I agree with Matt Walsh on certain issues, but I have never really been a Matt Walsh fan.
It’s the old saw of the stopped clock that tells the correct time twice a day. I also agree with Bernie Sanders on certain issues. That doesn’t mean I’m ready to join the DSA.
Like many youthful commentators in the political arena, Matt Walsh likes to interpret everything as an oppression narrative. Most recently, he has decided that the average Boomer is stealing from 35-year-olds in order to blow their Social Security checks on slot machines. (I’m not exaggerating here. Walsh actually makes this assertion.)
This no doubt relates to chagrin over the fact that millennials and Gen Zs are not reproducing at the expected rates. Matt Walsh, like JD Vance and other right-leaning social engineers, wants to redirect both public and private funds in order to encourage more marriage and childbearing. So the hobgoblin of the greedy, grasping 70- or 80-something fits neatly into this narrative.
I remember the 1980s; Walsh does not. (Walsh was in diapers in 1986.) I was a teenager back then, and my Boomer parents had noticeably fewer assets than my WWII-generation grandparents—who were also drawing Social Security.
Matt doesn’t seem to realize that this is the way Social Security has always been.
And this brings us back to a fundamental problem with Matt Walsh. Walsh is no dummy, but he has always been callow, petulant, and an aspiring authoritarian. Walsh has never been anything but a political commentator. He decided to start explaining the world before he had lived enough to fully understand the world.
You can challenge the premise of the Social Security system, if you wish. But to turn this into a “Boomer plot” is just silly.
More bad news out of Russia. There are reports of a 28-year-old female employee of Russia’s Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute dying of pneumonic plague a few days ago.
Russian officials have not confirmed the cause of the woman’s death. But they insist that they are in control of the situation. (Some two hundred contacts of the deceased lab worker have been placed under medical observation.)
There were several close calls related to Soviet bioweapons programs during the Cold War (including the 1979 Sverdlovsk anthrax accident). In each case, Soviet authorities declined to make full disclosures of the extent of the exposures. Thankfully, none resulted in worldwide pandemics.
The Kremlin was cagey even about acknowledging the deaths of one of its leaders. Between 1982 and 1985 (just before Gorbachev was named General Secretary of the USSR), three Soviet leaders died in relatively quick succession: Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko.
In each case, the Kremlin was slow to confirm the deaths to the Western media. This led to jokes about hypothetical Pravda headlines like “Stalin not feeling well” and “Lenin under the weather”. (By the mid-1980s, both Lenin and Stalin had been dead for decades.)
Where Russia is concerned, we should always hope for the best but we should never assume that the Kremlin is giving us the full story.
With the 25th anniversary of 9/11 this past week, I found myself confronted again with the personal stories of some of the ordinary people who died that day. Many were pressed by circumstances into acts of heroism. Their names include: Todd Beamer, Brian Sweeney, Mark Bingham, Betty Ong, and Lauren Grandcolas, among many others.
While the 9/11 attacks did have elderly victims, it seems that many of them were young people in their prime years: their twenties through their forties. That is the nature of air travel, perhaps—especially on a workday. (September 11, 2001, fell on a Tuesday.) Most of the WTC victims were at work.
All of those people’s stories, compelling as they are, were cut short twenty-five years ago.
I was not anywhere near the events of 9/11 on the morning of September 11th, 2001. I was working at an office building in Erlanger, Kentucky, hundreds of miles from all of the horror that was taking place.
By that time, the internet was commonplace and ubiquitous (though social media did not yet exist). My colleagues and I became aware of what was going on in more or less real time, as it was being reported on the various news sites.
But I went home that day. Many people did not.
All those lives were cut short on September 11, 2001. I, meanwhile, have had 25 years since then—25 years of joy, sadness, disappointment, and triumph. There have been good days and bad days since then, and—I dare say—some good years along with some not-so-good ones.
But those 25 years were mine. That’s a lot of memories. On 9/11/01, I was 33 years old. I’m now 58.
Twenty-five years is an entire generation of time, a generation of time that was given to me, but not to everyone. Even as I mourn the deaths of inspiring, ordinary people whom I never knew, and (in all likelihood) never would have known, I’m compelled to reflect on my own mundane life.
I should be more grateful. I should be kinder and more considerate toward the people around me. I should make better use of the time I have been given, time that was taken from so many others.
The trial of child murderer Lindsay Clancy has produced yet more political fallout. Over this past weekend, some Republican women in media circles expressed concern over online calls to “repeal the 19th Amendment.”
