Only After Human Beings Vanish Can the Problem of Consciousness Be Solved Tom McBride 1 Connection If you follow popular science at all, you know that two common themes are when the sun will run out of fuel, and how we can solve the problem of consciousness. The two are rarely if ever connected. It is time that they were.   Scientists know that in a billion years the sun will transition to a red giant and life on earth will be uninhabitable. Multiply a billion times 365 days and watch your calculator explode. You and I have nothing to fret about.   Scientists are much less sure about consciousness. Alfred Russel Wallace, who co-founded the theory of evolution by natural selection with Darwin, once   Read on »

In association with legacy.com The Mindset List® Project proudly presents THE MINDSET LIST® OF DEATH AND REMEMBRANCE: From Cherubs to Cryonics. Beautifully illustrated, it surveys shifting American attitudes towards mortality and memory over 350 years–from Colonial times to 2100. The List ranges from cherubs on grave markers to cryonics, the technology of freezing dead bodies in hope that someday they may be brought back to life. You’ll find our latest List to be a mind-bending look at the changing American landscape over more than three centuries. To consider American death is to consider American life. Just go to

http://www.legacy.com/life-and-death/

BREAKING UP ON FACEBOOK!

 How Today’s High Tech Millennials Fall Out of Love  

 An Intergenerational Conversation Between

 Joan Gackstatter and Tom McBride 

 Millennial Joan Gackstatter (not her real name), is currently a writer living in New York. Baby Boomer Tom McBride is co-author of the annual Beloit College Mindset List®, The Mindset Lists of American History (Wiley, 2011), and a forthcoming study of mid twentieth century popular culture (Sourcebooks, 2014). . Here’s part of their discussion about love in cyberspace:

Tom: Here at The Mindset List® we’re always tracking what’s new. The Seattle Times called us “America’s cultural timekeepers.” We take that seriously. Yet we often find that a lot has stayed the same.

Joan: Yeah, Tom, but this time I think things have really changed. High tech has been pretty revolutionary. I’m not sure the older generation gets that.

Tom: But hey, Joan, surely not everything has changed. When you fall in love, it’s pretty much the same as it’s always been, right, even in the ancient time of my own youth. You’ve become each other’s emotional slave. You call each other silly pet names. You’re like a kid at your first birthday party. You have no identity beyond one another. But when it’s over, when you’ve fallen out of love, you’re supposed to be an adult all of sudden: get over it, move on, and all those other miserable and “responsible” things.

Joan: But here’s where I disagree, Tom, because so much really has changed. It’s harder to get finality now. With my generation you break up, then you text again right away, and you keep at it and before you know you may be back together again!  I guess when you were young, Tom—was that a hundred years ago–a lot of break-ups occurred with snail mail, and by the time you and she had exchanged a few letters, your feelings for each other had cooled already.

Tom: Yeah, everything was pretty final back then. I got a “Dear John” letter, as they called them when I was your age, and I don’t think I’ve ever gotten anything so conclusive. We were just totally over: no appeal!

Joan: And, Tom, there’s something else really new now as well. Your break-up goes public on Facebook. Sometimes break-ups get nasty and public there, and your friends take sides against his friends, and the whole business becomes like a political campaign. Or sometimes your friends and his friends just wait to see what happens and then take sides based on their convenience. It can be pretty disheartening.

Tom: Well, I guess something like that might have happened to me in the sixth grade, when I broke up with my girlfriend Charlotte—we were both twelve. She returned my broken heart necklace, and I recall a couple of my little buddies really disliked her for that. But they also thought I was better off without her: I had more time for baseball.

Joan: I’d like to have seen you play baseball, Tom; would pay good money for that. It was a while ago. Let me continue with what’s new these days. There’s also no out of sight-out of mind. He (or she) is always lurking around cyberspace. Even if you “de-friend” him, you still know some of his friends, and you’ll see his comments on their posts. And there’s always the temptation to Skype or text or email him.

Tom: Well, in my day we could always call long distance. But those calls were expensive back then. You could only afford to talk for about five minutes—hardly enough time to say all you thought you needed to say, much less get back together. You just felt bad after the call was over—partly because you had to pay the bill.

Joan: Even so, Tom one thing that has stayed the same is the awfulness of having to break up. There are so many ways to say, “I love you” but only one way to say, “This is over.” Even if you do it the coward’s way and just don’t reply to his messages, you’re still covering up complicated and contradictory feelings with a single, negative message.

Tom: Yeah, that was awful then, and it’s awful now. I guess the truth is that for some of us, when we do “break up,” we are running back and forth between relief and regret. If we’ve left one relationship for another, we might get buyer’s remorse. Hey, it happens when you buy a house, too! But tell me, Joan: Is it still customary to break up with someone face to face?

Joan: Not always. High tech communications makes it easier to do it on line.

Tom: Let me give you some of my hard-earned wisdom, Joan, about break-ups, whether face to face or not. As I recall my misspent youth, I have concluded that there were good reasons for all my break-ups. If there weren’t, they wouldn’t have happened. Of course I couldn’t see that at the time; I was too upset. And I was too young. If I’d only know that then, I could have accepted the facts and moved on a lot quicker. The young rarely learn fast.

Joan: Speaking of young, given my generation’s expectations of instant and pervasive communication we expect to fall in love faster and heal faster. Maybe we need to slow down, but in a world like ours, where the next new thing is always coming at you every hour, it’s easier said than done.

