Experimental Success

My experiment seems to have been a success. In fact, it was far more productive than I imagined it could've been. About 8-9 days ago, I decided that while we were on vacation in the central New Mexico mountains, I would pretend that email and the Internet had never been invented. Given my periodic rants about the Decline of Society and the fact that I have not ever and will not ever use my cell phone for anything involving "data," going Off-The-Grid would seem to be easier for me than for most people. And it was. But the ease with which the experiment was conducted is not nearly as impressive or important (to me) as the realization that it spawned -- namely, that I am rarely more useless than when I am sitting in front of a computer.

Several people have written about the downsides of the Internet in general (and social networking in particular) far more eloquently than I could manage, so I will leave that cabbage singly chewed. What I will note, however, is that these things truly are, as Bill Keller notes so beautifully, "the enemy of contemplation." The speed with which my 15 year-old daughter compulsively swipes through Twitter, Instagram, Tumblr, and Facebook posts, tapping whatever needs to be tapped in order to assent to the amazingness of whatever status update or bit of cleverness or ridiculously filtered picture is posted is astounding. In a very real sense, it is the crack of this generation. Is it as harmful? Not explicitly, no. But it is an addiction. And it is a productivity (defined in many different ways) killer. And I believe that the second-order effects -- e.g., the utter decimation of people's attention spans -- will play a huge role in pushing us down the path toward Idiocracy.

In Hadley's defense, she spent a considerable number of her vacation hours reading, playing cards, hiking, and even simply playing outside at the park down the hill ("OMG Dad, I can't believe you are embarrassing me like this"). All four of the kids, ages 10 to 20, were similarly involved. In fact, it is one of the greatest reliefs of my life that whether our travel plans involve two days at the beach, a week at grandparents, or a month in the northwestern US or Canada, everybody is always totally on board, eager to do whatever we're doing and not at all happy when it is time to return home. The boys are far less tethered to technology than Hadley is, but even she comes around pretty well within a day or two. Although I don't believe I am in any way responsible for this "sanity," I do appreciate it.

Where does this leave me? My job pretty much requires me to sit in front of a computer for most of the time on most days. Even if I wanted to embrace the Truman / Eisenhower era entirely, it would hardly be possible for me to do so where my work life is concerned. But I can, with no problem, do away with social networking (particularly since Twitter has long been my only guilty pleasure). I can also check email a lot less frequently. And finally, I can greatly reduce the time I spend in front of a computer when I am NOT at the office. I spent my non-hiking downtime this past week reading books, writing this entry (longhand), jacking around with the kids, playing the guitar, and just thinking. Imagine that.

Is it really necessary that I alter my behavior? Probably not. But it seems like a worthwhile venture, given that I was more at peace this past week than I have been in a long, long, long time. The mountains and cooler weather always help with that, but I do believe that the complete absence of digital distraction was almost as important. So ... henceforth, I will be working toward preserving at least some semblance of that absence in my everyday life. I'm not ready to part company with Cotten Music and Umanov Guitars and Drakes of London, but most of my other "friends" will need to get their mouse clicks from someone else.

As a final note, if you're on Twitter and I don't have your email address and you WANT me to have it, let me know. I think I have most of you covered but a few might have slipped through the cracks ...

Peace,
Mike

Fashion and the Decline of Society

Yesterday was my birthday.

I am 46 years old.

Instead of taking pause to lament my continued slide into middle-agedom, I thought I'd reflect instead on a couple of occurrences from this past week that struck me as noteworthy examples of what is wrong with America. I'm not talking bright-line things like the national debt, taxes, and various in-the-news social issues. I'm talking more about signals ... metaphors, if you will, for our collective Condition.

After church last Sunday, we went to lunch at a restaurant here in Alamo Heights. When we finished, I went to HEB (gigantic grocery store, for those of you who are not in Texas) to pick up a few things while everybody else popped into a pet store in the same shopping center. Across the entire length of our interminable, extremely average, and ridiculously overpriced lunch and my 15-minute circuit of HEB, I did not see a single man who was wearing a tie. Granted it was a billion degrees outside, so I wouldn't have expected to see many suits (although that's what I was wearing). But really, it was (1) early Sunday afternoon (2) in Texas (3) where a decent proportion of the population does still attend church, and the only ties to be found were those that were being worn by my boys and me. I thought that was sort of bizarre. It's not that I was LOOKING for this, mind you. I just happened to notice and thought it was weird.