Let me save you some googling here. The 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed by Congress in 1919 and ratified in 1920. It was the amendment that gave American women the right to vote.
So why would anyone want to repeal it? There is scarcely anyone left alive who was even born before the 19th Amendment’s passage. No living American woman has ever been lawfully denied the vote because of her sex.
Calls to repeal the 19th Amendment are sparking fierce backlash following Lindsay Clancy's mistrial.
The rhetoric has Republican women sounding the alarm, including @MehekCooke, who warns of the "cultural push" that's fueling the growing online movement.
The answer is… because of vocal (though fringe) feminist calls to pardon, exonerate, or otherwise excuse child murderer Lindsay Clancy. Throughout Lindsay Clancy’s recent trial in Plymouth, Massachusetts, pink-clad, overwhelmingly female protesters showed up to demonstrate on Lindsay Clancy’s behalf.
The pro-Clancy demonstrations provoked widespread backlash. At the most extreme end of this backlash are some calls to repeal the 19th Amendment. Such declarations are mostly limited to social media.
According to the logic here, if women will support child murderer Lindsay Clancy, they should not have a voice in our democracy.
Before we go any further, allow me to make a necessary disclaimer. Taking away women’s right to vote is neither justified nor a plausible political outcome.“That dog,” as the old-timers say, “ain’t gonna hunt.” Women’s suffrage is not some newfangled idea of the social media age. My grandmothers both voted, as did all four of my great-grandmothers. This is not 1919. Women are now CEOs, governors, senators, military personnel and police officers.
And then there are the retail political realities—even if the 19th Amendment is never repealed (which it won’t ever be).Want to elect liberal Democrats for the next four or five election cycles? Keep talking about the repeal of the 19th Amendment.
Calls for the repeal of the 19th Amendment are so politically toxic that one almost suspects a false flag operation. But that probably isn’t what’s happening here. This is yet another instance of social media rewarding the most extreme and combustible positions available.
***
But two things can be true—or false—at the same time. The wrongheaded, politically suicidal proposal to repeal the 19th amendment must be evaluated on its own terms. So must the affection for the filicidal Lindsay Clancy in certain feminist circles. Continue reading “Lindsay Clancy, the 19th Amendment, and our culture wars”
Zohran Mamdani’s appearance at the 25th commemoration of 9/11 caused division in New York City and beyond.
Mamdani takes a different view on Islamism and Western civilization than do the majority of us. Mamdani does not “hate America”—but he believes that American policies have contributed to Islamic radicalism, both at home and abroad. Similarly, there is no evidence that he shares the views of violent extremists or is in league with them. But he is far more willing than most of us to give them a hearing.
Let me turn this around for you. There are many people on the right who would not describe themselves as white supremacists—and could not fairly be described as such. But many of these same people are willing to excuse the rhetorical excesses of white supremacists in certain instances.
Had I been eligible to vote in last year’s mayoral election in New York City, I would not have cast my vote for Zohran Mamdani. Most of his ideas on economics are wrong, at least from the perspective of anyone who has ever taken an introductory college economics course.
And while the conflict between radical Islam and Americanism is a complicated topic filled with some degree of fault on both sides, there is no doubt that the conflict exists. Should the mayor of New York City be an individual who is often willing to contextualize or give credence to arguments surrounding Islamist extremism? During World War II, would we have wanted a New York mayor who was willing to see the merits in the arguments of Hitler and Goebbels?
That said, Mamdani’s speech for the 9/11 commemoration was eloquent in style and perfectly reasonable in content. Since he is the duly elected mayor of New York City, it is difficult to build a legitimate case for why he should not be present at the 9/11 ceremonies.
The greater—and more troubling—question is what Mamdani’s election says about New York City, about what New York City has become. New York City’s foreign-born population now stands at 38%. Pick fifty New Yorkers at random, and nineteen of them hail from somewhere else. This is not a condemnation of the foreign-born. But it is fair to ask if the typical voter of New York City shares the values of the typical American. Zohran Mamdani’s election last year gives us at least one clue.
But that has long since been the case. New York City did not become—in Teddy Roosevelt’s words—“a polyglot boarding house” overnight. It has been thus for decades, and it was certainly thus on September 11, 2001.
New York City is an American city—technically at least—but its American status comes with a very large asterisk.