Tom: Easier said than done! Maybe if we were to ever bury Love and put down a marker for it, that could be inscribed: HERE LIES LOVE: It Was Easier Said Than Done.

Joan: I don’t expect to see that marker any time soon, Tom. You may be fantasizing again. Doesn’t that happen a lot with you old folks?

Tom: OK, Joan. Let’s not get personal here. We want to keep this a civil intergenerational dialogue!

Joan: Just kidding, Tom. My generation is pretty long on fantasy, too.

So: What’s new about falling out of love and what isn’t new? Post comments here at mindset.flywheelsites.com or post them on our Mindset List Facebook page, or send them to mcbridet@beloit.edu We’ll respect your privacy.

As the calendar flips to 2014, announcements will fill the media of the first child born in the New Year. Parents, veteran and new, will start preparing for the future, imagining what it will be like when these precious bundles grow up, graduate from high school, and head off to college around 2032.

Ron Nief and Tom McBride, authors of the annual Beloit College Mindset List,  offer their yearly advisory on the questions these parents should be prepared for.

Here is their  counsel:  “At some point you are going to have to explain yourself and your generation to the inquiring minds of your children, so it is best to recognize now how fast things are going to change.”

As a guide to the inquiries these infants may pose over the next 18 years about the “olden days,” here are 18 distinct possibilities.

Start taking notes!

What were you carrying around in those big backpacks when you were in school?

Why did you go to only ONE college and why did you go for FOUR years. 

When you did your grocery shopping online, how many hours did it take for delivery?

What sorts of programs were offered on television when it was free?

My college gave me a full scholarship plus they are paying me $40,000 a year to play basketball for them.  I don’t understand why you played for nothing when you were in college. Didn’t the NCAA Semi Professional College Athletic Union negotiate contracts for you?

Why do they call the digital fund transfer app on my pocket computer a “checkbook”?

When you were a kid and the lights did not go on automatically when you came into a room, how did you find the little switch in the dark?

Isn‘t it great that I can stay on your health insurance until I am 30?

How did you ever figure out that computer keyboard with the letters in such strange order? Keyboarding must have taken a lot of time.

Have you seen my 3-D pen? I seem to have misplaced it. 

Do you think that your having worked down at the Microsoft campus for the past 25 years will help me to get a job there when I graduate?

On which website did you meet Dad?

Why is that old guy Edward Snowden living on a boat in the middle of the ocean?

Why do Senate Third Party Leader Ted Cruz and his followers keep reading Green Eggs and Ham every year?

 How long have they been trying to figure out what Iran’s nuclear reactors are really for?

 How did you remember what all those keys and passwords were for before the introduction of thought identification software?

Since we now have Tasmanian Tigers and miniature Mastodons down at Biogene Park, do you think we will see real dinosaurs as pets someday?

Now that I have broken up with the first great love of my life, I think I need neurocosmetic surgery to get rid of all the painful memories. Is that covered on our insurance? 

P.S. IF YOU CAN THINK OF OTHER QUESTIONS NEW PARENTS SHOULD BE READY FOR OVER THE NEXT 18 YEARS, DROP US A LINE AT mcbridet@beloit.edu or at our Facebook Page. WE CAN ALWAYS USE THEM NEXT YEAR! Thanks!

WeRHistory

A Guide to THE MINDSET LISTS OF AMERICAN HISTORY

 INTRODUCTION

WeRHistory is a guide to discussion of the past and do-it-yourself history. As co-authors, we want our readers to explore the underlying message of THE MINDSET LISTS OF AMERICAN HISTORY: From Typewriters to Text Messages, What 10 Generations of Americans Think is Normal. As the first chapter says, “History Has Always Been Us.” Each of us does our bit for history every day. We make personal decisions that alter our individual history and collective decisions that make history. We are all part of the historical parade from birth to grave. We are all historical personages and actors in a historical drama. We not only are history; we can best discover this by “doing” our own history: making our own historical inquiries: about our time, about other times–and about our own lives and families.

WeRHistory includes ten questions for each of the book’s 10 chapters (excluding Introduction and Conclusion)—or 100 questions in all. These questions will prompt thought and discussion about what it felt like to grow up in a historical period. They ask readers to contemplate the values of earlier times with the preferences of more contemporary times. They even suggest how readers can contribute to each chapter by finding famous or obscure persons of their own and placing them in the unique features of each high school class.

DO YOUR OWN MINDSET LIST

Above all, we especially want to recommend a project that will help readers understand that history is a living and ongoing thing and not just something to be read about with facts to be memorized: that, in short, history is our histories. Any reader can do this project, but in schools it would run something like this: Assign students the task of compiling their own, personal Mindset Lists. Ask them to interview their parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and older siblings and friends in order to discover what was “always” or “never” true for them as they were growing up. Ask them to combine national with family history, so that they are able to find links between national trends and events and their impact upon families in terms of lost jobs, found jobs, new technology, moves to new places, new purchases, new tastes, and so on. These can range from why Grandfather lost his job to when the family first purchased a Japanese car to how the new Interstate highways affected the family farm. In terms of their own Mindset Lists, such items might be expressed as “Granddad has never bought a non-American car,” or “Uncle Earl has never worked in a steel factory in South Chicago,” or “Interstate 90 has always existed where the family dairy farm used to be.” The key is for readers to discover that history is not some abstraction but that history consists of them. History is personal.

