Here are a few excerpts from our talks around the country–from NCAA to NASA, from Greek system organizations to councils on financial literacy, from universities to doctors’ associations—and many more in between. Have talk, will travel! Hire us, and you’ll be glad you did. We’ll custom design our presentations for your specific group.

For North Texas State University: 

THE Beloit College Mindset List is an international phenomenon.  According to TIME Magazine “Mindset List” is part of the “American Lexicon.” The Seattle Times calls it “irreverent and insightful.”

Editors in England say the Mindset List is essential.  Brian Williams at NBC News says it is indispensable.  Editors in India and New Zealand ask us to help them create lists for their constituencies; and a bride marrying a man 16 years her junior in Nashville asks us to create a mindset list for her husband-to-be so she can better understand him, and possibly include the list in their nuptials.

It has been used by groups as diverse as MTV and NASA, and the Texas Highway Patrol to assist them as they make their case to a generation with a new set of values, definitions, and measurements of accomplishment. It has been used by all the military services where an officer once explained that “failure to communicate between a 22-year-old second lieutenant and an 18-year-old recruit could have dire consequences.”

And there are, annually, folks who criticize what we do and suggest that we are too far to the left or the right. While many look to the list for its wit and as a guide to aging, we are deadly serious about the transition that goes on in the first year of college.  We also deny having created any of these critics ourselves just to promote our work.

 •••

For The Executive Council for Alpha Gamma Rho:  

LET me say a few words about what brings me here. Along with my partner Ron Nief I’m the co-author of an annual list about entering college students: about what has “always” or “never” been true in their rather constricted world views. They have, after all, only lived for eighteen years. So for them “Amazon” has always been a river second, but first it has always been an on-line shop where you can get the latest available CD of Homeland. They have no experience at all with such technologies as 8 track tapes or 45 RPM record players; even a CD player is to them as an old Victrola might have been to their parents. We call this annual list the Mindset List. In working with this concept we’ve become amazed at the power of mindset: those solid cement fixtures of the mind that change very slowly. We’ve learned that in addition to mindset having dominion over people based on their ethnic backgrounds or political assumptions or home regions, there are also generational mindsets. Different generations have experienced different things. They’ve learned different lessons. And then there is the factor of biology: as a generation ages it becomes more hardened in its own mindset and more likely to disapprove of the mindset of the young. After all, the young have the world that the old are starting to lose. So there is an envy factor as well. We hear from thousands of people each year. Some of them tell us how baffled they are by today’s young people. Why are they always fiddling with their phones?

Well, as a result of our inquiry into mindset, we’ve also learned a lot about both contemporary trends and past history. Our first book, The Mindset Lists of American History, is a study of how 10 different generations of 18 year olds saw and lived through the United States; it’s also an inquiry into what has changed and what has not.

And this brings me to the Greek system, to fraternities. In my discussion tonight I want to do the following. I’ll identify six current trends that are affecting today’s young people—Generation Y, as they are sometimes called—and focus a bit on how these trends might affect fraternity life: recruiting, interactions, and rationales.

Some of these trends are easy to spot. You can see them quite easily if you walk around a city or read a few stats or just observe campus life. But some of these trends are subtle. They are so embedded in our daily assumptions we don’t always pick them out of the air and examine them. Tonight I want to examine those more tacit assumptions as well, for they too are related to so much of how we live, including the formation and maintenance of fraternities and other organizations.

I will preview the six trends briefly now. The first three trends are the rising costs of college education, the changing definitions of masculinity, and the emergence of electronic tribalism. The last three, the more covert ones, are the increasing potency of information; the increasing criticism of conformity; and the increasing ambivalence about memory. I will bring in fraternal life throughout this exposition.

 •••

For the Jump$tart Coalition on Financial Literacy: 

IN conclusion, let me add that in this talk on financial literacy among today’s young people, I have left out later chapters of The Mindset Lists of American History, although these too are full of historical information that may be linked to our four principles of financial literacy. I thought it better if I focused on more olden times, the eighty years between the 1880s and about 1960. So the tour is, for example, from typewriters to ballpoints.  Why concentrate on less recent times? Because the further back we go, the more we see that while circumstances change, these fundamental principles of economic life do not. The sooner young people learn about them and get comfortable applying them, not only to their grandparents’ lives but also (above all) to their own, the better.

All the applications Ron and I have discussed today, plus much more, are available in our on-line Financial Literacy Guide, the Internet address of which we will provide you, to The Mindset Lists of American History.

Many of us learn these ideas the hard way. We graduate from high school or college with no obviously marketable skills. We trade our bikes for ice cream cones. We might start a business and then flounder because either no one wants what we’re selling or because we can’t make it so that customers can afford it or get it. Or we find that they like what we’re selling but not the way we package it. Or we find out that we are not the only economic actor in town and that what others do has a tremendous impact on what we do, or don’t do, or can do, or can’t do.

How can we make sure that today’s students start learning these lessons early? One answer, we would submit, is by engaging their imaginations with the history of their ancestors—those previous generations who, like today’s students, might have thought once upon a time that they too would be eighteen forever. A historical education in financial literacy is, among other things, giving the young and restless a little reality testing.

 •••

For NASA: 

TAKE the year 1955, when Bill Gates, John Roberts, Maria Shriver, and Steve Jobs were all born within months of each other. In our book The Mindset Lists of American History we come reasonably close to their exact generation because our chapter six, for the generation born three years earlier (in 1952), is called “Magazines Have Always Been Mad.” Taking our cue from that chapter we would find that Gates, Roberts, Shriver and Jobs grew up in a nation where Dean Martin and the Rat Pack were getting less cool every year, where a man named George Jorgensen had a sensational sex-change operation and became Christine, where zip codes were transforming the American postal service, where Bob Dylan’s use of an electric guitar was thought to be both treasonous and inauthentic, where “womyn” was spelled with a “y” rather than an “e,” and where prominent gurus told them that groovy was better than greedy. This was life as experienced by the young Gates, Roberts, Shriver, and Jobs (all of them, by the way, mid-Boomers).

Out of this mélange of social information came Bill Gates, a prophet who bet on the idea that software, rather than IBM cards, were the way to enter and store data in the future; John Roberts, a nomad who went against the grain of prevailing liberal jurisprudence; Maria Shriver, whose own Kennedy-related family had primed her in the values of civic heroism; and Steve Jobs, who did not so much predict the future, as Gates did, as adapt to it with lovely, slim, and ergonomic designs. We don’t know how much, or even whether, Christine Jorgensen’s sex change operation influenced them; or whether the new spelling of “womyn” or the rise of zip codes did; or if the preference for “grooviness” over “greediness” had any effect on them. We do know that they grew up in a social realm where times were most definitely changing, as the supposedly radical Bob Dylan proclaimed in song. They grew up in a time where possibilities were in the ether, in the air they took in. So it should not be shocking that Gates in his Seattle garage thought that “do not spindle or mutilate” cards didn’t have to be around forever; that Roberts thought loose Constitutional construction was not necessarily going to be around forever; that Shriver decided that the notion that the disabled had no rights was not going to be around forever; and that Jobs thought that computers need not always look like big TV sets with typewriter keyboards in front of them.

To get in touch, call us at 608 312 9508 or 608 770-2625; or email us: mcbridet@beloit.edu or niefr@beloit.edu 

For Release:  TUESDAY, AUGUST 20, 2013            Author contact:                                                                            12:01 a.m.                                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Ron Nief (608-770-2625)

niefr@beloit.edu

Tom McBride (608-312-9508)

mcbridet@beloit.edu

Beloit College Mindset List Recognizes the Class of 2017,

Entering College this Fall, As The “Sharing Generation.”