Students in Asian countries—China, Taiwan, South Korea, and Japan—score higher than their US peers in reading, math, and science. CNN, whose writers apparently fell off the proverbial donkey cart yesterday, describes this as“a troubling trend.”
This is, however, a trend that goes back at least two generations. In the early to mid-1980s, when I was a high school student, there was a panic about US students falling behind. (At that time, we were probably more concerned with US student rankings vis-à-vis West Germans and Finns.)
On January 28, 1986, teacher Christa McAuliffe died along with the NASA crew when the Space Shuttle Challenger exploded over the Atlantic Ocean.
Why was a teacher aboard the space shuttle? The Reagan administration, alarmed over falling US scholastic rankings, hoped that the presence of a teacher aboard the space shuttle would increase US students’ interest in science and math.
Despite the presence of so many world-class universities within our borders, America has never been a scholarly, literary, or test-acing nation. Well into the nineteenth century, the most popular English-language writers in the United States were British writers like Charles Dickens.
In more recent decades, there are worries that Asian students are too far ahead of our kids in math and science. These fears have been exacerbated by the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration. In the past, we could steal the best and brightest from Taiwan, South Korea, China, and India. That may become more difficult in the near future.
Why are we such second-rate students? Historically, America was a frontier nation that was stubbornly obsessed with the practical. During the Industrial Revolution, education was tolerated if not necessarily prized. Could an education help you build a better steel mill? That was the relevant question.
The modern era, with its industrial-model grade schools and high schools, has shaped our indifference toward education in a different way. In recent decades, the obsession with competitive games and other extracurricular activities in school environments has far eclipsed the interest in competitive GPA rankings. At least, this was the way it was when I was a suburban high school student in the 1980s.
(The American obsession with watching grown men play boys’ games continues well into adulthood for most of us. This week I have heard little on the news but chatter about the start of the NFL season.)
One of my coworkers from Taiwan, a man I worked with in the late 1990s, was particularly baffled by this. He told me that in Taiwan, sports are seen as little more than something you do to blow off steam and keep your body limber when you’re not studying for the next exam.
All of these criticisms of American priorities are fair game and worth noting. I have noticed them for years and I haven’t been the only one.
But the proof is still in the pudding. The U.S. is still the top economy in the world, the country that draws the most immigrants. People aren’t flooding into Taiwan and China from other countries, despite these nations’ superior math scores.
All of this means that we’re doing something right, and we have been doing something right for decades now, even if we could genuinely use some improvement in our scholarship.
Imagine if we could raise our test scores to the top international levels and maintain the dynamism and competitive spirit that has always distinguished America from its Old World and Asian counterparts. Now that would really be something.
The other day an older woman in my social circle mentioned that she had to finance unpaid charges from her dual cataract surgery. “Four thousand dollars per eye,” she said. “Eight thousand in total.”
This woman is not indigent. She’s a retired public school teacher on Medicare.She also has supplemental Medicare insurance through Anthem.
This suggests that neither Medicare nor Anthem is all that great.
What options are available for those who are too young for Medicare? The Affordable Care Act (ACA)—aka Obamacare—insurance plans provide high-priced, privately available health insurance plans that come with high deductibles. And there’s another catch—many physicians do not treat patients on ACA plans.
The Affordable Care Act was enacted in 2010 in an effort to make health insurance more accessible to individual purchasers. But the ACA preserved the oligopolistic structure of the preexisting healthcare insurance market. This factor (combined with the inefficiencies of government planning) made ACA expensive and inefficient, despite the underlying intentions.
The typical ACA plan costs $650 per month, with a deductible in the $5,000 to $10,000 range, and a very limited selection of network physicians. This is not good health insurance.
“Medicare for all” has therefore entered the public debate space again this election cycle. DSA-backed Democrats like Abdul El-Sayed are advocating for single-payer public insurance, and this is taken as evidence of the Democratic Party’s sudden lurch to the left.
But the first Democrat to make such a proposal was Harry S. Truman. In 1945, just seven months after he took office, Truman made a written proposal for the creation of a national healthcare program. Universal healthcare was also an animating cause for the Democratic Party in 1992—the election that brought Bill Clinton to power. Neither Harry Truman nor Bill Clinton are widely regarded as wild-eyed left-wing radicals today.
America’s healthcare system is expensive, inefficient, and often unavailable—in practical terms—for anyone who is not insured under a top-tier corporate plan.