Last, we suggest that at the outset readers learn how both to read and write Mindset List® items, as with the following suggested instructions:

Can you write a Mindset List item of your own? A typical List item is found in Chapter 1: “There have always been telephones, talking machines, and light bulbs.” This means that those born in 1880 have “always” known this technology and have “never” known a time when it didn’t exist. Now try to write one for yourself. Find a technological social, or political fact that has “always” been true since you were born and write it in List format. Or write a Mindset List for a member of your family: parent, grandparent, uncle/aunt, sibling or cousin. Or write one for a close friend. Again, blend personal with national social history. 

An Ancestral Version of This Project: THE MINDSET LISTS OF AMERICAN FAMILIES

Here is also a variation on this project.  It would include both the process of genealogy and three types of synthesis achieved by the class as a whole.

*Teach the members of a class (no more than 15-20) how to use “Mindset List” lmethodology through a careful study of McBride and Nief, THE MINDSET LISTS OF AMERICAN HISTORY (Wiley, 2011).

*Assign them the job of interviewing their parents and grandparents about what it was like for them to grow up. Make sure class members have at least 25 questions in common to all interviews.

*Assign class members the job of writing “Mindset Lists” for their parents and grandparents, as though they were subjects of THE MINDSET LISTS OF AMERICAN HISTORY. Students will ideally weave family and personal history with national social and economic history and examine ways in which the two “histories” overlap, collide, or connect.

*Help students become familiar with major genealogical sites (Ancestry, FindaGrave, MyFamily, GenealogyBuff, and so on).

* Help them trace their own late ancestors via these sites.

*Then assign class members to detail what sorts of questions they would have liked to ask their late ancestors, and to imagine what sorts of answers they might have gotten. Have students document these indicative questions and subjunctive answers. Then assign them to write a second set of “Mindset Lists” for their late ancestors.

*Combine all these results on a common web site so that students may give each other suggestions, view each other’s results, and offer comparisons and contrasts to each other about their findings.

*Once everything has been documented and posted, subdivide the class into three committees to do final phases of the project. The first will write a “chapter” of a book similar to THE MINDSET LISTS OF AMERICAN HISTORY. This chapter will portray a particular generation of Americans growing up with particular attention paid to what was “always” or “never” true for them back then: what in the subtitle of THE MINDSET LISTS OF AMERICAN HISTORY has always been “normal.” A second subcommittee will draw up a chronological chart that will detail what various ancestors of the class—both living and dead—were doing at about the same time down the years. This will supply an overview—or panoply—of life in the United States as lived by diverse persons. Finally, a third subcommittee will imagine themselves in thirty years and draw up their own answers to questions that their own children or grandchildren will be likely to ask them. What will their Mindset Lists look like if some future generation were to do this course project?

–Tom McBride/Ron Nief

WeRHistory Questions (10 For Each Chapter of the Book):

High School Class of 1898 (born 1880) WOMEN HAVE ALWAYS RIDDEN BICYCLES

This class saw the first real liberation of women as they were permitted to dress in looser clothes and join the men on the bike craze.

From the Mindset List for the Class of 1898: Youngsters their age have always had about a one in ten chance of graduating from high school.

1. Plump Rooms. Chapter 1 describes domestic taste during the late nineteenth century as stuffed and overcrowded. Sofas and chairs were “plump” and rooms were crowded with chairs, sofas, tables, lamps, family pictures and so forth. What social values are on display? (You might google some photos of home interiors of the period to help you get started.)

2. Do-It-Yourself Toys. Children born in 1880 often adapted very ordinary objects, like wheels, balls and boards, as toys. If you had had to do that when you were growing up, what routine objects might you have picked and how might you have played with them?

3. Dire Prophecy. As the telephone became more common some critics predicted that it would mean the end of face-to-face house visits. Has this prediction panned out?

4. Beecher’s Bread. Do you agree or disagree with Henry Ward Beecher’s dictum that if a man cannot live on bread and water he is not fit to live at all?

5. Corporate Trends. What is the apparent difference–in values and lifestyle–between a “cowboy” and a “ranch hand”?

6. Immigration Disputes. Do the tensions about immigration in the late nineteenth century have a familiar ring today?

7. Immoral Ticket-Splitting. Why do you think some people in the late nineteenth century thought “ticket-splitting” (voting sometimes for Republicans and sometimes for Democrats) was immoral?

8. Immortal West. The authors write, “No doubt the West will be forgotten by the next generation.” This was as of 1898. Has such a prediction come true?

9. Hardy Piety. The authors say that women in the late nineteenth century were sometimes supposed to be “hardy” but were always expected to be pious and domestic. Can women be hardy, pious and domesticated?

10. Do It Yourself. The authors point out that among famous people in the class of 1898 were comedian W.C. Fields, general Douglas MacArthur and author Helen Keller. Find another famous American born in 1880. How would you locate him or her in the historical trends detailed in Chapter 1?

For RUM HAS ALWAYS BEEN DEMONIC

High School Class of 1918 (born 1900) RUM HAS ALWAYS BEEN DEMONIC This class grew up in a world of moral fervor with those who thought that America should be booze-free forever and that just one more war could end wars forever.

From the Mindset List for the Class of 1918: Their fathers might have tossed a few camphor balls in the gas tank in order to pep up the old Tin Lizzie.

