“Maybe,” he said hesitantly, “maybe there is a beast . . . What I mean is . . . maybe it’s only us.”
—William Golding,
Lord of the Flies
IN THE DOLDRUMS OF FUN
School, given the amount of childhood that’s spent in it, should form a greater part of this picture. But it doesn’t. School was just there, inexorable, inevitable, and almost escape-proof. In our childhood, school life held the place that real life would occupy in our adulthood. You could avoid school but only by doing things that were worse or had worse consequences such as getting sick or telling wild lies, the juvenile equivalents of dying or going to Promises Malibu.
There were public schools and Catholic schools, mostly indistinguishable except that in the latter you learned about the infinite mercy of the blessed Virgin Mary and got your knuckles whacked more often.
Schools were big buildings. They resembled fortifications or castles. But they had been carefully designed to avoid any suggestion of the romance associated with citadels, strongholds, and keeps. The windows were large, to give children plenty of the healthy sunlight that didn’t use to cause skin cancer and lots of air during the climate change that happened only twice a year, spring and fall, instead of all the time. Through those large windows we learned what a wide and wonderful world it is and how much we’d love to be out in it.
Some of the massive public schools that were built in the first third of the twentieth century haven’t yet been torn down or repurposed. But their windows have been replaced with insulated panels that leave just a slit of casements for students to peer through. And we wonder at the increase in childhood suicide rates.
School started at 8:30. Before the doors opened children were expected to form two lines, one for the boys and one for the girls. The boys pushed each other. The girls teased each other. We would have been better behaved if we’d been mixed together, but the people who insist on organizing life and the people who have no idea how life is organized were and always will be the same people.
Classrooms were well populated. I count forty-two children in my third-grade class picture. The teacher was, until junior high, invariably a woman, usually single, and alone at her station of command. Teachers’ aides had not yet been sent to the aid of teachers. Busybody parents weren’t sticking their noses in from the back row. Elected representatives of the school board weren’t visiting to make sure that the curriculum was conformist, or that the curriculum was nonconformist, according to which kind of nut won the school board election. Not that our teachers needed such assistance. They wielded the kind of unalloyed power that God used to have in the Old Testament before 1950s Sunday school teachers got to Him.
Corporal punishment was not unknown in public schools. But its infrequency and the seemingly random nature of its application made it less a deterrent than a suburban legend. Paddling gave us a sort of campfire story to tell on the way home from school. “And then he was sent to the principal.”
The more effective disciplinary measure was to send us to sit in the hall. A break from the crowded, busy classroom would have been a relief to a sensible generation, but we are a sensitive generation and can’t stand to be isolated. The worst penalty we could devise, when we got children of our own, was to give them a “time-out.” Probably the tykes were thinking—like many people who have had experience with our generation—“Please, make it two.”
Our teachers were not old bats by any means. Many were fresh from their El Ed major at state universities and full of innocent enthusiasm. Others were old bats. Pedagogical methods combined the hopelessly old-fashioned with the hopelessly newfangled. There was still copious rote learning and much copying of things from blackboards. We were made to memorize the alphabet both forward and backward, the latter being something I most certainly can’t do to this day. I didn’t have much success with the former either. When I use the dictionary I’m still singing the “ABC Song.” My parents bought the 45 and I played it on a little red record player. I used to catch myself, among Y and Z words, mouthing the lyrics of the final verse—Now I know my ABCs/Aren’t you very proud of me?—sometimes aloud, which occasioned looks in the college library.
We were taught to read with flash cards. “You can remember it’s the word look because it has two eyes in the middle.” This is not conducive to good spelling. It’s no accident that SpellCheck is a product of the Baby Boom, and no accident that we misspelled “spell check.” Anything to get out of liiking up words in the dictionary.
On the other hand, History and Geography had been replaced with Social Studies. By the end of grade school we were well prepared to go out and take Margaret Mead’s place in Samoa, if we’d known where Samoa was. We studied the handicrafts, songs, and square dances of the American pioneers. We knew everything about frontier life except when it happened and why. There was a great fad for coonskin caps thanks to the Walt Disney show’s Davy Crockett episodes, which were only slightly less historically inaccurate than Margaret Mead. We understood that pioneers wore coonskin caps. We didn’t understand that they’d had to eat the raccoon first.