Fast-forward to Tuesday. I needed to get a new jacket altered, so I stopped at the tailor on my way to the office. I usually don't wear a tie when I go to the office during the summer, as Trinity's campus is a complete dead zone between June and late August. But I wore one to the tailor shop because I always feel like they're more conscientious when clients at least sort of look the part. Anyway, I went to the office after that and then stopped by Central Market on my way home. When I was at the meat counter, I had the following conversation with the mid-20s guy who was waiting on me:

Meat Counter Guy: What kind of job do you have where you wear stuff like that?
Me: Excuse me? (no clue what he was talking about)
Meat Counter Guy: Where do you work? What do you do?
Me: I'm a professor at Trinity.
Meat Counter Guy: You dress like that every day?
Me: In the summer? Not always. Other times, usually.
Meat Counter Guy: Looks sharp. I'd like to dress like that.

I've frequently commented that when America was truly great, TV was black and white and men wore suits to baseball games. And hats, too, dammit. Did they call them "fedoras" then? Ummm ... I don't think so. In the picture below, from 1951, Harry S. Truman is not wearing a hat (I suspect it is resting in his seat) but there is no shortage of gentlemanly attire across the entire stadium. This is when I would've liked to have been in my prime. With all due respect to "Midnight in Paris," I firmly believe that having been an adult male in 1950s America would be worth being dead in 2013.

Contrast the class of 1951 with this representative modern-day example. Not a tie to be found. In fact, I'm pretty sure I only see two shirts that might reasonably even accommodate a tie. And baseball caps don't count as hats. Granted, these people are Phillies fans, but still.

Where am I going with this? At some level, it makes no difference what one wears. I dressed pretty formally during the first half of my career at A&M, but gradually gave up across the last 8-10 years such that ultimately my wardrobe was Dri-Fit and jeans. Did that make me a worse teacher, a less capable researcher, or a less qualified / less interested student mentor? No. Is there anything inherently wrong with it? Not really. The point is that over time, I succumbed to the ease of a casual office environment despite the fact that I've always viewed the decimation of the dress code as being symbolic of the general downfall of society. I mean really, think about it. Over the past 50 years, as dress has become more casual, so has everything else -- manners, morals, speech, education, relationships, attitudes about personal responsibility, you name it. I'm not suggesting that this landslide was brought on by casual dress, obviously. That would be stupid. I'm just noting that it's one of the many indicators I point to as evidence of Society In Decline. (NOTE: Toward that end, if you have not watched Idiocracy, I recommend that you do. It is a crude and vulgar comedy and it got bad reviews, but as social commentary I believe that its view of the future of America is spot-on.)

People need to dress nicely. People need to hand-write (not email) Thank You notes and speak the King's English and keep their elbows off the table. Why? Because in a civilized, educated society, decorum matters. Or it should, anyway. My view is that if we're still paying attention to things like this, we've not completely lost sight of bygone (and vastly superior) eras, including the one in which kids roamed neighborhoods / fields / hills / hollers and carried pocket knives and BB guns and said "yes ma'am" and "no ma'am" and didn't get trophies just for showing up to participate and families ate meals together and used the "good china" and paid for stuff BEFORE they got it and drug stores had soda fountains and music was vinyl (and free of both profanity and Autotune) and if you wanted to smoke you could smoke (I don't, but that's hardly relevant) and churches had sanctuaries with uncomfortable pews instead of worship centers with coffee stations and valet parking ...

And things like this abomination did not exist:

Here we have an American flag hat, purchased at Target. Patriotic, right? But look carefully. First, it was made in China (Strike 1). Second, the more-than-casual observer will note that the number of stars on the field of blue is 17 short (Strike Infinity). Hunter bought this last night, without looking at the tag or counting the stars. He discovered the "problems" when he got home and would've taken it back if I hadn't insisted on keeping it for the sake of posterity. I really find this to be borderline unbelievable.

Were things perfect when men wore suits to baseball games? Hardly. Opportunities for women and minorities were not exactly extensive and two of my four kids (and possibly my wife) probably would be dead if their circumstances were pushed back 60 years. So I get that "progress" has been made on a few fronts. But since I'm the guy who is writing the column, I'll reserve the right to take a Luby's approach to things. Give me all of the medical advances and a couple of cherry-picked cultural improvements and I will gladly go back to the late 1940s -- when the Meat Counter Guy not only knew what a tie was, but probably wore one to work.

Peace,
Mike

PS: I will be on vacation in the New Mexico mountains from July 9-16. I'm not going to look at a computer while I'm there and I don't do data on my phone. I'll check for texts every couple of days, though, so if for whatever reason you need to get in touch with me, fire away.