1. Potent Idealism. This class grew up in a time of great idealism: about ending alcoholic consumption in the United States, giving women the right to vote, and intervening in a European war in order to make all future wars impossible. What are the pros and cons of non-negotiable idealism?

1. Auto Anxiety. This was also a time when more and more people came to travel in automobiles. Imagine that you had never traveled anywhere before without walking, running or riding in a horse-drawn wagon, and you have a chance to ride in a “horseless carriage” that can get up to twenty miles an hour. What would the experience have been like for you? (You might look at photos of early autos—they’re pretty primitive by our standards—in order to conceive yourself in this situation.)

1. Castigation/Mastication. One of the great health fads of this era came from a man named Fletcher, who thought a key to good health was chewing food sufficiently. He said, “Nature castigates those who do not masticate.” What do you think of this idea?

1. Corsets and Hats. Fashion was strictly demarcated during this period. A woman’s waist could never be too small—thus the mandatory wearing of corsets—and hats were required for all occasions except for the bedroom. What was behind such rigid formality?

1. Current Repressions. You and I might consider being forced to wear a corset or a hat repressive. Will your grandchildren look back at your youth and find repressions that you had to endure?

1. Public v. Private. The electric chair was thought to be a progressive step because it was so much more humane than hanging. It also made public attendance at legal executions by the state much less likely and made capital punishment a much more private affair? What are the pros and cons of this development?

1. “Moral” Schools. Schoolchildren during this period of the early twentieth century learned in school from an all-purpose book called the McGuffy Reader, which taught them how to spell, do sums, deal with grammar—and also how to read highly moral stories. Should schools today teach morality as much as spelling?

1. Ethnic Slurs. This was a time in which it was really OK to make ethnic and racial slurs—against African-Americans and the Irish, for example, even in public. Why have such slurs become less acceptable today?

1. Washington v. Du Bois. The two great black leaders of this time were Booker T. Washington, who thought “Negroes” should accept segregation and build their own separate societies on the basis of excellence and hard work, and W.E.B. Du Bois, who thought that black people could never truly advance, no matter how hard they tried, unless they were integrated into the mainstream of American life. Take one side or the other and try to build a case.

1. Do It Yourself. Adlai Stevenson, who ran twice as president of the United States; Hyman Rickover, who “fathered” the atomic submarine; and Spencer Tracy, the great Hollywood actor, were all members of this generation’s class. All were born in 1900. Find another famed American born around this time and integrate his or her growing up and subsequent career with what you have learned about this generation overall.

High School Class of 1931 (born 1913) THEY’VE ALWAYS BEEN SPOILED BY ZIPPERS

This class grew up in the first great era of mass consumption and modern conveniences—along with elders who thought the whole shift was dangerous and decadent.

From the Mindset List for the Class of 1931: You could get your dental work done at Bloomingdale’s. 

1. Decadent Technology. The chapter title, “They’ve Always Been Spoiled By Zippers,” denotes that older people during the period between 1918 and 1931 would sometimes think youngsters were having it too easy because they didn’t have to button up their clothes. These older people thought zippers dangerously decadent. Can you imagine yourself as an older person reproving the younger generation for being spoiled by some new technology that makes life too easy for them? What might such a technology be?

1. Ironic Technology. “It seems that everyone has been taking the train to Detroit in order to build the cars that would make trains somewhat obsolete.” Can you think of other examples in which the use of one technology builds a new one that makes the first technology obsolete?

1. Indirect Election. This was the first generation to be able to elect United States Senators directly. Before that, state legislatures chose them, so their election by the voters was indirect. What was the thinking behind this method?

1. Little-Box Stores. This generation was the first one to experience large, national stores and mass marketing. They were among the first to enter large supermarkets and department stores. How would your life be different if, for example, you had to buy your pens at a small, local pen store operated by a single owner, or if you couldn’t buy books anywhere except at a small bookstore and so on?

1. Seminal Catastrophe. This generation was born right after the Titanic sunk. Yet they heard plenty of tales about it. Were you born after a famous catastrophe, who told you about it, and why did they tell you?

1. Sports Novelty. The forward pass, for this generation, has always been an innovative way to move the football. Why do you think it was so relatively slow in being developed? What other innovations in sports strategies can you think of, and have they also been slow to develop?

1. Business Necessities. During these times every business had to have a typewriter. What does every business have to have today if it is to be taken seriously?

1. Generic Packages. As the first generation to experience mass marketing, this generation was also the first generation to experience products where “packaging” was just as important as the product itself. For instance, it wasn’t just a matter, any longer, of how good the soap was; it was also a question of how it was wrapped and even what it looked like when out of the package. What are some examples of persuasive packaging today?

1. Preferred Age. Members of this class were eighteen when the Great Depression unleashed its most furious force. If you were growing up during a time of great economic calamity, what age from 1 to 18 would you prefer to be—and why?

1. Do It Yourself. Famous members of this class included Richard Nixon, Rosa Parks, and Mary Martin. Find some other famous member of this class and place him or her in the distinctive features of this generation; or if you have a grandparent or parent who grew up during this time, write a mini-bio of him or her and place him or her in the context of this generation.

High School Class of 1944 (born 1926) THE SHADOW HAS ALWAYS KNOWN

This class was the first radio generation and listened eagerly every week as the enigmatic Lamont Cranston (The Shadow) exposed gruesome villains.  

