could lead to the Oval skipping us, too. :(

Oh well.

Books of 2024, #6: Babel by R. F. Kuang

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You’d think I’d get tired of hating books the SF critics love, but here we are again.

Babel is a mess. It’s yet another coming-of-age tale in SF, which is something I’m getting really tired of across the board; I mean, is it impossible for authors to imagine something interesting happening to adults? Fine. Whatever. If that was the only thing I disliked, this would be a different post.

The basic argument is that our point of view character (Robin) is a half-Cantonese youth orphaned by a cholera outbreak. Predictably, he’s “rescued” from poverty by an English academic, who adopts him as his “ward” and takes him back to Oxford to join the fictional Translation Institute there.

In the world of Babel, a sort of magic exists based on the user of silver bars engraved with matched-pairs of words in translation. The effect is derived from the tensions and implications inherent in translation. This is clever, but not NEARLY so clever as Kuang clearly thinks it is; one serious shortcoming of the book is an ENDLESS PARADE of footnotes describing this-or-that matched pair. Often, the footnotes are in untranslated Chinese, because I guess why not?

But even this bit of babble isn’t the main problem with the book. Publisher’s Weekly says it better:

Publishers Weekly negatively reviewed the novel, saying, “Kuang underwhelms with a didactic, unsubtle take on dark academia and imperialism.” They explained, the “narrative is frequently interrupted by lectures on why imperialism is bad, not trusting the reader or the plot itself enough to know that this message will be clear from the events as they unfold. Kuang assumes an audience that disagrees with her, and the result keeps readers who are already aware of the evils of racism and empire at arm’s length. The characters, meanwhile, often feel dubiously motivated.”

This is something I’ve joked about before as “Rand’s Disease.” Like lots of bright kids, I read Atlas Shrugged in high school. Ayn Rand’s books are notionally novels, but they’re not REALLY. What they are are long tirades about her philosophy masquerading as fiction. The characters are wooden and poorly fleshed out. Motivations are questionable. Reactions are bizarre. This is what happens when your priority is something other than the novel itself.

Kuang falls prey to this at every turn. Her characters are wooden and shallow. Motivations are sketchy at best. They all feel like sock puppets in a pantomime about the evils of colonialism. I’d say “cut out the endless rants and you’d have something,” except absent the pages and pages of anticolonialism I’m not sure what would be left.

And yet: it won the Nebula. I think SF people just must not care very much about the actual craft of fiction, and consider Big Idea shit to be the higher value, because holy hell this is a problem I run into a LOT when I read an “award-winning” SF text. In Babel’s Nebula year, it beat out the drastically better crafted Nona the Ninth, for example. Reading backward in the list of Nebula winners, I see only 7 genuinely excellent novels in the winner slots since 2020 (Butler’s Parable of the Talents; Gaiman’s American Gods; Chabon’s Yiddish Policemen’s Unions; Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl; Leckie’s Ancillary Justice; Jemisin’s The Stone Sky; Wells’ Network Effect).

Others obviously disagree, but I think my takeaway is that the Nebula isn’t a good indicator for quality for ME. (The Hugo list is marginally better, but there’s other issues there.)

What we talk about when we talk about the Stones

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So geriatric oldies act “The Rolling Stones” played here on Sunday. I’ve seen them before, most recently 30 years ago, and candidly it was already a bit hard to swallow 50+ Mick preening about when Clinton was president. At 80, it’s damn near a novelty act — and a gradually sadder and sadder one, given that at this point only Mick and Keith remain of the band that gave us the string of groundbreaking records in the late 60s and early 70s. Wyman has been retired since 1993. Charlie Watts has been dead for two years, which is hard to fathom.

Sure, they have Ron Wood as the “new guy” with half a century behind him, and that’s not NOTHING, but he’s also not on the good material. He joined because Mick Taylor had left, and his exit crippled the band creatively — at least, compared to what they accomplished with him. Taylor was in the band from Let It Bleed (1969) through I’s Only Rock And Roll (1974); that era includes Sticky Fingers and Exile on Main St. The Stones songs you know are overwhelmingly from 1974 or earlier, with some exceptions, and a GREAT chunk of their best material happened with Taylor on 2nd guitar.

In keeping with that, of the 18 songs they played Sunday, 11 were from 1974 or earlier. The newer tracks include 2 each from 1978’s Some Girls (“Beast of Burden” and “Miss You”) and 1981’s Tattoo You (concert favorite “Start Me Up” — realistically speaking, their only true hit since 1974 — and “Little T&A”).

The Tattoo You tracks are, at this point, 43 years old; they were also the youngest songs played aside from the obligatory sampling of last year’s Hackney Diamonds. Even with the new tracks in the mix, the average song age Sunday is old enough to schedule a colonoscopy. If you drop the 3 youngsters as outliers, the average age shoots up to 53.

Anyway, he’s a review — and setlist — from the other night, written by my pal Andrew. He’s awesome. It’s a fun read, even allowing for my snark about these octogenarians and their nostalgia tour.