Beloit, Wis. – When the Class of 2017 arrives on campus this fall, these digital natives will already be well-connected to each other. They are more likely to have borrowed money for college than their Boomer parents were, and while their parents foresee four years of school, the students are pretty sure it will be longer than that.  Members of this year’s first year class, most of them born in 1995, will search for the academic majors reported to lead to good-paying jobs, and most of them will take a few courses taught at a distant university by a professor they will never meet.

The use of smart phones in class may indicate they are reading the assignment they should have read last night, or they may be recording every minute of their college experience…or they may be texting the person next to them. If they are admirers of Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, they may wonder whether a college degree is all it’s cracked up to be, even as their dreams are tempered by the reality that tech geniuses come along about as often as Halley’s Comet, which they will not glimpse until they reach what we currently consider “retirement age.”

Though they have never had the chicken pox, they are glad to have access to health insurance for a few more years. They will study hard, learn a good deal more, teach their professors quite a lot, and realize eventually that they will soon be in power. After all, by the time they hit their thirties, four out of ten voters will be of their generation. Whatever their employers may think of them, politicians will be paying close attention.

Each August since 1998, Beloit College has released the Beloit College Mindset List, providing a look at the cultural touchstones that shape the lives of students entering college this fall. Prepared by Beloit’s former Public Affairs Director Ron Nief and Keefer Professor of the Humanities Tom McBride, the list was originally created as a reminder to faculty to be aware of dated references. It quickly became an internationally monitored catalog of the changing worldview of each new college generation. Mindset List websites at mindset.flywheelsites.com and beloit.edu, as well as the Mediasite webcast and their Facebook page receive more than a million visits annually.

The Mindset List for the Class of 2017

For this generation of entering college students, born in 1995, Dean Martin, Mickey Mantle, and Jerry Garcia have always been dead.

1. Eminem and LL Cool J could show up at parents’ weekend.
2. They are the sharing generation, having shown tendencies to share everything, including possessions, no matter how personal.
3. GM means food that is Genetically Modified.
4. As they started to crawl, so did the news across the bottom of the television screen.
5. “Dude” has never had a negative tone.
6. As their parents held them as infants, they may have wondered whether it was the baby or Windows 95 that had them more excited.
7. As kids they may well have seen Chicken Run but probably never got chicken pox.
8. Having a chat has seldom involved talking.
9. Gaga has never been baby talk.
10. They could always get rid of their outdated toys on eBay.
11. They have known only two presidents.
12. Their TV screens keep getting smaller as their parents’ screens grow ever larger.
13. PayPal has replaced a pen pal as a best friend on line.
14. Rites of passage have more to do with having their own cell phone and Skype accounts than with getting a driver’s license and car.
15. The U.S. has always been trying to figure out which side to back in Middle East conflicts.
16. A tablet is no longer something you take in the morning.
17. Threatening to shut down the government during Federal budget negotiations has always been an anticipated tactic.
18. Growing up with the family dog, one of them has worn an electronic collar, while the other has toted an electronic lifeline.
19. Plasma has never been just a bodily fluid.
20. The Pentagon and Congress have always been shocked, absolutely shocked, by reports of sexual harassment and assault in the military.
21. Spray paint has never been legally sold in Chicago.
22. Captain Janeway has always taken the USS Voyager where no woman or man has ever gone before.
23. While they’ve grown up with a World Trade Organization, they have never known an Interstate Commerce Commission.
24. Courts have always been ordering computer network wiretaps.
25. Planes have never landed at Stapleton Airport in Denver.
26. Jurassic Park has always had rides and snack bars, not free-range triceratops and velociraptors.
27. Thanks to Megan’s Law and Amber Alerts, parents have always had community support in keeping children safe.
28. With GPS, they have never needed directions to get someplace, just an address.
29. Java has never been just a cup of coffee.
30. Americans and Russians have always cooperated better in orbit than on earth.
31. Olympic fever has always erupted every two years.
32. Their parents have always bemoaned the passing of precocious little Calvin and sarcastic stuffy Hobbes.
33. In their first 18 years, they have watched the rise and fall of Tiger Woods and Alex Rodriquez.
34. Yahoo has always been looking over its shoulder for the rise of “Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle.”
35. Congress has always been burdened by the requirement that they comply with the anti-discrimination and safety laws they passed for everybody else to follow.
36. The U.S. has always imposed economic sanctions against Iran.
37. The Celestine Prophecy has always been bringing forth a new age of spiritual insights.
38. Smokers in California have always been searching for their special areas, which have been harder to find each year.
39. They aren’t surprised to learn that the position of Top Spook at the CIA is an equal opportunity post.
40. They have never attended a concert in a smoke-filled arena.
41. As they slept safely in their cribs, the Oklahoma City bomber and the Unabomber were doing their deadly work.
42. There has never been a national maximum speed on U.S. highways.
43. Don Shula has always been a fine steak house.
44. Their favorite feature films have always been largely, if not totally, computer generated.
45. They have never really needed to go to their friend’s house so they could study together.
46. They have never seen the Bruins at Boston Garden, the Trailblazers at Memorial Coliseum, the Supersonics in Key Arena, or the Canucks at the Pacific Coliseum.
47. Dayton, Ohio, has always been critical to international peace accords.
48. Kevin Bacon has always maintained six degrees of separation in the cinematic universe.
49. They may have been introduced to video games with a new Sony PlayStation left in their cribs by their moms.
50. A Wiki has always been a cooperative web application rather than a shuttle bus in Hawaii.
51. The Canadian Football League Stallions have always sung Alouette in Montreal after bidding adieu to Baltimore.
52. They have always been able to plug into USB ports
53. Olestra has always had consumers worried about side effects.
54. Washington, D.C., tour buses have never been able to drive in front of the White House.
55. Being selected by Oprah’s Book Club has always read “success.”
56. There has never been a Barings Bank in England.
57. Their parents’ car CD player is soooooo ancient and embarrassing.
58. New York’s Times Square has always had a splash of the Magic Kingdom in it.
59. Bill Maher has always been politically incorrect.
60. They have always known that there are “five hundred and twenty five thousand, six hundred minutes in a year.”

WE HOPE YOU’VE ENJOYED THIS YEAR’S LIST. For more information, here are some added sites:

*For our GUIDE FOR COLLEGE COUNSELORS: http://www.beloit.edu/mindset/guides/

*For our book THE MINDSET LISTS OF AMERICAN HISTORY: http://www.amazon.com/Mindset-Lists-American-History-Typewriters/dp/0470876239/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1376763136&sr=1-1&keywords=the+mindset+lists+of+american+history+from+typewriters+to+text+messages

*For INFORMATION ABOUT OUR FREQUENT WORK AS SPEAKERS: http://mindset.flywheelsites.com/2012/11/the-mindset-list-speaks/

For OUR WEB RADIO SPOTS: http://www.prx.org/series/32710-mindset-moments

For our SONIC FOUNDRY WEBCAST: www.sonicfoundry.com/mindsetwebcast

###

Copyright© 2013 Beloit College

Mindset List is a registered trademark

THE SHARING GENERATION:

 A Preview of The Mindset List® for the Class of 2017

 By now we are familiar with adjectives that go before “generations,” such as “Greatest” and “Silent.” Or sometimes we just hear “the Boomers.” For some reason that bunch isn’t called “the Booming Generation.” Maybe that’s a good thing, too.