From the Mindset List for the Class of 1944: Radios have always been bigger than most toddlers.

1. “Normal” Miracles. This was the first “radio” generation, but because they grew up with it, it seemed normal. What new technologies have you grown up with that, however miraculous they may seem to older people, seem normal to you?

1. Burma Shave. One of the great advertising campaigns of this generation involved the automobile and a shaving cream. This was Burma Shave, and the company advertised its wares with small signs along the side of the road, with each sign containing part of a funny little poem, which ended with the words “Burma Shave.” How would such an advertising campaign work today? Would it succeed or fail?

1. Martian Invasion. When members of this class were twelve, Orson Welles, the famous actor, broadcast a fictional “documentary” on radio about the landing of Martians on the East Coast. Those who tuned in late took it seriously and began to panic. Could this sort of thing happen today?

1. Amazing Sightings. When members of this class were six, the infant of the great aviation hero, Charles Lindbergh, was kidnapped and killed. Yet many refused to accept the death of the child, so there were sightings of him still alive and, in time, there were even those who claimed to have been the former Lindbergh baby, all grown up. Are there such “sightings” of famous dead people today, and why do they persist?

1. Fallen Idols. While this generation grew up, they saw several fallen idols. Andrew Mellon, the secretary of the treasury, had been thought an economic wizard, but the Depression turned him into a heartless and corrupt old incompetent. Herbert Hoover, the 31^st president, had been thought a great humanitarian for his work feeding the hungry after World War I. He too, thanks to the Depression, became known as a cold-hearted do-nothing. Charles Lindbergh came out against the United States’ entering World War II and was deemed a fanatical anti-Semite. Can you think of fallen idols in our own time? a good thing or a bad thing?

1. Body Odor. During this generation’s growing up it was always OK for men to talk about “B.O” in public? Why wasn’t it OK for women to do so?

1. Homey Facades. During this period, as the auto became more pervasive, so did gas stations. Some of them were designed to look like English cottages. Examine the facades of such chain outlets as McDonalds, I-Hop, Starbucks, and Motel 6. Do they also look homey and welcoming?

1. Fright Nights. This was also a period of very scary movies, including King Kong, about a giant ape climbing the Empire State Building, and Frankenstein, about a repulsive and frightening creature assembled by a crazed doctor and brought to life with electricity. Check out these films. Do they seem laughable and “creaky” today?

1. Loving Hatred. This was also the time of the great murderous gangsters, such as John Dillinger and Baby Face Nelson and Pretty Boy Floyd. It is said that youngsters growing up then hated to love these outlaws but also loved to hate them. How do you explain this combination of feelings?

1. Do It Yourself. The late coach Joe Paterno, economist Alan Greenspan (still pronouncing) and screen legend Marilyn Monroe were members of this class. Find another famous member of this class and locate him or her in the context of these times; or if you have a grandparent or parent who grew up during this time, write a mini-bio of him or her and place him or her in the context of this generation.

High School Class of 1957 (born 1939) FLOURIDE HAS ALWAYS BEEN CONTROVERSIAL

Having grown up in a period of post-war prosperity unlike any other in history, this class, the first teens to have disposable income all their own, endured the both the real perils and paranoid fears bred by a very Cold War.

From the Mindset List for the Class of 1957: Chips and dips in their special dish on TV trays have replaced popcorn in paper sacks on Saturday night.

1. Influential Events. This class was only two years old when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the Second World War began for the United States. Can you think of a major event that occurred when you were also just two or three years old? How much do you remember of it, and when did you first begin to sense that, whether or not you could recall it, it was going to have an effect on your life?

1. Patriotic Advertising. In those war years advertisements had to be patriotic. It wasn’t enough to advertise the product. You also had to show how it was helping win the war. Are there any products today that use patriotism in their advertising themes?

1. Women Football Players. Because the men were away at war, women had a chance to play professional baseball, as dramatized in the film A League of Their Own. At a time when women are making headway in many major sports, including basketball and tennis and even hockey, why has it not happened in football and baseball…or is it just a matter of time?

1. Enemies Within. Although fluoride in toothpaste is now quite non-controversial, there were fringe groups in the United States during the 50s who thought it might have been a Communist plot to poison the population. Are there, today, some conventional practices that are nonetheless attributed to various enemies of the US?

1. The Demise of “Live.” A key word during the days of early television was “live,” which meant that the program was being carried in real time and not on film. Most network television was “live” then—including two-hour dramas and plays. Is most TV today “live”? Why or why not?

1. Portable Then, Portable Now. During this period was developed “45 RPM” record players (45 revolutions per minute), or portable record players. Yet by our standards these players were big and not at all “portable” based on what we mean today by the term. Why is advanced technology is getting smaller and smaller now? Is this a good trend or a bad one?

1. Ideal Husbands. A poll taken in the mid-1950s revealed that girls in that period thought people such as President Eisenhower (then in his 60s) and the actor Tony Curtis (then about 30) would become ideal husbands. If such a poll were conducted today what might be the outcome?

1. Generational Identity. The generation that grew up in the 1950s in the United States is now sometimes called “The Silent Generation,” and that hasn’t always been a compliment. The proposition is that this generation scared no one, was overly eager to conform, never mocked its elders and just wanted to be nice and inoffensive all the time. How would you characterize your own generation?