One lesson the Baby Boom did learn was that we were being bored on purpose. Until we understood school we regarded boredom as an accident—nobody to play with, nothing but Name That Tune on TV. At its worst, during Thanksgiving dinner with a relentlessly joshing Uncle Timmy, or on a visit to Grandma’s ancient friend who was under the impression that children liked horehound candy, boredom was the result of mistakes in attempts to entertain us. Being boring was a fault, not a vice. It had never occurred to us that boredom could be premeditated.
Our generation does not believe in original sin. But we do believe that Adam and Eve were boring. We take it on faith that humankind has fallen from divine enjoyment of life. We carry the burden of blasé and are continually tempted to ennui in thought and deed. We can be restored to an Edenic state only by the grace of the Interesting.
We know this from school and from Sunday school, Scouting, summer camp, and organized sports. If you weren’t bored by these institutions and activities, you weren’t paying attention.
Let us not commit an intentional fallacy. The grown-ups bored us. They had a purpose for doing so. Therefore they bored us on purpose. That is not to say they meant to bore us. Quite the contrary with Sunday school teachers, who tried everything to make religion entertaining. God, how they failed.
The tedium of Sunday school, though less frequent and prolonged than the tedium of school, produced greater hopelessness and despair. It was a theft from the heavenly gift to us kids, the weekend. In church basements all over America the gospel of Mark 10:14 was being invoked, “Suffer the little children to come unto me,” leaving little children wondering what they’d done to deserve the suffering (“. . . and the children shall rise up against their parents,” Matthew 10:21, but that verse was never taught).
Jesus should have been frighteningly interesting. He was undead. He wore his bathrobe outdoors. He had a beard. The halo thing meant he glowed in the dark. But by the time the Sunday school teachers were finished with Him all the gee whiz had been taken out of Jesus. He was always patient, kind, gentle, and understanding. The people we knew who were like that were really dull, except Mom. And Mom would give us hell sometimes while Jesus, we were told, was giving us the other place.
The glory of the other place was so vaguely described that it’s easy to understand why our generation would mistake getting high on drugs for it.
Hell should have been fascinating. But the Sunday school teachers explained it as a sort of absence, without an excuse, from meeting God. Meeting God, this sounded worrisome. But hell went on forever. This sounded like Sunday school.
Despite my name, both my parents were milquetoast Protestants. The O’Rourkes had been Catholic but in the 1920s my widower grandfather divorced his lunatic second wife. She’d put her stepchild—my dad’s baby brother, later to become overjocular Uncle Timmy—out on the back steps in the snow as punishment for wetting his pants. His underwear froze.
The Catholic Church refused to grant an annulment. Granddad got so angry that he joined the Freemasons, the Republican Party, and the Lutheran Church, all in one day. It’s a family story that is, as we journalists say, too good to check. Mom came by her Presbyterianism honestly.
During the 1950s denominations of the Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, and Episcopalian kind had fitted the Light of the World with a lampshade so it wouldn’t produce distracting salvational glare and dampened the fires of perdition to avoid spiritual smoke inhalation. A stillness of the soul and a quiet reverence during church services had been turned into sitting still and being quiet.
Catholic kids had the advantage of scary nuns, still in full habits. Did they have hair? Did they have feet? Priests, performing the mumbo jumbo of the Latin Mass, were almost as impressive as stage magicians. A Catholic priest could probably pull a quarter out of your ear. (That he could do something else in some other place of yours was not yet a popular article of faith.) And saints were all over the place with special powers like comic book superheroes but more numerous and more outlandishly costumed although beset with really a lot of Kryptonite causing them to be martyred all the time.
And there were kids, like Johnny MacKay, who went to the other kind of Protestant church, the kind in a cement block building with a clever sign out front.
CH RCH TODAY
WHAT’S MISSING?
U ARE
Never mind that much of the congregation and maybe the preacher hadn’t finished high school, here was learning and culture. Worshippers were the heirs of Jonathan Edwards, one of colonial America’s great religious thinkers, and conversant with the brilliant prose style of his “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” “Consider the fearful danger you are in: ’tis a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath . . . you hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it . . .” Their religion had special effects.