The current generation, I predict and I hope, will be called The Sharing Generation. They may very well become the most secular generation–and yet also the generation best organized for service–in American history.

Why? Well, consider for a moment how much—and what–they share:

*They share information: it is a generation that has grown up with the electronic cut and paste and forward.

*They share themselves: it’s a generation that is constantly “chatting,” which doesn’t mean that they are necessarily talking, even on the phone, much less face to face. They text all day; they text all night. They wake up and text before their feet hit the floor.

They share transportation: they tend to flock to big cities for employment, where it’s more expensive to keep a car, but in fact they seem less interested in owning their own autos than previous generations have been, and they take public transport.

They share our national identity; it’s a generation that is not sold on the idea that there is a single national identity. They’ve grown up in a multi-ethnic society. One survey suggested that in the future they wouldn’t follow a political party that could only attract whites, even if they are themselves white.

They share knowledge; it’s a generation that has not grown up with the lecturer (in educational terms, “the sage on the stage”) but with the facilitator (“guide on the side”). They’ve absorbed educational methods that involve small-group collaborative learning rather than more passive listen-and-take-notes.

Finally, they share spiritual values; it’s a generation that is interested in spiritual ideas—such as meditation and service—but it’s not a sectarian generation. It has a more ecumenical approach. It’s spiritual but not religious in the sectarian sense.

Meanwhile, The Beloit College Mindset List®, for the class of 2017, will be out on Tuesday, August 20. You can find it at

www.beloit.edu/mindset

www.mindset.flywheelsites.com

The MINDSET LIST® proudly presents a new series on famed fictional characters. Here we treat them as real persons, offer a character sketch, and then unite them with famous people who died, or were born, the same year they were. We then present their personal Mindset Lists….

Here’s DONALD DUCK, and right after him you’ll find TONY SOPRANO. In future look for the likes of Jay Gatsby, Lucy Ricardo, Don Draper, Jerry Seinfeld, Captain Kirk, and more. Have fun…..

Donald Duck

Donald Duck has always been #2, or perhaps he is 1A. #1 has always been Mickey Mouse, likely the most recognized such rodent in the world. Donald is probably the most recognized duck, but given the existence of Daffy, we cannot even say that for sure. This is just one of the ambiguities that Donald has to put up with, but he is indefatigable, so it is improbable that such uncertainty and second fiddling will defeat him.

Sketch

Donald was born in 1934 (in a short cartoon called The Wise Little Hen) and was named after an Australian cricket player named Donald Bradman, who was once “dismissed” for a “duck,” which in cricket means that he did not score a point (a “duck” is linked to a duck’s egg, which is linked to a zero) and so was “dismissed” from the game. This is a fancy way of saying, in baseball lingo, that Bradman was called “out.” But because he was a Donald and because he was “dismissed for a duck,” Donald was named after him. Such was the logic of nomenclature for Donald’s parents, the Disney Studios. But more ordinary parents have probably done worse.

There is no certain record as to how Mr. Bradman reacted to his being dismissed, but if he did so with equanimity, he would have been different from his namesake, who would have reacted with irascibility, accompanied by a phrase (for which he became famous) such as “What’s the big idea?” or “Aw, phooey.” Nor would such phrases have been easy to understand, for Donald has a duck’s way of articulating and pronouncing English. He quacks his words. In time, however, the average person can grasp what he is saying. Just as Donald often has trouble adjusting to the world, hearers may have a little trouble adjusting to his speech. But the hearers will have the easier time of it, for Donald is a slow-to-adjust duck who will always have trouble negotiating with the world as it is.

He is, though, a generally upbeat fellow—until something goes wrong. The English novelist Evelyn Waugh once said that before the First World War if one thing went wrong, it ruined the day; after the war, if one thing went right, it made the day. Donald is definitely pre-War. Just one thing wrong, and he is in a temperamental orbit. Always attired in what must be thought a finite wardrobe (sailor suit and red or black bowtie), anger is virtually his default mechanism. It is the emotional backdrop against which everything else is measured as we observe DD’s demeanor. This fury is his own worst foe, and this is saying a lot, because Donald has lots of really terrible foes, including (massive) kites, sharks, ghosts, impish chipmunks (named Chip n’Dale), opportunistic and grunting bears (including Humphrey), and a wolf sorcerer named Merlock, from whom Donald rescues his girlfriend Daisy. Donald’s temper often makes him overestimate his abilities in competition and against whatever Hell other people are visiting upon him.

Yet the sheer energy of his choleric nature serves him well. He once saved his nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie by punching out a shark. (These are Donald’s nephews, by the way—they really are—and not Daisy’s sons by a previous marriage.) Unfortunately, even when Donald wins—which is frequently—he is only happy until something else makes him mad. Yet at his core he is a good fellow. He can be a bully and a tease, but he isn’t malicious. He feels regret when he goes too far. Once he thought one of his pranks had meant the death of his nephews and cried real tears upon seeing Huey above with angel wings. But then he lost even a semblance of control when he realized he’d been suckered. He does not like being on the receiving end of pranks. That has so far not cured him of fomenting his own.

He is also lazy—he likes hammocks altogether too much—but apparently the sheer adrenaline of his temper compensates for what must otherwise be a generally slipshod physical condition. Ostensibly, then, you don’t have to jog or lift weights if you have as many antagonists as our Donald does. They include, even, Mickey Mouse, a rival of whom Donald is jealous. When Mickey was kidnapped, DD was the chief suspect, though he later cleared his name. He wishes “The Mickey Mouse Club” had been “The Donald Duck Club,” but now, it is said, he cares less because no one much remembers the old club anyhow—no one but a bunch of seventy year olds. Back in the club’s heyday, there was a relatively faint echo: a couple of times, during the many iterations of “Mickey Mouse” in the theme song, one of the singing club members would also intone “Donald Duck!” as a sort of consolation prize for our favorite grouchy warbler. Donald no doubt would have muttered, “Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy,” as though to ask, “Is that all I get?” Yet he is always devoted to Daisy—his #1 fan ever—and always addresses her with “Hiya, toots!” At least we think that’s what he’s saying.

Corpses

For Donald, born 1934, the following have always been dead:

Madame Marie Curie. She was the quintessential brilliant—but humane and modest—scientist, who took her award money and gave it away to struggling researchers. In this sense she was the anti-Donald. Yet she also discovered the element radium, which allowed future scientists to develop atomic energy. This led to the atomic bomb, so by the time 1945 rolled around Donald, then eleven, and his many fans had yet one more thing to quack nervously about.

Bonnie Parker, Clyde Barrows, John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, and Pretty Boy Floyd. All these desperadoes, stars of America’s greatest crime spree, died the same year Donald was born. The came of age in hard times, when autos had gotten fast, guns deadly, and bank-robbing almost semi-respectable in some parts of the country, where Depression foreclosures were unpopular. But they were killers, all of them. Donald would have had an extremely tough time protecting Daisy from them, but then Donald specialized in big kites and sharks.

Ernst Rohm. He was a prominent Nazi ally of Hitler who fell victim to the Fuhrer’s treachery during the Night of the Long Knives, a ghastly series of assassinations that occurred during Donald’s birth year. Hitler and Rohm were at odds because Adolf wanted to make his army of thugs semi-respectable while Rohm insisted that they remain the extra-legal bullies they had always been. In time Hitler went from this victory to becoming the architect of World War II. In a movie filmed in London during the war’s last year (Brief Encounter), a character says that whatever the world’s coming to, there’s always the humor of Donald Duck. Hitler, cognizant of certain defeat, killed himself shortly thereafter; Donald is still with us.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman. She wrote one of America’s greatest short stories (“The Yellow Wallpaper”), about the madness of a woman confined by her husband to a “rest cure” that, instead of settling her nerves, drives her mad. The point is that women need independence and creativity, not benign imprisonment based on the premise that they are little girls. Donald is roughly parallel; he would wither away from indolence in his hammock where it not for his excess sensitivity to the slightest thing that goes wrong in his world. Donald, as a male, does not lack autonomy.