1. Historical Retrospective. The authors write, from the perspective of the summer of 1957, “There’s that Negro woman down in Alabama who won’t give up her seat on the bus, and there are those Negro students in Arkansas who need the whole army to protect them in high school.” Are you hearing about anything now that might be seen much more positively—or negatively–in the future?

1. Do It Yourself. Find another famous American born in 1939 besides Gaye, Oswald and Yaztremski. How would you place him or her in the context of the trends detailed by Chapter 5? Or write a mini-bio of a member of your own family who is part of this class, and try to place him or her within the features of this generation.

High School Class of 1970 (born in 1952) MAGAZINES HAVE ALWAYS BEEN MAD

This class read a magazine called Mad, lived through the nuclear absurdity of MAD (Mutual Assured Destruction) and drove their parents mad, too.

From the Mindset List for the Class of 1970: Trusting no one over thirty, their generation’s anthem has always included “I hope I die before I’m old.”

1. Mood Disorders. During this time, as an increasingly rambunctious and rebellious generation became even more so, their parents could always pop an often prescribed pill called “Valium” in order to tranquilize themselves. Do you believe that taking powerful medicine for mood disorders causes people to lose their “true selves”?

1. Radical Purity. Bob Dylan famously “betrayed” his groupies and fans at a rock festival when he allowed the usage of an electric guitar, for his followers saw this as lacking purity for a generation that had gone green and hated users of high technology as phony, greedy, and “corporate.” What sorts of purity do people demand today?

1. Words in Transit. This was a period when language was changing in witty but perhaps disturbing ways. “Acid” was the term of LSD, while “laid” was the term for illicit sex and “stoned” the word for a drug high. “Hanging out” was doing nothing and not being ashamed of it. What “ordinary” words today have come to mean something very different?

1. The Greatest Week Ever. When men landed on the moon in 1969 President Nixon called it “the greatest week… since the Creation.” Can you think of an event that, if it happened today, might prompt the American president to say, about it, what Nixon said about the moon landing?

1. Memorizing Numbers. When members of this class were just eleven, some of them needed to learn their zip codes—a new and more efficient feature in the post office’s sorting. Soon they also needed to learn their area codes. Think about the United States a hundred years ago. What numbers and letters would Americans back then have needed to know, and why?

1. Parenting Strategies. The narrative of this chapter is as much about the parents as it is about the kids, but that’s because this was a generation defined by increasing conflicts with parents who were viewed as stodgy and hypocritical and “no longer with it if ever they were.” Is today’s generation much less in conflict with their parents?

1. Tragedy and Death. This generation grew up during two events that have come to be called “The Kennedy Tragedy” and “The Day The Music Died.” The former occurred in 1963 with the assassination of President Kennedy and to a lesser extent in 1968 with the murder of his brother Robert. The latter occurred in 1957 with a plane crash in Iowa that killed Buddy Holly, an early and now legendary rock singer, and several other famous musicians of the time. But different generations have come to have different ideas about what these terms refer to. What is “The Kennedy Tragedy” to your generation, and what is “The Day The Music Died” to your generation?

1. Meaningfulness and Phonies. Two of the most-loved books for this class were The Diary of Anne Frank and Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. Both are about young persons under pressure: Anne Frank was trying to find meaning and distinctive identity while hiding anonymously from Nazis in Holland.  Holden Caulfield  was looking for things in New York City while surrounded by what he called “phonies,” who were more interested in promoting themselves than in understanding him or trying to comprehend nature (such as where the ducks go in the winter). Do such phrases resonate with your generation? Are you compelled to look for “personal meaning” and are you and your mates constantly on the look out for uncomprehending “phonies”?

1. Obsession With Image. During this generation’s time of growing up one national network began a news program called Today (still going strong) and a late night comedy program called Tonight (also still going strong). TV began to influence our lives from morning to night, and some observers say that television has promoted a world where “image” is more important than reality. Do you think the concern with “image,” along with its power, could have been part of pre-TV generations as well?

1. Do It Yourself. Find another famous American in this class besides Costas, Swayze and Barr and try to place him or her in the context of the times. Or write a mini-bio of a member of your own family who is part of this class, and try to place him or her within the features of this generation.

High School Class of 1983 (born in 1965) THERE HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE GRATEFUL DEAD

The first latch key generation, this class lived through scandal, divorce, stagflation and the growing likelihood that Mom would want a career all her own. 

From the Mindset List for the Class of 1983: The “typical family of four,” headed by a working father with a stay-at-home mother and two children, has always been the exception.

1. All-Volunteer Military. “They’ve never needed to worry about being drafted.” This was the first generation for which there has always been a strictly voluntary army. Is an all-volunteer army a good or bad thing for your generation?

1. Gender Strictures. “Women have always worn pants.” The main objection to this trend was apparently rooted in the belief that the two sexes should be strictly distinguished and that is both dangerous and decadent to head down the road of mixing them up or fusing them. Is this idea still alive today?

1. Beatles and Voting Rights. This generation was the first never to be able to see the Beatles in live performance but they were also the first to be able to vote before the age of 21. Was there a connection between the Beatles and their own right to vote?

1. Commercializing the Counter-cultural. This generation grew up in the aftermath of the Sixties, and many of the themes of the Sixties became commercialized as they were growing up. Tie-dye jeans, once a symbol of revolt and authenticity, were sold en masse in stores. Earth-colored shoes, which seemed to celebrate the Sixties generation’s love of “going natural,” were commercialized. The simplicity and “back to nature” of Sixties values was sold through the mass marketing campaigns of “Pet Rocks.” Can you think of examples today where unconventional ideas have gone commercial?