My religion had specific evasions. The more specific the query I made, the more evasive was the response. How come Santa isn’t in the crèche at Christmas? Baby Jesus is getting presents from the Three Wise Men but nothing from Santa? Does the Easter Bunny come before or after Jesus rises? When the rock was rolled back was the candy inside or outside the tomb? What does the Holy Ghost dress up as on Halloween?
Baby Boomers mock born-agains (or we do until we get cancer, go to jail, or reach the “Higher Power” part of the 12-step program). But Christian fundamentalists can answer these questions and we can’t.
Scouting was Sunday school with mission creep. There was God and Country and for some reason both were in the Great Outdoors. The proper way to show respect for God and Country when They were outdoors was to adopt pseudomilitary dress and behavior.
We liked wearing the uniforms until we realized, immediately, that they looked stupid. We did not actually go outdoors much. Most Scouting was done in the church gymnasium, but at least it was on a weeknight. I remember maybe three camping trips in my five years of desultory participation in the Boy Scouts. It rained.
“Boy Scout” was not a term of endearment among the Greatest Generation. They’d had enough of military dress and behavior, pseudo- or otherwise. There was no superabundance of dads volunteering to be Scoutmasters. Organizational details were left to high school–aged Eagle Scouts who didn’t—even we could tell—have much of a life at high school.
Cub Scouts got no male supervision at all. Den Mothers did their best. As a crafts project for our den, Johnny MacKay’s mother chose painting china figurines of choirboys. She had the figurines glazed in the kiln belonging to Mrs. Furstein who lived one block over and was arty. I don’t think this was what Baden-Powell had in mind.
When we graduated to the Boy Scouts proper there was the knot tying. What a tangled skein of cordage had to do with God and Country was not clear. What was to be done in the Great Outdoors with a big snarl of rope wasn’t clear either. Study of the classics was not a strong point in 1950s education. If we’d known the legend of Alexander the Great and the Gordian knot we would have used our Scout knives on something besides our little brother’s hair and sliced right through the hopeless clumps of failed half hitches, sheet bends, and bowlines. Or, anyway, we would have cut ourselves free from the Boy Scouts. As it was, the knottiness prefigured a generational tendency to find the most complex solutions to our problems. Health care reform, variable rate subprime mortgages, and Microsoft Word come to mind.
First aid was also taught. If you need it you’d better hope someone my age doesn’t get to you first. And there were weak attempts to memorize semaphore flag signals and do other things that didn’t engage our attention, followed by Battleball.
Steve Penske and I were charged with forming a new patrol. We chose the name Bat Patrol. We had the coolest patrol badge. Our patrol’s call was an “EEEEEEE,” inaudible to human ears.
We weren’t any good at going to summer camp either, as Woodstock was to prove. Summer camp was basic—leaky forest, dense cabins, mucky mess hall, and a lake that smelled like greasy food. In time our generation would become fans of the primitive, the rustic, the crude, and the clumsily handmade. But not when our parents were paying for it.
We played Capture the Flag at summer camp. The point of the game was to lose the unpopular kids in the woods. At my camp everyone was unpopular.
Summer camp was an exercise in doing things we didn’t want to do with people we didn’t know. A nature hike with a bunch of strangers was a lot like going to work. We in the Baby Boom put that off for as long as we could, but when we did go to work—on politics, finance, media, and the Internet—we did so with such a will that we almost wrecked the country, so summer camp must have been a suitable preparation.
Organized sports, as they were foisted upon us, had only a tenuous relationship to real sports, the kind we and our dads rooted for on radio and television. My friends and I didn’t make a mental connection between Little League and the Cleveland Indians or even between Pop Warner football and the athletic glories on display from September through Thanksgiving in our local high school stadium.
Part of the problem was the fan base. Our parents didn’t come down from the stands at our games and hit coaches, opposing players, and each other in swell melees that went viral and got, like, a million hits on YouTube. Such behavior was inconceivable. It would have meant that our parents had come to our games.