Contemporaries

Among those born the same year as Donald and thus his contemporaries are the following:

Bart Starr and Hank Aaron. They grew up to become two of the greatest and coolest athletes in American sports history, as champion Green Bay Packers quarterback and Braves slugger. Later in his career Starr became the Packers’ coach and withstood fan dissatisfaction with calm and aplomb. While Aaron was chasing Babe Ruth’s home run record, he received many threatening letters, but he homered through them all. Donald has never achieved such grace under pressure.

Ralph Nader. He made his name as a consumer advocate and declared in the 1960s that American cars were “unsafe at any speed.” Later he ran for president and likely took enough votes away from Al Gore to make George W. Bush president. Who’d have blamed Gore if he’d said, with Donald, “Aw, Phooey”?

Willard Scott. He became famous as an early morning TV weatherman who also helped octogenarians celebrate their birthdays. Viewers criticized his corniness, but other watchers adored him. Before that, he was the first Ronald McDonald, another celebrated character so famous that he became even more recognized than Mickey Mouse and hence yet another figure, of whom Donald is jealous.

Gloria Steinem. She was an architect of the second wave of American feminism in the 1960s and 1970s and is credited with saying that a woman no more needs a woman than a fish needs a bike. Tell it to Daisy.

Dionne Quintuplets. They were five Canadian babies born to the same mother and become so famed that school children would impress their parents by memorizing their first names. Like Donald, a talking duck, they were freaks of nature.

Joan Didion. She became one of America’s greatest late twentieth century authors, specializing in the mordant and observant essay. One of hers, “On Morality,” dispenses with abstract moral codes and states that morality consists of actions that communities say you must do, however dreadful, such as diving to the bottom of a dangerously deep lake to recover a dead body. Donald’s morality, too, is rooted in rescues.

Mindset

Here are some items on Donald Duck’s Personal Mindset List, based on the year of his birth, 1934:

•Another Huey—not Duck but Long—has always been the unofficial dictator of Louisiana and has a considerable following in the country for his idea of radical redistribution of wealth and one-party, tyrannical rule.

•In a sign of the times’ economic despair and cynicism, one wag has always said that if everyone has a chance to become president, he’ll sell his for a quarter. This seems especially apt during a period when a mere dime would get into one of Donald’s cartoons—which, unlike the presidency, is a sure thing.

•The same year Donald was born, there was the nation’s first Mother-in-Law Day in Amarillo, Texas, The idea has never caught on, and this may be a clue as to why Donald has never married Daisy.

•Franklin Roosevelt’s National Recovery Administration—a cooperative of wage and price controls designed to cure the Depression—has always had a bird as its symbol. It looks like an eagle; no doubt Donald is furious it is not a duck.

•The only kind of new construction in those hard-pressed times has always been to build cocktail lounges where people can escape from being broke, but indeed for Donald and Daisy the very term “cocktail” would seem “birdist.”

•In a less birdist moment, the new species of Eskimo chickens and snow goosebirds have always been hatched and made their debuts in the eco-cycle.

•In a rescue from trouble worthy of Donald himself, Claudette Colbert has always hitched up her skirt in order to attract motorists so that she and co-star Clark Gable (It Happened One Night) could hitch a ride. Daisy never did anything like this. It’s not clear how sexy a feathered leg would be anyhow.

•Sears’s catalogue has always featured contraceptive devices, as no one has wanted any extra children during the Depression because they can’t afford them. There is no evidence that Huey, Dewey, and Louie were illegitimate.

•As Prohibition has ended, sales of Coke have always been dropping, but there is no indication that either Coke or whiskey would have soothed the temperamental Mr. Duck.

•The gangster John Dillinger has always escaped from an Indiana jail brandishing a wooden pistol colored by black shoe polish. This is the sort of thing that might happen in one of Donald’s cartoons, but this was real life!

•Another group of cartoonish, slapstick types—human, not duck—have always made their debut and been dubbed “The Three Stooges.”

•In a humorless decision antithetical to the loose antics of Donald, the government of Italy decrees that all schoolteachers must wear a military uniform in class. Even so, their wardrobe would have been more varied than Donald’s.

•The one and only arrest for the kidnapping of Charles Lindbergh, Jr. has always been made in the year of Donald’s birth. Charles, Jr. would have been three years older than Donald and would have enjoyed growing up with and laughing at him. And Donald wouldn’t have minded a bit.

•The prudish Will Hays has always been head of Hollywood’s Picture Production Code, with its strict rules—which is why you never see Donald in the nude.

•The great actor Lionel Barrymore has always read Dickens’ Christmas Carol to children on the radio in December. Later, one of Donald’s most irascible uncles, Scrooge McDuck would emerge to take advantage of the story’s newly found popularity among kids. He enjoyed swimming in a pool of gold, which seemed absurd until McDonald’s in the 1980s enchanted children by placing a pool of plastic balls in their restaurants. The lads and lassies would “swim” all day, much to the chagrin of parents who wanted to get home. They could have blamed it all, maybe, on Donald’s stringy uncle.

TONY SOPRANO 

 The last time we see Tony Soprano, the crime boss of New Jersey and street boss of the DiMeo family, he is forty-eight years old. He is sitting with his family—including wife Carmela and virtually grown children Meadow and A.J.—in a restaurant. They are sitting down to a meal. They may or may not be “hit” by one of Tony’s many enemies. Camera fades to black. No one has seen Tony since. For all we know, his family may have finished that meal and gone on to many more—or maybe not.

Sketch

Tony was born on June 17, 1959 and attended high school in West Orange New Jersey (WOHS). His father was “Johnny Boy” Soprano, a hood, and his mother was Livia. Later Tony tells his psychiatrist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, that Livia was a cold, merciless woman that wore his father down to a little bitty nub. Outside the house, however, Johnny Boy was someone to be wary of. His brother Corrado (later Tony’s “Uncle Junior”) was an up and comer in the DiMeo family; one of Tony’s more harrowing memories was watching his father and brother mutilate a local butcher by the name of Mr. Satriale. A typical day in young Tony’s life was going home and hearing from his mother that his father had been arrested. “Did he do anything?” Tony asks; and his mother says, “Of course not. The cops just like to pick on Italians.”

Tony’s grandfather came from Italy to New Jersey nearly a half-century before Tony was born. He became a stonemason and helped build a local church that Tony likes to show to his kids so that they will grasp, and take pride in, their heritage. Tony himself did not enter “the life” (of criminality) until he was in his early twenties. Before that he had attended Seton Hall University for a while. By the time he was twenty-three he had killed his first man. His father died four years later, but by this time Dad was a far lesser figure in the annals of New Jersey bad guys than was his Uncle Junior. Soon enough Tony was growing up in a world of rackets and “hits,” of prostitution and shakedowns. He ran with guys who had sobriquets such as “Walnuts” and “Big Pussy,” some of whom he’d known most of his life. Blessed with dominance and cunning, he gradually came up the ranks.

By the time he was in his late 30s the illness of the DiMeo head, Jackie April, Sr., led to a lot of internal squabbling, which only got worse when Jackie, Sr. died of gut cancer. Tony was pitted against none other than his own uncle for the keys to power. He cleverly settled the matter by giving Uncle Junior the big title and taking operational control for himself. This arrangement also benefited Tony because Uncle June drew the interest of the Feds while Tony hid behind his façade.