1. Martians and TV Shows. This was also an era in which TV shows and sit-coms were less and less about the traditional American family of a mother and father and two children, probably because this traditional American family was becoming less common. If you were a Martian newly down to earth and watched popular TV shows today, what inferences would you draw about the American family?

1. Loud History v. Quiet History. Although conservative Ronald Regan was president during this period, something non-traditional was also happening: women were going to work in unprecedented numbers. Can you think of examples today where something traditional may be happening in our politics while something non-traditional is happening in other institutions?

1. Sun Belt Presidents. This generation grew up with presidents from what is now known as The Sun Belt. Johnson (Texas), Nixon (California), Carter (Georgia) and Reagan (California again). Since then, presidents have continued to come from the Sun Belt (both Bushes came from Texas while Bill Clinton came from Arkansas). Barack Obama is the first Frost Belt president elected since John F. Kennedy. Is this just a coincidence, or is there more to it?

1. Cures and Side Effects. The class born in 1965 grew up when America was in a pretty bad mood, thanks to an economy that was both sluggish and inflationary, the loss of the Vietnam War, and the drop of American prestige as it was bedeviled by oil-producing Middle Eastern countries as a result of long gas lines and the taking of hostages. What have been other times in American life when people were mostly in a bad mood, and why—and what about the present time?

1. Common Foes. As members of this generation were just being born there was unified opposition to the Vietnam War, but as they grew up, and the war ended when they were about eight years old, these groups lost their common front. Black civil rights groups no longer worked with white labor unions, and members of the women’s movement didn’t trust men to help them with their cause. Is a common foe necessary for a united cause?

1. Do It Yourself. Find other famous persons other than Rock, Parker and Downey who were members of this class and see if you can place them in the features of this time. Or write a mini-bio of a member of your own family who is part of this class, and try to place him or her within the features of this generation.

High School Class of 1996 (born 1978) MICHELANGELO HAS ALWAYS BEEN A TURTLE.

In love with video games, comforted by Mr. Rogers, and instructed by Yoda and Miss Piggy, this class came of age in a second American Gilded Age.

From the Mindset List for the Class of 1996: Game Boys have made many a cross-country auto trip with their parents more tolerable.

1. Mystery or Clarity. For this class, “Unlike the Artist Known as Prince, a computer has become less mysterious with every passing year.” Prince has done well with his projected mystery—it has arguably made him more popular—yet computers have done well with their clarity of use and lack of mystery. What are the roles of “mystery” in a society, such as the present one?

1. Censorship and Choice. This generation grew up with especially bitter conflicts about school policy, such as vouchers, testing and banned books. These conflicts reflect different opinions about whether students must attend the school the state says they should, about whether schools should teach students so that they can do well on standardized tests, and about whether students should be exposed to sex and racism in books. What are the pros and cons of school choice, teaching to the test, and regulation of what students are allowed to read?

1. Teen Fears, Teen Desires. This was also the generation that grew up with those “turtles on the half-shell”: the Teenaged Mutant Ninja Turtles with the names of famous Italian artists. These characters seem fantastical, but they were very popular. Check them out on youtube. Why were they so popular with kids and teens?

1. Four Gurus. Pay special attention to this chapter’s discussion about this generation’s “gurus”: Miss Piggy, Yoda, Mr. Rogers and Dr. Felix Huxtable. Whom, if anyone, would you identify as your generation’s philosophical guides as you were growing up?

1. Decreasing Repression. “Discussing condoms in mixed company has always been less and less embarrassing.” This seems to be a long way from the days when women were barely allowed to ride bikes and when men were discouraged from even discussing body odor in public. Has American society become less and less repressive with every passing generation?

1. Intervening Parents. This was also the first generation whose parents tended to be obsessive about their activities and their safety. They rode as infants in carefully tested car seats and were made to wear helmets while biking. They were also, according to some observers, overly scheduled with violin lessons, soccer games and drama practice. How does this accord with your own experience as a child? What might be good and bad about such active parenting?

1. Live Wars. This was also the first generation to grow up with cable TV news with its constant live coverage. When they were thirteen they could watch the Iraq War “live” all day long. Is live televising of wars and riots a good or bad thing?

1. Rock Lyrics. This generation was also the first whose elders worried about rock/rap lyrics, especially ones that promoted racism, sexual violence or self-destruction. Is this concern is justified?

1. American Creativity. This generation grew up with a lot of creativity on display. Ronald Reagan made conservatism not a hidebound compulsion about he past but forward-looking optimism about the future. Dustin Hoffman was a great male actor who played a woman impersonator. And Claymation raisins sang, “I Heard It Though the Grapevine” in order to sell a commercial product. “Creativity” might be defined as putting together stuff that doesn’t normally go together, like conservative optimism, men who pass as women, and raisins that sing. What are examples of such creativity in your own generation?

1. Do It Yourself. Find another famous person besides Aiken, Bryant or Holmes who is a member of this class and try to place him or her within the features of this generation. Or write a mini-bio of a member of your own family (perhaps in this case an older sibling or cousin) who is part of this class, and try to place him or her within the features of this generation.

High School Class of 2009 (born 1991) THEY’VE NEVER DIALED A TELEPHONE

This class, the first fully digital generation, learned to type at a computer keyboard as soon as they could stand, never wrote in cursive, and may now be cursing an economy that has gone on a long, long recess.

