On The Road With Al and Ivy: Blog

Just as many writers about 1930 had discovered that you cannot really be detached from contemporary events, so many writers about 1939 were discovering that you cannot really sacrifice your intellectual integrity for the sake of a political creed — or at least you cannot do so and remain a writer.  - George Orwell (The Frontiers Of Art and Propaganda) "...the Indian lovers, like the Indian haters, were satisfied with their own image of the red man". - Stephen E. Ambrose (Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives Of Two American Warriors) Childhood is described as a time of innocence, but kids often spend it lying, cheating, stealing and inflicting pain on each other; while parents try their best to contain such impulses, at least until adulthood where there's a time and place for everything.  It's a time for learning your place in the world. Look at any children's toy section and it's obvious that sexual roles are defined early on, and as our perception of t...

"The world is a looking-glass, and gives back to every man the reflection of his own face. Frown at it, and it will in turn look sourly upon you; laugh at it and with it, and it is a jolly kind companion; and so let all young persons take their choice." -William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair) "All that I shall repeat after her, must be true, without any intermixture of falsehood, but where I may happen, without intending it, to introduce my own conceits."  - Jean-Jacques Rousseau (A Discourse Upon The Origin And The Foundation Of The Inequality Among Mankind, 1762) I heard the term, "OK boomer" for the first time last year, when reading about an exchange between a young woman and an older male, both of whom were politicians. The latter had begun to interrupt her speech, and she replied with the phrase. I hadn't realized it had been around for a while, though it wasn't a surprise that it was. There's always been "generation gaps," a...

"Think for yourselves and let others enjoy the privilege to do so, too..." -George Orwell Each generation produces a coterie of rebels and forward thinkers who may or may not edge our culture forward, but will at least add ideas to the mainstream. Very few age groups develop an ability to look inward and see their own flaws in real time. That tends to be the task of the next generation. There were writers such as Voltaire, H. L. Mencken, Paul Krassner, or Tom Wolfe who could see that human nature was really a constant, that is to say, could see the irony in a generation criticizing another, and who turned their sharp eye on their peers' foibles and failings. But most societal critics and lampooners end up becoming, as George Orwell called it, "licensed jesters" who can coast along as honored sages if they stick to approved targets, but the early feminist writers, the ones who stubbornly kept to the core issue of equality, broke that mold, as as a result faced of...