Tony Soprano is a fascinating guy because he is a bad man who tries to be as good as he can. If we take Tony’s career and translate it into non-Mafia terms we get the sorts of dilemmas that afflict other successful men. They do their jobs well and exert a lot of power. But then they also have to do unpleasant things, such as fire old friends or turn down the sons and daughters of relatives for jobs. They might have to juggle the books a little bit. They have to cut a corner or three. And this is hard on them, but then they not only have their own positions to think about. They must also think about the security of their own families and the well being of the organizations they run. And behind their front of confidence and authority, they are anxious, panicky, and depressed. But they cannot allow any of this to show. And then there are problems at home: they have wives who make demands of them and children who listen to them not. Any of this could apply to the head of a pizza manufacturing company or the dean of a large university.

And this is also Tony Soprano—who has all this on his plate—except for one thing: he doesn’t fire people; he kills them. He has to. And sometimes they had it coming, but at other times they don’t. Sometimes he has to kill them to keep them from a worse fate with another crime family. And sometimes he doesn’t want to kill them, but they’ve gone to the F.B.I., and Tony must worry about all his other “employees” and the effect on them if the syndicate is brought down. And sometimes it might be his own nephew, but the kid has a drug habit he can’t beat and he’s killing the organization.

Tony is in a rough business. His psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi, tells him that she has trouble with his act, which is murderous, and later she even learns that she might be helping Tony become an even better psychopathic manipulator. Tony tells her that he is ethical after all. He cites people like Hitler as really bad, because he killed innocent people. Tony doesn’t kill innocent people. His killings are “need only.” Tony says that his people are no different from other people who come from the Old Country: they want a little sliver of America.

Tony worries, though, about his own humanity, just as much as he worries that Carmela will find out about his serial adultery or that Meadow will discover his criminality (she does) or that A.J. lacks the nous to get on in life and might try to drown himself again. Tony is anxious about all this but also about himself. He likes animals, especially the ducks that land in his New Jersey suburban pool, and he delights in feeding them. Yet he also dreams that a duck stole his penis, and his psychiatrist says that the ducks are a symbol of his family, which he enjoys feeding and caring for even as he frets that they diminish his macho and freedom. Tony loves horses, and the one murder he does for which he has no regrets is revenge for starting a fire that kills his favorite racehorse.  He reads with great interest a book on dinosaurs, and when a black bear gets into his garbage, he approaches the subject more with interest than extermination in mind.

He dreads anyone in the crime family—especially Uncle June—knowing that he is confessing to a psychiatrist. It’s matter not only of losing face but also letting information out. But he is prone to panic attacks and depression, and the doctors tell him there’s nothing wrong with him physically—so he reluctantly sees a shrink and from time to time storms out of on him when she seems to be getting too close to his deepest fears and wounds. Tony hates his mother, but he also hates it that he hates his mother. At one point she and Uncle Junior actually plot his death. He despises Livia; he hauls around guilt because he does so, even if he knows goddamned well that she deserves it.

Tony wants his children to escape a life of crime. He doesn’t think A.J. has the stuff anyhow. He makes such a good living that it’s hard not to spoil his kids, but he still wants them to embrace old-fashioned values. When Meadow says that the household is like a time warp stuck in the 1950s, Tony unapologetically agrees. He senses the end of something. He imagines that there must have been a time when Mafia bosses didn’t suffer from despair; didn’t incur guilt; didn’t stew about ducks; and had a firm thumb on their offspring. He knows that he’s successful but downgrades himself against the standards of some Golden Age gone by.

Tony is a homicidal sociopath, and yet he isn’t. He’s vulnerable. He’s sensitive. He is a very mean man—cruel at times—yet you also sense that he’s up against those worse than he is. There is never any notion that he’d like to get out of the life. But he’d like to be as good as he possibly can while staying in it. And he knows that this is a losing contest. But what else can he do? As he says, when everyone tells him how terrible they feel about Livia’s death, “Yeah, well, whadda gonna do, huh?” He cries crocodile tears when he says that.

But it should be his epitaph.

Corpses

Tony, having been born in 1959, grew up in a world in which the following have always been dead; he didn’t kill any of them, though.

Buddy Holly, along with Ritchie Havens and J.P. “Big Bopper” Richardson, died in a plane crash near Clear Lake, Iowa. The deaths of so many fledgling rock n’ roll stars heralded, in legend, “the day the music died.” Tony would grow up in a criminal world where such nicknames as “Big Bopper” would be standard, except perhaps a Mob “Big Bopper” would be a hit man who specialized in baseball bats. More significantly, the death of Holly signaled the end of a nicer form of rock, complete with boy-next-door horn-rimmed glasses. Something more wicked and demonic would succeed Buddy Holly and the Crickets. It would create a rebellious counterculture that the more traditional Tony would find still alive and kicking in his own children. He would hope to make his own home a redoubt of conservative values, even as he realized that he could not control his kids once they were out of the house. That the head of New Jersey crime lacked such power is part of his ironic poignancy.

Cecil B. De Mille was one of Hollywood’s most conservative and anti-Communist directors, but while he died the year Tony was being born, he and The Tone shared a productive cleverness. When Hollywood censorship in the early twentieth century began to restrict semi-nakedness on the screen, De Mille, knowing that such attractions were popular, adapted to the orders by featuring semi-semi-nakedness but placing it in the context of Biblical epics in which a righteous God punished the naughty girls. De Mille managed to have it both ways, just as Tony did when he posed as a waste management consultant while bossing a riot of illegal activities. And, as in De Mille’s films, Tony was both a traditionalist and a lawbreaker. He also feared punishment.

George Reeves, TV’s Superman, died under mysterious and still-unresolved circumstances. He was having an affair not with Lois Lane but with the wife of a Hollywood producer with Mob ties that Tony would have appreciated. They may have bumped him off; or his death by gunshot wound might have been accident or suicide. The news came as a shock to America’s youngsters, who had believed the legend over the man. This is somewhat akin to the façade of Tony as tough guy, beneath whom there are demons and vulnerabilities. The year Tony was born, both the music and Superman died. Was this a portent of how, as Tony took the reins, the Mob’s best years were also dead, already?

Frank Lloyd Wright, the notoriously brilliant architect, also passed away the year of Tony’s debut on Earth. Known for a style of architecture in which the inside seems continuous with the outside, Wright’s last great achievement was the twisting, learning, ostentatious Guggenheim Museum of Art, which is often thought to be the pinnacle of architectural discourtesy because it fits so ill with the uptown Manhattan buildings that surround it. Wright didn’t care. In a way the Guggenheim is like Tony’s Uncle Junior, who flamboyantly draws all the attention of law enforcement, while Tony, a more ordinary-seeming building, hides in plain sight.

Raymond Chandler, American-born, British-educated, drunk and depressed, also “bought it” the year Tony was born. In his novels he invented a bard-boiled detective named Philip Marlowe, who discovers—though it is hardly news to him—that violence and corruption are rife in 1930s and 40s L.A., from the top strata to the bottom rung, from the plutocrats to the pimps. Marlowe once said that, “Dead men are heavier than broken hearts.” Tony, reflecting upon the shame of having had to kill his old buddy “Big Pussy” for squealing, might have responded that they both weigh the same, both are heavy, and that they come to the same thing in the end.