The linkage of health insurance to specific corporate employment is a longstanding flaw that is no longer appropriate in the age of the gig economy, entrepreneurship, or—for that matter—the family farm. Recent headlines indicate that large banks and other corporate employers are gearing up for massive downsizing because of anticipated AI-related efficiencies. The demand for health insurance not linked to a corporate plan is likely to increase in the coming years. Continue reading “Medicare for all, or the Bell System solution?”
Betty Jean O’Hara (1913-1973) was a famed lady of the night and madam in Honolulu, Hawaii’s Hotel Street red-light district during World War II. O’Hara came up with a novel solution to cope with the demand of randy US sailors during the conflict.
O’Hara set up a Hotel Street brothel that combined sexual services with the assembly-line efficiency of a Ford plant. Each of O’Hara’s employees rotated between a series of three rooms. In one room a man would be undressing, in another a fellow would be engaging in an act of carnal knowledge. In a third room, a satiated sailor would be getting dressed. The Hotel Street red-light district of Honolulu lasted throughout most of World War II.
I never served in the military, but I have met many men who have. In the 1980s I met a man a few years older than me who was stationed in South Korea with the US Army in the late 1970s. He told me stories of “Miss Oh”, a local courtesan in Daegu, South Korea. Based on the gleam in his eye when he reminisced, Miss Oh must have been a proverbial firecracker.
One of my high school acquaintances was in the US Marine Corps during the 1980s. (I’ll call him Mitch.) Mitch also served in the Persian Gulf War of 1990-91.
Many years later, I ran into Mitch at a reunion and he told me some war stories.
While relating his experiences abroad, Mitch also mentioned a handful of experiences with professional women—mostly in the Philippines, where large numbers of US service personnel were stationed through about 1992.
I was somewhat surprised. Mitch had been the archetypical ladies’ man in high school: a handsome, charming, multi-sport athlete. Not the kind of guy one associates with sex workers.
Perhaps sensing my surprise at his revelation, Mitch explained: “You’re a young guy in a foreign country, working in a mostly male organization (the Marine Corps). There aren’t many opportunities for conventional dating and relationships.”
Things are different, though, in this enlightened 21st century. The USS Abraham Lincoln has just docked in Thailand. The aircraft carrier and its crew participated in US military operations against Iran, and stayed at sea for more than 260 days—almost nine months.
It’s an ordinary spring afternoon in suburban Cincinnati, 1980.
Eighteen-year-old Michelle Blevins is home with her younger brother when a stranger rings the doorbell.
The stranger is wearing a blazer, tie, and aviator sunglasses. He says he represents a local law firm. He says Michelle’s parents are in trouble.
And he really wants to come inside.
That’s the setup for “The Door-to-Door Man,” my latest original short story for YouTube.
Those of us who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s will remember that this was the era of “stranger danger.”
In some ways, the world was considerably less connected than it is today. There were no cell phones, doorbell cameras, GPS trackers, or Internet searches. If a stranger appeared at your front door, you couldn’t pull out your phone and immediately find out who he was.
At the same time, people were becoming increasingly aware that the world wasn’t necessarily as safe as they had once imagined.
Serial killers, violent crime, and mysterious disappearances regularly made the news. Parents warned their children about strangers. And yet it was still perfectly normal for unfamiliar people—salesmen, repairmen, deliverymen, religious solicitors, and others—to simply walk up to your house and ring the doorbell.
That combination provides the backdrop for “The Door-to-Door Man.”
I’ve been experimenting with writing very short fiction specifically for YouTube: complete stories that can be read or listened to in a single sitting, accompanied by atmospheric visuals.
“The Door-to-Door Man” is one of these stories. It’s a tale of suspense rather than supernatural horror. There are no ghosts, monsters, or paranormal forces here. Just an ordinary young woman, an ordinary suburban house—and a stranger at the door who may not be what he claims to be.
You can watch and listen to the complete story in the video accompanying this post.
If you enjoy “The Door-to-Door Man”…
You might also want to check out my DEADLY BYWAYS series.
Deadly Byways consists of six novels set in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Like “The Door-to-Door Man,” these stories explore the darker side of an era that many of us remember with nostalgia—but which had plenty of dangers and shadows of its own.
If you enjoy suspense stories about ordinary people confronting extraordinary dangers—especially stories set against the backdrop of America several decades ago—DEADLY BYWAYS may be for you.
In the meantime, I hope you enjoy “The Door-to-Door Man.”
