January 2011

It’s easy to get silly when you start generalizing about generations. Witness the recent mania regarding Tom Brokaw’s beloved "Greatest Generation.” Yes, those individuals who came of age during the Great Depression and World War II were certainly courageous in guiding America through the two worst crises it ever faced. But does that really make them any greater than, say, the generations that fought the Civil War, or the Revolution, or who pushed the American frontier through to the Pacific?

Just what are we talking about when we use the word generation anyway? I’m sure that those older Americans who were around in the 1930s and 1940s thought that they had something to do with saving the country, too. For that matter, it used to be that a generation meant 30 years, but with the pace of change today, a generation—like a dollar—just ain’t what it used to be.

The law of unintended consequences is usually invoked to explain political disasters. Take Prohibition. Its millions of advocates thought that it would free the country from the scourge of drink, inducing fathers to spend time with their children, instead of squandering their pay at the local saloon. What we got, of course, was Al Capone.

Sometimes, however, while the consequences are just as unintended, they turn out to be beneficial. This was true of the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, far better known as the GI Bill of Rights. The ostensible purpose of this famous piece of legislation was to reward millions of World War II veterans for a job well done. Its underlying aim was to keep as many of those veterans as possible out of the job market for as long as possible, for nearly every economist was predicting renewed depression with the war’s end.

In Jonathan Valin’s mystery novel The Music Lovers , a character named Leon Tubin visits the detective Harry Stoner after he finds 35 of his most valuable record albums missing. One is worth $1,500, another $2,000, Tubin laments, and he tutors Stoner on valuable classical LPs, including “EMI’s, London Bluebacks, Lyritas, English Deccas,” and ones from Mercury and RCA Victor.

Apart from rarity and condition, which are critical to a classi-cal LP’s value, collectors focus on repertory, performers, and sonic quality, according to Valin, who is a collector himself. While some care only about the musicians and what they’re playing, audiophiles are primarily concerned with sound quality. They savor certain early stereo LPs produced in the late 1950s and early 1960s, especially Mercury Living Presence series albums and the RCA Living Stereo releases known as “shaded dogs” because of the shadowed area surrounding Nipper, the trademark terrier listening to his master’s voice on an old gramophone. Meticulous engineering techniques gave those recordings their unmatched sonic qualities.

Late this Spring the New York Times reported on yet another controversy over John F. Kennedy’s ever-restless memory. Two writers have produced books with diametrically opposed conclusions about his most famous line. In Ask Not: The Inauguration of John F. Kennedy and the Speech That Changed America , Thurston Clarke insists it was JFK alone who wrote, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.” In Sounding the Trumpet: The Making of John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address , Richard J. Tofel says it was supplied by Kennedy’s speechwriter Theodore Sorensen.

As early as 1925 Aldous Huxley described Los Angeles as “nineteen suburbs in search of a metropolis,” and many people not native to the city still tend to see it as a vast incoherence, sun-dazzled and a little sinister. As a child growing up in New York City, Ben Stiller visited a Los Angeles that “smelled different, it felt different—it was fantasyland. And I loved it. I guess that might be why I moved here eventually. And of course, I grew up, and my impression of L.A. changed.

Photography exhibitions in museums often have a superfluous air. The pictures may be beautiful, but you could probably see them just as well or better in a magazine or book. Not so with daguerreotypes. The images they contain can be photographed and reproduced, but the mirrored surface, illusion of depth, and striking clarity of a well-made daguerreotype can be experienced only in the original.

When President Bush visited Chile last November, a state dinner at the presidential palace in Santiago was canceled at the last minute because of the U.S. Secret Service’s insistence that guests pass through metal detectors. This is standard practice in the United States, but Chileans regarded the weapons check as humiliating. “Can you imagine someone like the chief justice of the Supreme Court having to submit to an inspection by gringo security agents in order to get into our own seat of government?” someone on the guest list asked The New York Times.

So powerful and familiar are the Depression-era photographs of Dorothea Lange, Margaret Bourke-White, Edward Steichen, and many others that today’s Americans can be forgiven for envisioning those turbulent times as a black-and-white world.