Charles Starkweather was executed by the state of Nebraska the year Tony came to live among us. He and his teenybopper girlfriend went on a killing spree in the Midwest that horrified the nation, which wondered what today’s young people were coming to. A punk with a leather jacket, a perpetual smirk, and a dangling cig, Starkweather would have been a terrible liability for Tony’s gang, which would have told Charlie that crime can pay—but not that way, kid.

Contemporaries

In the same generation with Tony—and born the same year—were the following:

Lawrence Taylor. Taylor was one of the greatest linebackers to play pro football. Offensive schemes by rival teams were designed simply to neutralize him alone. Unusual for a defensive player, he won the NFL’s Most Valuable Player award; with his mix of brutality and speed he also led the New York Giants, and its Big Blue Wrecking Crew, to two Super Bowl victories. Tony, who lived near the Meadowlands where the Giants played ball, has seen “L.T.” many times and has almost doubtlessly admired his prowess to inflict terror and pain.

Keith Olbermann. Olbermann began his career as a sports analyst but became a leading voice during the new millennium against the conservative outlook of Fox News. He was especially critical of President Bush and Vice President Cheney because of their “criminal” invasion of Iraq, once suggesting that the latter should leave this country because he is a liar and a traitor. Like Tony, Olbermann is mercurial and unpredictable—he has feuded with his bosses on two networks and quit both—but unlike Tony he is a free agent who does not have to worry about family or employees. One of his segments was “Today’s Worst Person in the World,” but these ogres were nearly always guilty of only ideological mendacity or stupidity, so he never named Tony. For years Olbermann feuded with his opposite number on Fox, the overbearing Bill O’Reilly, and once said that “Billy O” engaged in self-applause to drown out the sound of “his daddy’s hitting him.” O’Reilly said that even Tony Soprano wouldn’t bring a father into a fight. So there! These guys have a way to go before they become genuine Mob material.

Eliot Spitzer. He was a governor of New York who had ascended to office based on his prosecution, as state attorney general, of Wall Street chicanery. But his political flight was downed by his having visited a New York City prostitute—perhaps one of Tony’s. After Olbermann left his last network, Spitzer replaced him.

Nicole Brown Simpson. She and Ronald Goldman were notoriously murdered in Los Angeles in 1994. Her ex-husband, star football player and occasional Hollywood actor O.J. Simpson, stood trial but was acquitted. Now in jail on other charges in Florida, he says he is always looking for the real killer. What Tony and his guys would think of this whole thing is worth contemplating. When a hood killed a prostitute outside Tony’s strip joint the Bada Bing, one of his lieutenants (Paulie Walnuts) said it was OK to off a hooker but to do so on Bing property was disrespectful of the club. So perhaps Paulie might have thought that to ice an ex-wife is one thing, but to do it in her own front yard is quite another. Such are the vagaries of gangster ethics.

Mindset

Here is Tony Soprano’s Personal Mindset List, based on the year of his birth, 1959.

•Fidel Castro has always been in control of Cuba, having ousted a dictator who was mob-friendly. For those in the Mafia, such as Tony, the rise of puritanical Castro has always been an unwelcome event; under his predecessor Cuba was a wide-open island for bets and strumpets. Had Castro not come to power, Little Tony might have grown up running numbers and whores in Havana rather than doing so in Newark.

•Xerox has always been making plain paper copier, thus increasing the number of paper documents in nearly every organization and creating, over time, more and more garbage: good for Tony’s phony business as “waste management consultant.”

•Herman Kahn, a scientist and mathematician, has always been raising hackles with his analysis of thermonuclear war. Kahn’s big idea was that instead of wringing our hands over nuclear weapons we must face up to them and figure out how to survive them in the event of a major exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union. Kahn believed that such an event would hamper, but not end, humanity. He thought that the elderly could certainly eat contaminated food because they wouldn’t live much longer in any case. Kahn was like Tony, who also faced up to surviving the most dreaded of circumstances in his business; but no one would nominate either for Moralist of the Year.

•Rod Serling has always been writing and producing his Twilight Zone episodes about sudden suspensions of conventional time and space: the past is in the future, and the young man is the old man. The episodes are as surreal as Tony’s anxiety dreams, as when he douses himself with gasoline and self-immolates in order to forestall a doctor’s prediction of premature death.

•An acclaimed movie has always been The Nun’s Story, about a courageous sister who opposes Hitler, despite orders to be neutral, and who braves her life in order to provide medical care amid the dire conditions of the Congo. Audrey Hepburn plays Sister Luke; she is perhaps an archetype for the Madonna of Love that Livia was not, and that Tony never had: if only he could have been raised by Audrey Hepburn. He might have finished Seton Hall and become a real waste management consultant.

•TV networks have always been broadcasting The Wizard of Oz every year on television. They have learned that some movies never suffer from overexposure and are the gift that keeps on giving. This is also what Tony and his cohort have learned: that the key to big money is systematic profit, rather than one time profit. It’s the difference between John Dillinger, who robbed a bank and hoped he could rob another, and Tony Soprano, who ran big business, albeit illegal. It’s the difference between a good show and a brand.

•Another radical difference between Tony and other criminals also emerged the year he was born, for in western Kansas two ex-cons tried to rob a rich farm family, got nothing, but killed all four and got themselves hanged. Tony is less like them and more like Truman Capote, who grew wealthy writing a book about the whole thing (In Cold Blood), selling the rights to a major magazine, and collecting big bucks on a movie version.

•The Daytona 500 has always run each year in Florida 500 miles, 200 laps). It has developed into the most popular racecar event of them all and has become yet another excuse for gambling: good for Tony’s eventual business.

•The year Tony was born has always been a big year for jazz, especially the recording of a pioneering session known as Kind of Blue, featuring Miles Davis. The novelist Ralph Ellison wrote that jazz is like living in America: you can riff in your own way as long as you play more or less in tune with everyone else. This has always been a problem for Tony, for he is all-American (he is a determined striver) but also anti-American (he kills people, or scares them, and tempts them into lives of vice and ruin.) Tony too is kind of blue.

•The scientist Gregory Pincus has always been developing an oral contraceptive, thus making it easier for Tony (and millions of others) to cheat on their wives and get away with it sans biological consequences of a certain type. Carmella still finds out about his addictive adultery; there’s no pill to prevent that.

•Becoming independent of Mother Britain, Singapore has always been a self-governing colony: yet another sign of the break up of imperialism around the world. This trend will only grow. Rebellion against authority will peak in the next decade, the 1960s, as Tony grows up. Tony himself becomes a maverick against conventional values and laws, but he wants to be a imperialist at home—for the good of his children, whom he sometimes confuses with the colonized. Tony wants to be British Empire and Singapore all at once: no wonder he dreams of phallic theft by ducks and needs Dr. Melfi.

•Norman Mailer, the novelist, has always written his famous essay “The White Negro,” about the “wigger,” white guys (such as beatniks) who adopt urban African-American habits in music, violence, slang, dress, and the consumption of narcotics. Tony and his guys are not wiggers. They are not involved with dope or guns in order to make a statement, but in order to earn a living: a good one.

•The social scientist Ervin Goffman has always written his pioneering study The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, which observes how we are constantly “acting in scenes” in our routine interactions with others. The big idea is to smell out the scene and to act according to its unofficial rules. When Tony tells Dr. Melfi he is in love with her, she “saves” the scene by telling him that he isn’t really in love with her. Rather, he just feels better overall, and his falling in love is just a sign of that. Thus Dr. Melfi moves the scene back to a therapy session, which Tony, in his own presentation of self, had forgotten all about. Ervin Goffman would have been pleased with the good doctor, who is happy that Tony has transferred his affections to her—she gains authority as a therapist—but is reluctant to allow him to admit it.