And remember: be careful who you open your front door to.
One of the nice things about the pre-internet world was that the foolishness of teenagers and young adults was usually restricted to small audiences. But now we have Gen Z social media influencers. Canyon Mimbs is a 22-year-old convert to Islam who wants to tell the world what he knows–or thinks he knows.
Theology is not my bailiwick. Like Elizabeth I, I do not seek to make windows into men’s souls. But economics is another matter.
Young Mr. Mimbs advocates for shariah law in the USA. Well, why not? Half of Gen Z is joining the DSA, if you believe the internet. There are any number of reasons why shariah law would be incompatible with our American system, but in this post, I’ll focus on one: shariah’s prohibition on interest. Continue reading “Shariah law fails Economics 101”
Today Vietnam vets are older men in their seventies and eighties. But when I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s, Vietnam vets were young middle-aged men in their thirties and forties.
When I was very young, Vietnam vets were still in their twenties. I was born in 1968, so I have no direct memories of the Vietnam War. I do, however, remember its immediate aftermath. It was a common topic of conversation in the mid-1970s. In those days, the war—as well as the political and social turmoil of the 1960s—were very much in recent memory.
Movies about the American War and Vietnam began to appear in the 1970s. These include Apocalypse Now and The Deer Hunter. Although Taxi Driver is not technically a movie about the Vietnam War, its central character, Travis Bickle, is a disturbed Vietnam War veteran.
And this was the common “meme,” to use an internet-age word: the disturbed Vietnam War veteran. In film and literature, Vietnam vets were often portrayed as brooding, volatile individuals.
It wasn’t until the 1980s that the American Vietnam War experience began to be portrayed with a bit more nuance. The release of the Vietnam War film Platoon, a commercial and critical success, portrayed the Vietnam War as a complex situation in which American soldiers often had to choose the least bad option. As the 1980s concluded, portrayals of Vietnam vets became far less simplistic, more diverse, and more respectful.
I would never attempt to write a novel about the Vietnam experience itself. But I did include a Vietnam vet in my Gen X coming-of-age novel, No Sure Thing. The novel is primarily the story of Paul Nelson, a 19-year-old University of Cincinnati student. But Paul’s mentor, Ron McNab, is a 42-year-old Vietnam vet. (No Sure Thing is set in 1988.)
I would describe the character of Ron McNab as half-fictional. Throughout my formative years, I met many Vietnam vets who shared their experiences with me. Several of them became an inspiration for Ron.
We all know the history surrounding Nazi Germany and its authoritarian controls on popular culture. The Third Reich aggressively banned art that the Nazi Party deemed substandard, degenerate, or subversive.
But that was 90 years ago, right? Today Germany is a modern, democratic nation that isn’t afraid of free expression. Right?
Not exactly. The old authoritarian impulses still hold sway in Berlin. Last month German movie regulators refused to assign a rating to director Uwe Boll’s Citizen Vigilante. Since it is illegal to distribute films in Germany that have not been rated, this effectively banned Citizen Vigilante from the Bundesrepublik Deutschland.
Citizen Vigilante stars Armie Hammer as Michael Sanders, a vigilante who hunts down rapists and violent criminals, many of whom are migrants from Islamic countries.
The movie is an unsubtle statement on government policies that have tolerated—and perhaps even encouraged—mass migration from the Middle East to destinations in the European Union and (to a lesser extent) North America. (Uwe Boll is a German filmmaker.)
By all accounts, Citizen Vigilante is not a pleasant film, and perhaps you could argue that it is not even a particularly good one. But if present headlines are any indication, this is a debate that is not going away anytime soon. The backlash against mass migration is not limited to the Trump-voting sectors of America. The same backlash has been building in Europe for quite some time now. The immigration issue is the primary reason for the recent successes of Germany’s right-leaning Alternative für Deutschland (AfD).
In the internet age, you simply cannot stamp out ideas. After the movie was suppressed in Germany, Elon Musk made it available for 48 hours, free of charge, on his X platform.
I didn’t hear about the movie because of Elon Musk, however. I learned of Citizen Vigilante when I read a finger-wagging article decrying the film’s very existence. It probably would have escaped my notice otherwise. That’s the irony of cancel culture: the very act of denouncing something has the unintended consequence of amplifying it.
