The Best and the Brightest (According to the Sunday New York Times Styles Section)

Synchronicity! On the very day I sat down to start writing about all the beautiful people announcing their marriages in the Sunday New York Times Styles Section I happened to read the Opinion Section where the Public Editor addressed a question from a reader that was the very same question I wanted to ask: “How do editors select which announcements to publish, and why don’t editors make a sustained effort to include different types of couples?”

OK, I only wanted to ask the first part of this question about how editors select which announcements to publish because I know better than to ask why they don’t make an effort to include other kinds of couples besides lawyers who graduate magna cum laude from Harvard Law School and now work for Wall Street investment firms or doctors who are doing their residency at the University of Pennsylvania in gastroenterology. In the intense competition among all these power couples who want their announcements to appear in the NYT Styles Section I figured it’s the beauties over the uglies, the Harvards and Yales over the Oberlins, and the Greenwich parents over Newark who get the nod.

But lo and behold, according to the Public Editor, the criterion is none of these: it’s achievement. “The only truly fair way to select one submission over another is on the basis of achievement.” Nietzsche lives! (You have to excuse me, I’m still reading his Philosophical Biography). The elite are defined by their will to power, especially those who manage to make their way out of the herd and end up at the “top of their medical school class at Yale or Stanford,” as the Public Editor explained it.

So I decided to submit a marriage for publication that might give the Weddings /Celebrations editors pause, at least in terms of their definition of achievement, and might give the rest of us out here in the herd someone we can identify with.

“On March 20, at the lovely farm of the groom’s family in upstate New York (I guess one of the criteria for publication is that the couple has some connection to New York, but I’m really talking about anywhere in rural America) so and so and so and so married themselves with their extended family members, their intimate comrades in arms, their three dogs, two cats, and tank of tropical fish in attendance (the cattle, horse, and chickens were confined to the field). They both will retain their own names even though they are their father’s names but it’s too late to do anything about that and anyway, everybody has always known them by those names.

So and so’s parents own the local grocery store where they have kept accounts for as long as twenty years for the down and out folks in the community who live month to month on their social security or disability checks. The other so and so’s parents drove in from New Mexico where they work as farriers and create magnificent iron sculptures on the side.

The happy couple has a long employment history that includes waitressing at a swank restaurant in the neighboring town, working for the Forest Service as seasonal patrols telling people to put out their campfires during times of drought, substitute teaching in the local high school while reporting on sports for the local newspaper, writing articles for various other local newspapers about whatever they can come up with on a day’s notice, canvassing for the Service Worker’s Union, growing great garlic that they sell to the local food stores, working construction on all their neighbors’ houses so their neighbors will work construction on their house, and most recently, and thanklessly, as members of the school board even though they don’t have any kids yet and might not because as anyone with a brain can see things are getting worse, not better.

They love to tell the story of how they met. One day so and so went over to a friend’s house down the road for a visit with her/his dogs and the other so and so was also there visiting and had to run into the house when the first so and so’s dogs started barking at him/her, which kinda pissed him/her off, but he/she also kinda liked the first so and so and thought she/he had an especially nice butt. He/she started dropping by the first so and so’s house around breakfast time but she/he rarely invited him/her to eat, so they didn’t make much progress. Then he/she got up his/her gumption, however, and invited the first so and so on a real date: they went to the State Fair. But then when they got back to the first so and so’s house, where the second so and so had high hopes for a kiss, they got into an argument on the nature of inspiration and the first so and so kicked the second so and so out of her/his house. But the second so and so was tenacious, and when the first so and so started working in the fire lookout for the summer he/she went up to visit and those Desolation Peak fantasies were too much for both of them and they kissed. The rest is history.

“I’ll Take You There”

Mavis Staples “took us there” last Friday night at a benefit for the Outpost Performance Center in Albuquerque. The “us” were the folks over 50 who grew up listening to Pops, Mavis, and sisters, known as the Staples Singers; the “there” was the place that only live music by one of the great R & B singers of all time can take you. We’re talking Aretha Franklin, Etta James, Laura Nero, Patti LaBelle, and potentially Beyonce, who now says she wants to get back to her “roots” and be a “real” soul sister instead of an MTV playdoll (see "Reflections on the Super Duper Bowl").

Mavis came out with a cane, having “blown out” her knee, with an amazing band that’s been with her as she’s resurrected a career that got a little off track through the eighties and nineties. Even though I could count on one hand the 20, 30, or 40 somethings at the concert, there are a few in the know who helped in her new career: Have a Little Faith was produced by Jim Tulio and You Are Not Alone by Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy.

These guys know their R & B history. And there must be others out there who know their jazz, but they don’t come to the concerts at the Outpost, either. When I go there to hear Ravi Coltrane or Bill Frisell or Oliver Lake, gray hair and wrinkles predominate.

What’s going on? In the May 27 New Yorker George Packer quotes a Silicon Valley start-up engineer talking about his techie cohort: “They’re ignorant, because many of them don’t feel the need to educate themselves outside their little world, and they’re not rewarded for doing so. . . . People with whom I used to talk about politics or policy or the arts, they’re just not into it anymore. They don’t read the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times. They read TechCrunch and VentureBeat, and maybe they happen to see something from the Times on somebody’s Facebook news feed.”

Notice we’re not even talking about reading the New Yorker or Andrew Soloman or Zadie Smith currently on the newstands and best seller lists at Amazon. Ever heard of Edmund Wilson or Twyla Tharp? Janet Frame or Werner Herzog? An entrepreneur Packer interviewed told him he went a few years without reading a single book. Yet these are the guys (and it’s mostly guys, and they’re mostly white) who call themselves the “Best and the Brightest.” Do they even know that’s the title of David Halberstam’s book? Do they really want to be identified with the academic policy wonks in the Kennedy administration who were responsible for the Vietnam War?

But according to Packer’s article, they have no interest in politics or the history that contextualizes it. When they do decide that for whatever reason—good PR? bad conscience?—it might be a good idea to give some of their billions to non-profits and charitable foundations Bill Gates ends up supporting the educational policies of Michelle Rhee, teaching to bad tests, and Mark Zuckerberg wants to reform immigration by bringing in more educated foreigners to work as engineers and designers.

It’s not just the techies, of course, who have no interest in politics, art, literature . . . . but I’m beginning to sound like a broken record (see "Jamaica Kincaid"). It seems a generation of people who knew at least a little about a lot of things is fading away while a generation that knows about nothing but one thing is the future. But hey, the one thing they do know about, social media, is how they’re going to “entertain each other and interact with each other and do things for each other much more efficiently” (as one of Packer’s interviewees waxes poetic). That what they’re doing so efficiently has no content doesn’t seem to matter.