Our parents were home getting a little peace and quiet while sports “kept us out of trouble.” Meanwhile, we could imagine ourselves as sports stars, but not while playing under adult supervision. There was too much supervising. We had just crossed the finish line and won the Indianapolis 500 in our Soap Box Derby racer when somebody yelled, “Fly ball, you dummy!”
Our parents imagined us as sports stars, too, when they bothered to take time off from imagining sports were keeping us out of trouble. (That playing sports is a way to meet kids who are real trouble is something we never told Mom and Dad.) Our parents imagined, “If the kid has talent maybe he’ll get a scholarship to Youngstown State.” But even if the dream came true, sports were regarded as a likely road to an income in the high four figures teaching gym someplace with the summer off for standing in the weeds at a public park yelling, “Fly ball, you dummy!”
We suffered from an emphasis on good sportsmanship. We weren’t allowed to pump our fists in the air, exchange high fives, do sack dances, or prance around in the end zone as if we had Deep Heat in our jockstraps. We were reduced to bragging to smaller children out of adult earshot. (And the purchase of a first jockstrap was a painful humiliation. Our mothers hovered nearby. The size we required was invariably “small.”)
We worshipped our sports heroes, collected their bubble gum pack baseball cards, followed their exploits in the sports pages as well as we could in the balderdash of sports writing, and argued about whether, if Rocky Marciano played baseball and Mickey Mantle was a boxer, who would win. We worshipped our sports heroes, but we didn’t identify with them. Wearing an imitation item of Stan Musial’s uniform to school would have been as odd as wearing Batman’s cape. We’d be laughed at. And sent home. Maybe pro athletes are more approachable in the guilty minds of boys now that “felony indictment” has become a sports statistic.
We were never asked whether we liked sports. Some of us did. Billy and Bobby Stumf were good at sports. For the rest of us . . .
“Pat’s batting. Everybody move in!”
“Jerry’s on your team. He was on our team last time.”
“Bobby, run the buttonhook. Billy, fall back and pass. And Steve and Johnny, you two, uh, go deep.”
Liking sports wasn’t the point. But, the adults informed us, being good at sports wasn’t the point either. This left quite a few of us wondering, “What’s the point?”
The point was to learn teamwork and leadership. The Greatest Generation was big on teamwork. I can’t think why. They’d just lost China with their Chiang Kai-shek team, been stalemated in Korea on the UN team, and were in the middle of a Cold War that was the result of having been former teammates with the Soviet Union. When corporations teamed up it was called a monopoly and needed to be stopped with antitrust laws. When workers teamed up it was called Jimmy Hoffa and needed to be investigated by the FBI. But out on the sports field we were told, “There is no ‘I’ in team.” And what with the way we were taught to spell in the 1950s, we had to think about that one.
Our parents were also big on leadership while, at the same time, being grossly cynical about leaders. They would say things like, “Ike wanted to be president because then he’d get two pensions when he retired.” They’d impute base motives to those in positions of even the least authority. “The paperboy knows the Ryans are on vacation so he delivered their paper to us and saved himself three cents.” And they knew what happened to youthful leaders. Our parents remembered D-day. They themselves were experts in “leading from behind,” preferably from behind a beer at home while we played Little League. Maybe all generations want their children to have what they did not. Or maybe they didn’t love us as much as we think.
The point of organized sports was teamwork and leadership. As far as I could tell from questioning adults, the point of everything they cajoled us into doing—sports, Scouting, religious instruction, summer camp—was teamwork and leadership.
I wonder what kind of leader I was supposed to become by getting beaned at home plate, making granny knots, being paired on the buddy system in the lake at camp with a kid who ran away and hid in the latrine, and thinking up three questions to ask Jesus if He came to our church bake sale. And I wonder what kind of team would want a semiconscious, tangled-up, soaking-wet, agnostic team member.
When you hear, these days, that there’s no teamwork or leadership in Congress, the White House, business, industry, education, civil society, or at home when it’s time to decide who’s making dinner, it’s because the Baby Boomers would rather have been watching TV. Even Name That Tune.