I haven’t seen Citizen Vigilante, though I’ve seen clips of some of its most controversial scenes. By all indications, the movie is boilerplate vigilante spectacle. That’s an old genre in entertainment. It goes all the way back to the Race Williams detective stories published in Black Mask in the 1920s, when large numbers of Americans were anxious about rising crime rates. In the 1970s, it was manifest in the Death Wish vigilante films starring the already fifty-something Charles Bronson.
The notion of citizens taking the law into their own hands is an uncomfortable topic for a film. But when such movies become popular, it is usually because of some genuine grassroots frustration with the status quo. Perhaps this is the issue that the German government should really be paying attention to, rather than trying to ban what is, by all accounts, a rather mediocre movie.
Although the Third Reich ended more than eighty years ago, German authorities are still uncomfortable with the concept of unregulated speech. They are also, apparently, unfamiliar with the concept of reverse psychology.
Never before have so many movies, videos, and whatnot competed for our attention. The best way to convince people to seek out an otherwise obscure movie is for a government to declare its director a pariah and his movie verboten. Citizen Vigilante received over 10.5 million views, from all over the world, during its 48-hour free run on X.
Which Latin American strongman was most on the mind of the American president in 1986? Daniel Ortega, the dictator of Nicaragua.
Ortega, a Marxist protégé of the USSR, ruled Nicaragua throughout the 1980s. The Reagan administration provided aid to the Nicaraguan Contra rebels, often through clandestine means. This led to the infamous Iran-Contra scandal of Reagan’s second term in office.
Time Magazine, March 1986
There was talk in some quarters about direct U.S. intervention in the Latin American nation in the 1980s, though I don’t think this was ever seriously on the table.
Ortega was eventually ousted from within and found himself out of power for seventeen years, from 1990 to 2007. Then he came back into power. Ortega’s second dictatorship has lasted for almost 20 years now.
No, I’m not about to suggest that the US should attempt to force a regime change in Nicaragua. That was a bad idea in 1986, and it’s a bad idea now. From the U.S. perspective, the situation in Nicaragua is a nuisance, not an existential threat.
But we may consider the irony. So much has changed since the mid-1980s. (To consider the matter from a personal perspective, I turned 18 in 1986, the year I graduated from high school. I will soon turn 58.)
There are, however, some constants in this ever-changing world. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
Ted Turner passed on May 6 after a long, busy life. While his enterprises were numerous, he is best remembered for the Cable News Network, aka CNN, which launched on June 1, 1980.
Most of us did not get CNN right away. Even middle-class households were slow to adopt cable. Americans really did believe that we could exist with access to only four or five television stations in those days.
My parents purchased a cable subscription with CNN included in 1982. For many years, CNN included a partner channel called CNN Headline News. The idea was simple: all the major headlines in thirty minutes.
CNN has become controversial in recent years, depending on one’s political sentiments. President Trump has repeatedly referred to the network as “fake news.” Early on, CNN was mostly apolitical and mostly dedicated to reporting the news in an objective manner. There were no significant controversies like that back then.
On the contrary, pretty much everyone believed that there was something amazing about CNN. Prior to that, if you wanted to watch the news, you had to tune in right around dinnertime. The local news ran from 6:00 to 6:30 p.m., and the national news ran on each major network afterward.
Either that or (gasp!) read the newspaper. Most Americans had longer attention spans in those days, and actually didn’t mind reading the newspaper, but that’s another topic for another day.
I watched CNN sporadically during the 1980s, but I was a high school kid for most of that period. My CNN obsession began in 1989, with the Tiananmen Square Massacre in Beijing. About a year after that came the first Gulf War. For both events, I was tuned in to CNN multiple times throughout the day.
Bad things happened before CNN became common in American homes. There were wars, government scandals, and troubling international events like the Tehran hostage crisis of 1979 to 1981.
Although I was a kid then, I don’t believe that most American adults ignored national and global problems. There was, however, a commonly held belief that attention was best directed closer to home. Plenty of Americans were dismayed at Nixon’s corruption, or Carter’s bumbling, but there was generally less outrage about the news.
Maybe this was because there were fewer news broadcasts to consume. (And this was long, long before the internet or social media). This made faraway events, including events taking place in another American city, genuinely remote.
It’s also worth noting that in 1980, almost all American adults of childbearing age were married. Most had children. Their personal lives were full and demanding.
This is another way in which 2026 is far removed from 1980. Nowadays, only about a third of young American adults are married, and even fewer have children.
Perhaps that makes it easier to sell them on the notion that the news is more important than their daily lives, that events in Washington DC are more urgent and pressing than events taking place in their living rooms.