A Mad Man’s Mindset List®….

In both The Mindset Lists of American History and The Annual Mindset List, Tom McBride and Ron Nief offer an “indispensable” (Brian Williams) and “mesmerizing” (Associated Press) way of tracing the American past…. Here McBride and Nief offer their unique perspective on one of America’s favorite TV characters….

As AMC’s Mad Men continues in its latest season, it is time to take historical stock of its leading character: the outwardly handsome but subtly tortured Don Draper. A brilliantly successful man in the sexist, alcohol-soaked early 1960s, Don’s personal life remains a mess from which we viewers do not wish walk away.

A Little Background

Don Draper (real name: Richard Whitman) was born in the American South in 1924 and is thirty-six (36) when he begins to work as an account executive for Sterling Cooper, a small but prosperous advertising firm in New York City. (Coincidentally, an actor named Jon Hamm, born 1971, is also 36 when a new series called Mad Men began in 2007 on the American Movie Channel.)

When Don Draper was born, President Woodrow Wilson and Louis Sullivan had always been dead.

Woodrow Wilson’s dream of an internationally activist America also seemed dead, but in the end Wilson’s vision would flourish in such ventures as the war in Korea, where young Dick Whitman, then 29, changed identities with his dead lieutenant so that he could get out of the war.

Louis Sullivan died broke and disgraced, but his vision of skyscrapers survived and flourished. Don would work in a high-rise in New York City. His boss Bert Cooper, said of an elderly secretary, “She was born in a barn and died on the 39^th floor. She was an astronaut.” It’s also a tribute to Sullivan.

Born the same year as Don were

Lee Marvin (like Don, a future well-spun macho man);

Gloria Vanderbilt (like Don, a marketing genius, with her specialty of cosmetics);

Marlon Brando (who played famous movie roles seeking emotional truth, from which Don always tries to escape);

Doris Day, an actress whose identity was so well-spun that Oscar Levant would quip that he knew her before she was a virgin);

Rod Serling (who, like Don, had a fertile imagination about how to shape reality); and

Elizabeth Short, the infamous Black Dahlia murder victim in Los Angeles (like Don, she was looking for a new and more glamorous identity).

 Here’s Don’s (Dick’s) Personal Mindset List

(based on the year he was born: 1924)

1. The author Bruce Barton has always written that Christ (not Don) was the world’s first successful ad man.

2. No one has ever gone broke buying IBM, a brand new company.

3. There’s always been a media company and dream factory called Metro Goldwyn Mayer.

4. The coolest man was not the debonair Don but silent President Calvin Coolidge, as Republicans drank a new “Keep Cool With Coolidge” cocktail, consisting of raw eggs and various fruit juices.

5. Smoking ads have always been directed at women, with celebrities such as aviatrix Amelia Earhart endorsing Lucky Strikes (later spun as “toasted” by Don at Sterling Cooper) and with slogans such as “reach for a cigarette, not a sweet.”

6. A brand-new cigarette was Marlboro, touted to women as being as “mild as May” and sold complete with an ivory tip.

7. Foreshadowing the presence of talented Peggy Olson and canny Joan Holloway at Sterling Cooper, a top national issue while Don (Dick) was in his crib was whether or not women should work outside the home.

8. Anticipating the later work of Sterling Cooper and other ad agencies, there have always been national fads sold and spun by mass media, such as books of cross word puzzles, complete with attached pencils (the B&O Railroad even put dictionaries in their passenger cars for crossword aficionados).

8. The fleet football player Red Grange has always been known as “The Galloping Ghost,” another example of the new power of mass-communicated slogans and catch phrases.

9. Texas Guinan, a racy and colorful nightclub owner in New York, has always greeted her customers with “Hello, suckers”—a line that the cynical and image-selling Don would have appreciated.

10. Methodists have always lifted their ban on dancing and theatergoing—though not necessarily in the American South where Don (Dick) was born.

11. As Don was part of the last generation of American men to wear hats, he might have been amused to learn that the most fashionable hat during the year he was born was the bowler.

12. Nearly forty years before Don was decisively against Peggy’s idea that Harry Belafonte should become the spokesman for Fillmore Auto, both major political parties struggled with whether or not to condemn the powerful Ku Klux Klan, which had major influence as far north as Indiana.

13. A popular opinion was that Henry Ford had saved America by giving men a tension relieving substitute for prohibited booze: the Model T (banned liquor would not become a problem for Don, however; maybe that’s why we rarely see him in a car).

14. With a sign that sexism didn’t begin with Don Draper, a popular ad slogan said, “Thousands of men are denying their wives Packard Six cars.”

15. In an early sign of the information revolution on which Sterling Cooper and other ad agencies would later seize, news has always been overtaking dance music as the principal content on radio.

16. There has always been a Macy’s Parade on Thanksgiving: great advertising.

17. The Toastmasters’ Club has always been promoting better public speaking and impression management in men.

18. Foreshadowing Don’s later problems with the FBI’s inadvertently finding out who he really is, J. Edgar Hoover has always been the bureau’s director.

19. In a sign that image and do-overs didn’t start with Don, singer and model Fanny Brice has always been willing to vouch for the nose job her plastic surgeon did on her.

20. Cigarettes, which boosted morale between battles in World War I, have always been endorsed by everyone from Santa Claus to doctors to generals and have always been more popular than pipes and cigars. (By the time Don came to Sterling Cooper every adult American would smoke an average of 4,000 of them yearly.)

Presented to the League of Women Voters on February 10, 2013:

1. When they were toddlers, academics were talking about the “chilly climate” in the classroom for women; now that they are college students, academics are worried about the paucity of males attending American colleges and universities.

2. Although Hillary Clinton was a pioneering feminist, most of them supported Obama in 2008.

3. They fully expect the Democratic Party to be running women on the top or bottom of presidential tickets for the next decade and beyond—and think the Republicans might, too.

4. They are the least surprised people in America to learn that the Army is now bringing women into forward combat roles.

5. They have heard the word “diversity” all their lives and use such terms as “hetero-normal” to refer to refer to Super Bowl ads.

6. They are more likely to find musical programmers than guitar players interesting.

7. They are in no rush whatever to marry, but doing so by age 30 seems a pretty good idea.

8. Depending on their major, they do not expect to find rewarding and remunerative work right away and expect to acquire added professional or graduate education.

9. As their own parents also grew up with rock music and its various associations, they tend not to be estranged from their immediate forebears.

10. Exposed bra straps have always been a fashion statement, not a wardrobe malfunction to be corrected quietly by well-meaning friends.

11. A “Facebook Widow” is someone who has broken up with her significant other and announced it on the world’s most popular social networking site.

12. They are not necessarily surprised when they meet a guy who can cook better than they can.

13. They were about “minus 10” when Title IX first became a law requiring gender diversity and equality in college athletics.

14. Nurses have always been in short supply.

15. The words “Kardashian” and “tacky” have always been synonymous.

16. They are “spiritual” but not necessarily religious.

17. Altar girls have never been radical.

18. Unlike the previous generation, they think P.C. means Personal Computer, not Political Correctness.

19. All media—from movies to TV to music to telephones to the Internet—have always been migrating to smart phones the size of a large oyster shell.

20. They rarely use actual wires, but they are always wired.

21. It is entirely possible that some of their own children will live to be 120.

22. Having come to maturity with the Great Recession and talk of Social Security and Medicare going broke, they have relatively little faith in the economy.