And, by the way, why is it that the TV of the 1950s, along with the suburbs and the tail fins, takes so much grief from deep thinkers? In a 1961 speech the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, Newton N. Minow (now there’s a name for a deep thinker), told the National Association of Broadcasters, right to its face, that television was “a vast wasteland.” As if, before TV, my family spent the evening playing chess and Tchaikovsky. Leave It to Beaver is still taking a beating as the exemplar of all that’s tepid and bogus in our Baby Boom cultural heritage. This pleasantly written and acted diversion featured a masterful portrayal of Silent Generation Iago Lite in Eddie Haskell. Is the depiction of middle-class Baby Boom life in Leave It to Beaver less acute and penetrating than the depiction of middle-class Elizabethan life in Shakespeare’s Merry Wives of Windsor? Which entertainment winks more often at moral turpitude? And, tell the truth, which would you rather sit through?
Not to go off on another digression (although the Baby Boom has always been inclined to wander from the main subject whenever we can get a hall pass), but unfounded objections to tract houses, DeSotos, and Beaver Cleaver make you fear for the mental well-being of intellectuals. We are not a highly intellectual generation and who can blame us.
Baby Boom girls didn’t mind the boredom as much as Baby Boom boys. Girls could see into the future. This was evident in the way girls played with dolls that had dollhouses full of sinks, toilets, bassinets, and other items of real futurity plus doll clothes and somebody’s older brother from down the block who’d rip Barbie’s blouse off to look at her breasts. Meanwhile boys were playing with one-legged lead soldiers that were French.
Girls knew that the tedium of school was a necessary preparation for the tedium of home and family. And Baby Boom girls had an intuition that their tedium would extend beyond home and family to professions, corporate management, and the State Department. They’d better get ready to be bored.
Boys were driven crazy—literally crazy, as defined in the current edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. The “diagnostic criteria” for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder include:
These boys have been accurately diagnosed as boys. Now there are drugs to treat it. The medications are what Baby Boomers would call uppers. The recommended therapy for ADHD is, essentially, dating fat girls to get their diet pills to study for exams.
It’s a shame, although not because Ritalin, Adderall, Vyvanse, Concerta, and whatever lead to a lifetime of drug dependency and squalor. I came of age in the 1960s. A lifetime of drug dependency and squalor has its points. But kids are sitting still after the bell, engrossed in their schoolwork, and being denied the benefits of the fantasy life induced by utter boredom.
Our school’s classrooms and halls had two-tone paint based on some theory that was current about what was good for eyesight: a pale bile green above a nose-high watermark with a darker cheese mold green below. The school is filling up with water, right to the watermark level. Miss Burbage’s big wooden desk and chair are floating away and Miss Burbage with them. We have to tread water or we’ll drown. “Get back in your seat,” says Miss Burbage.
Our school is indeed a fortress. Other kids from other schools are attacking it. We rain Miss Burbage’s potted African violets down upon their heads. They break through the girls’ entrance with a teeter-totter battering ram. We fence with wooden rulers. They throw blackboard erasers. Our only hope is to retreat to the auditorium and barricade the stage with cardboard straw, cardboard twigs, and cardboard bricks from the first grade’s performance of Three Little Pigs. “Get back in your seat,” says Miss Burbage.
My desk is a helicopter. Mary Ritter sits in front of me. Her dual braids spin, whup, whup, whup. Jack Gertin sits behind me, a round boy, the tail rotor. I have twin .50-caliber Number 2 pencils. Oh no, ack-ack at twelve o’clock high. Good thing I’ve got a parachute in my book bag. “For the last time,” says Miss Burbage, “get back in your seat.”
And every couple of months we’d have a real air-raid drill and get under our desks to protect ourselves from nuclear holocaust. Nowadays the kids, their minds made literal by drug-induced obsession with doing long division, would be scared they were going to die. But we, in the sure and certain hope of fantasy life, knew that atomic bombs only killed grown-ups and probably caused school to be let out early. Billy and I and Johnny and Steve and Bobby and Jerry would survive, like in Lord of the Flies but without the flies. Not that I’d read the book, or heard of it. But when I did read it I was impressed anew with the capacity of adults like William Golding to spoil things.