From the Mindset List for the Class of 2009: They can’t figure out why anyone would bother to print out a whole set of encyclopedias.

1. Inconvenient Answering. “With Caller ID they’ve always known who’s been waiting on the line.” This generation has grown up with Caller ID, but once upon a time people answered the phone without knowing who was on the other end. How would this have made life different?

1. Quirks of Words. This generation has never actually “dialed” a telephone. Yet the term “dial” continues to be used, even though we now push buttons in order to “dial” phone numbers. We continue to say, “Roll up the car window” even though there’s no hand crank. We continue to “write” stuff even though “writing” has traditionally meant taking a pen or pencil in hand. How do you account for why these old words continue even though they are now technically outmoded?

1. Customer Self-Service. “They have met customer service, and it is they.” This generation is used to pumping its own gas and shopping on line without the need of help in the form of other people. Is this good or bad?

1. Multiple Tasking. This is also the first multi-tasking generation. They can “walk and surf” at the same time. What are other, even more elaborate, examples of multi-tasking, and what are the pros and cons of such a development?

1. Transient Information. “Memory has always been doubling.” What are the implications when information doubles or triples each year but population (and the number of brains) only doubles every century?

1. AIDS Cure. When members of this generation were born, the great basketball star Magic Johnson revealed, to a shocked nation, that he had acquired AIDS. Everyone expected him to be dead by now, but he has survived and even flourished thanks to expensive medical care. Suppose AIDS could be vaccinated against, so that your chances of getting it were about the same as your chance of getting polio? Would that make a profound difference in your life and in the life of your generation?

1. Necessary Taboos? “Some of their friends might be disabled but never handicapped.” What do you think of taboos on politically incorrect language?

1. Gender Neutrality. “Chairmen have always been chairpersons and actresses have always been actors.” Is gender-neutral language good or bad?

1. Major Catastrophes. This has also been a sort of  “9-11” generation, as they were in the fourth grade when their parents picked them up early from school one September day after planes piloted by terrorists crashed into the World Trade Center. Was 9/11 a “Pearl Harbor Moment” for this generation, or is the comparison invalid?

1. Do It Yourself. Find another well-known person besides Spears, Curtis or Greenberg who is a member of this class and try to place him or her within the features of this generation. Or write a mini-bio of a member of your own family (perhaps in this case a contemporary sibling or cousin) who is part of this class, and try to place him or her within the features of this generation.

High School Class of 2026 (born 2008) THEY’VE NEVER NEEDED A KEY FOR ANYTHING

This class will be known as the first “virtual” generation, which means they will rarely touch a newspaper, sign their names, miss out on computerized travel more real than the “real” thing—or need a key for anything.

From the Mindset List for the Class of 2026: Carpal thumb syndrome is a universal malady that afflicts mostly adolescents.

1. Virtual Everything. This chapter is about the generation just born, and it therefore speculates about future. What sort of world will this generation live in? One answer might be a virtual world, in which electronically generated experience takes the place of “real” experience. For instance, can you imagine a world in which the following might be true: “People have never had to leave their houses for anything.”

1. A Sign-less World? Following this same “virtual” theme, would you like to live in a world where road signs are no longer necessary because everyone now has geographical positioning systems that tell them exactly where they are and precisely how to get somewhere else?

1. The Rule of Narrowcasting. It’s widely expected that the new generation will grow up in a world where “broadcasting” no longer exists but where “narrowcasting” is the rule: There will be an almost unlimited number of cable channels and websites, each one catering to ever more specialized tastes. The big “mainstream” networks, such as NBC and CBS, might no longer exist because their programming was just too general. Would you like to live in such a media universe?

1. Specialty Channels. Following from the previous question, this chapter speculates that there will even a “specialty” cable channel that airs nothing but weddings and funerals. Would this be a good idea or a bad idea?

1. Corporations Everywhere? “When they bought their first car, they had to choose a corporate logo for a license plate.” Would you approve of such a development?

1. Minority Majority. Before the middle of the 21^st century a majority of Americans will be black or brown in what is called a “minority majority.” Do you see this as a threat to the traditions of America—after all, none of the Founding Fathers were black or brown—or as a fulfillment of the promise of America?

1. Virtual Silence? “You can tell the brand of an electric car by the odd artificial sounds they are legally required to make so that people can hear them coming.” Please assess the accuracy following statement: “With a more virtual world comes a quieter world.”

1. Underrepresented Males. A trend already underway is the possible underrepresentation of males in colleges and universities. A prediction of this chapter is that the government will be awarding special incentives to males to study harder and go to law and med school. What are the implications of a society in which most doctors and lawyers are women?

1. Elderly Exasperation. A recurring trend of this book has been how exasperated the older generation is with the younger generation. The old frequently think the young have it too soft. Imagine yourself in thirty years with your own children or grandchildren. What sorts of things might you tell them about your own younger life that allegedly made you much less spoiled than they are?

1. Do It Yourself. The authors have made a lot of predictions about the future in this chapter. What are your own predictions, and how might you justify them as possibly sound? Finally, here’s a related question: Imagine yourself in about 2025 telling a young teen about the most important and far-reaching trends of the early 2000s. What would they be? 9/11? The Great Recession? The Arab Spring? The Rise of China? What?

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.