Sadly, for all too many Americans in 2026, that is genuinely the case.
I was born in 1968. I did not go to school with a single boy named Ryan.
Thirty-odd years later, I was in the workforce. I met a lot of younger men (born in the mid- to late-1970s) named Ryan.
This was odd. Where had all these Ryans come from? And where had they been before, during my childhood, teens, and twenties?
The mid-1970s surge of boys named Ryan is an example of how generational naming patterns can turn on a dime. From the 1950s through the end of the 1960s, the following male given names were much more popular for newborns in the United States:
Mike/Michael
David
John
Mark
Scott
Steve/Steven
Kevin
Jeff/Jeffrey
The sudden (and relatively short-lived) increase in American babies named Ryan can be partly attributed to two factors: the popularity of the actor Ryan O’Neal (1941-2023), and the debut of the soap opera Ryan’s Hope in 1975. So if you’re an Xennial man named Ryan, it’s likely that you owe your name to a soap opera. The popularity of the name Ryan tapered off in the mid-1980s, right around the time that the soap opera’s ratings started to decline.
My name, Edward, was uncommon among boys my age. I was named after my father. Over the years, I have heard various explanations for the reason my father was given this name. None of them are entirely satisfactory. Edward is certainly not a family name for our clan, in any meaningful sense.
When I was a kid, I would sometimes meet adults who delighted in telling me about Mister Ed, the 1960s sitcom that featured a talking horse of the same name. They would then imply that I might have been named after the sitcom’s eponymous equine.
Despite my youth, I was quick to disabuse them of such notions. (Oh, the traumas that children had to endure at the hands of adults, before the advent of the “self-esteem” craze.)
My mother was born in 1946. She was named Linda—like more than a million other women born in that era. Linda was a much overused name during the Baby Boomer birth years. Linda was, in fact, the second most popular name for newborn girls during the 1940s, according to the Social Security Administration’s online database.
Throughout my life, I have met many Boomer women named Linda. I have never, so far as I can remember, met a woman my age or younger named Linda; but I don’t doubt that they exist.
When I try to think of any Linda who doesn’t have Baby Boomer associations, the only one who comes to mind is Linda Barrett, the fictional sexpot of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982).
But once again, there are Baby Boomer connections. Even though Fast Times at Ridgemont High is regarded as an early Gen X movie, the movie’s director, Amy Heckerling, born in 1954, is solidly in boomer territory. (Heckerling is closer in age to my parents than to me.) I think it’s safe to say that the name “Linda” belongs entirely to the Baby Boom generation.
The most popular girls’ name in the 1940s was Mary. Mary was my maternal grandmother’s name. She was born in 1922. I have never met a woman my age or younger named Mary, either. I have met some Mary Jo’s who were born in the 1960s and 1970s, but never a plain old Mary. Once again, I am sure that they exist; but they are comparatively rare.
Kayla is a girl’s name that came out of nowhere in the 1990s. One never encountered the name when I was a kid. I began meeting Kaylas around 2010, just as the first girls given that name were reaching early adulthood. I have nothing against the name Kayla, but what’s wrong with its more traditional analog, Katie?
Among Gen X girls, Jennifer is the most popular name, hands down. Jennifer was already becoming popular when I was born, in the late 1960s. But Jennifer really surged in popularity in the early 1970s. It is the most common name for American girls born in that decade.
This is why there are so many 50-something women nowadays named Jennifer. Jennifer Aniston (born in 1969) is just one drop in that vast ocean of Jennifers.
I went to school with more Jennifers than I can count. Later in life, I met many more who were just a few years younger than me (born in the first half of the 1970s).
I seem to have been surrounded by Jennifers from the very beginning. My mother informed me that when I was a newborn, the couple living in the apartment unit next to my parents had a two-year-old girl named—lo and behold—Jennifer.
The girl had especially wide, blue eyes. She was also fond of staring at adults, according to my mother’s telling. My mother therefore nicknamed her Jennifer Big Eyes. Over the years, Jennifer Big Eyes has come up in conversation from time to time.
Jennifer Big Eyes would now be, I would guess, in her early 60s. I don’t believe my mother ever knew her full name. I have no idea where she would be nowadays, or if she is even still alive. After that many years, anything is possible. But I do hope that Jennifer Big Eyes is still out there somewhere, and that she is doing well. One more Gen X Jennifer among so many.