23. They really resonate with Carrie Mathison, the bipolar intelligence agent on Homelandthat the guys don’t listen to.

24. Tattoos have always been both highly visible and very chic.

25. They’ve grown up with condoms being advertised on TV.

An Excerpt from the Keynote Address for the NCAA National Convention

Dallas, 2013

By Tom McBride and Ron Nief, co-authors of The Mindset Lists of American History (Wiley, 2011)

What have today’s young people—those between eighteen and twenty-nine—grown up with in terms of American athletics? What has been “normal” for them? What is their “sports mindset”?

There are two ways to answer this question: by offering some items off our famed, patented Lists, and by offering some analysis of a main difference between this sports generation and previous ones.

Let’s start with some List items: they supply an immediate (and comic) insight into what has always been “normal”—in terms of athletics—for the current generation of young people:

Sports bras have made underwear a fashion statement that no longer needs to be covered up.

Students today no longer need the weight room–they can get a workout playing a video game.

There has always been football in Jacksonville but never in Los Angeles.

Billy Graham is as familiar to them as Otto Graham was to their parents.

The Green Bay Packers have always celebrated with the Lambeau Leap.

Being crowned the biggest loser is no longer offensive

Barbells are not just a piece of athletic equipment but are decorative body piercing jewelry

Cheerleading has always been a controversial sport

Arnold Palmer has always been a drink

O.J. Simpson is a felon

George Foreman is a grill salesman

They’ve always wanted to be just like Kobe

LBJ has always been LeBron James

But there’s something more as well: Today’s young people simply expect that American athletics are not going to be free from larger political, economic, and social concerns. The fact that Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa both broke Babe Ruth’s record in a single season cannot be separated from the issue of doping, and doping can’t be pulled apart from the larger question of drugs, both legal and otherwise, in our society. When Muhammad Ali tied boxing to protesting the Vietnam War, and said he disliked Sonny Liston a lot more than he disliked the Viet Cong, this was shocking. Now, however, the link between athletics and politics is more or less usual. Even Title IX, which has revolutionized collegiate athletics, is viewed by many conservatives as government overreach and, in the words of one conservative columnist, “a train wreck.”

Yet if the relationship between athletics and controversial issues is not unusual, sometimes the details are. Who would have thought that a Ravens linebacker and a Vikings punter would have come out for legalizing gay marriage? Still, even though that was unexpected, the overall genre of tying athletics to politics is not. This is “normal” for today’s young people.

They have grown up with a Seton Hall basketball player and Chicago Bulls three-point specialist being ostracized because they opposed Desert Storm. They have grown up with Martina Navratilova’s insisting that the American public would not have gathered in support of a prominent female athlete if she had gotten AIDS, as did Magic Johnson, from living a promiscuous life. They have grown up contrasting the very brand-conscious Michael Jordon, who declined to take a stand against sweatshop cruelties in the making of shoes because “Republicans buy sneakers, too,” with Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf of the Denver Nuggets, who refused to stand for the national anthem because it offended his Muslim beliefs and got his Mississippi house burned down for his trouble.

Many of them remember that the women’s soccer team boycotted the 1996 Olympics in order to secure equal treatment in terms of such things as facilities. They are aware that the Williams Sisters had to walk through the dangerous streets of Harlem in order to practice a sport in which they excelled, but also a sport associated with country clubs. They remember Don Imus’ comment about the Rutgers women basketball team and the push back from the coach, Vivian Stringer—and how Imus was chased, briefly, from the air for making comments deemed racist and sexist. Some of them know that Steve Nash and Joakim Noah of the NBA protested the war in Iraq.

Some of them remember Pat Tillman, a great NFL safety, who was killed in Afghanistan and honored as an All-American hero of sacrifice. They may also recall that Tillman was killed by friendly fire—a fact covered up even from his family—and that he himself was personally opposed to the war in Iraq, if not in Afghanistan. They will not always forget that the first time poor people saw the inside of the New Orleans Superdome was in the desperate wake of Hurricane Katrina.

None of this means that today’s young people are of only one political persuasion. Like all of us, they draw different conclusions. But the melding of the business and political pages with the sports pages is normal for them. It does not surprise them.

In a sense this is not so good, for maybe sports should be a refuge from political disputes. Great athletes speak with their bodies far more eloquently than most of us do with our tongues. Sometimes we might even prefer that they not talk—just play. But perhaps such innocence, however comforting, needs to be opposed and complicated. Whether or not that is true, it is being complicated. And in another sense, as we have always insisted, the more things change, the more they don’t.

After all, athletics in the United States have never really been separate from the great issues of race and gender, as when differing people had differing ideas about the advisability of women riding bicycles or African Americans winning boxing matches. It’s just that such non-separation is out in the open now. It’s out of the closet. It’s what’s “always,” as we Mindset List types like to say, been true.

THE MINDSET LISTS OF AMERICAN HISTORY

 Frequently Asked Questions Posed to the Authors,

Tom McBride and Ron Nief

Q: Why didn’t you just publish a book that included all your Mindset Lists since the beginning in 1998?

A: No one would buy such a book when they get all our Mindset Lists free online at www.beloit.edu/mindset or www.mindset.flywheelsites.com Besides, we wanted to do something larger: prove that our methods are an illuminating way to pursue historical truth, especially about American life over the past 150 years, from 1880-2030.

Q: What do you mean by that?

A: We mean that an investigation of what’s normal for one generation, but abnormal for another, reveals how history is all about change. Historical change is usually slow, and it’s hard to measure or even notice unless you ask a particular generation what has always been “normal” for them. The way we use the words “always” and “never” in our Mindset List items is ironic: for history, unlike philosophy or math, is about shifting, not fixed, reality. We are always trying to dramatize that in light-hearted but mind-blowing ways.

Q: So your book is a record of social and technological change. Aren’t there any constants?

A: Sure there are. We begin the book with how, for late nineteenth century teens, patent medicine salesmen with wagons of so-called magic “elixirs” were normal. They’d supposedly cure everything from constipation to nerves. Everything’s changed, right? Not really: today’s teens find products like St. John’s Wort, never checked by the Food and Drug Administration, on sale everywhere. For that earlier generation, the cryptic telegraph was normal; for the current generation cryptic texting is normal. Texts are electronic telegraphs. For that earlier generation pocket watches were normal; no one wore a wristwatch. For the current generation smart phones are their watches. They don’t wear wristwatches any more either. Things move in cycles; the more things change, the more they don’t.

Q: What else doesn’t change?

A: Human nature. It’s hard to define exactly, but we all know what it is. If members of the college class of 1902 came back to the U.S. today they’d be bewildered at first with all the new technology, but then they’d realize that love, jealousy, envy, greed, war, and bravery haven’t really changed at all. Our new world would soon become recognizable.   

Q: Yet surely your book is mostly a record of bewildering change, isn’t it? Look at your last chapter: a futuristic one about how much different everything will be by 2030.

A: That’s right. We predict newspapers will be delivered only three days a week, and then mostly in Braille. We predict that the new generation will never fold up a map or write a check. We predict a digital, paperless world—and that’s just the start of it. Again, however, change is slow; and, lived every day, it doesn’t seem all that dramatic. It’s when you tell the whole story of change in American life over a century and a half from the viewpoint of kids growing up—as we have—that the fun and wonder come into play. That’s why so many people, such as Brian Williams, have liked the book.

Q: Is there any ultimate reason you wrote this book?

A: Yes. We want generations to talk across the divide. If just one person reads our book and begins to interview and archive the memories of parents and grandparents for future generations (before it’s too late), we’re a couple of happy guys.