In August 1965 Sonny and Cher sang “I Got You Babe” on The Ed Sullivan Show.  I was 13. The moment I saw that doe-eyed waif in bell-bottoms sing to her shaggy-haired partner in a bobcat vest, I knew I was leaving my crew cut behind. I’ve been a fan ever since.

      For over 60 years, Cher’s expansive talents have not only blazed multiple trails, but been amazingly resilient. She has garnered Oscar, Golden Globe, Emmy and Grammy Awards and is the only artist to chart number one records in seven consecutive decades. In October, Cher was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

      Now 78, she has written a compellingly candid chronicle of her early life, “The Memoir, Part One.” . . .

      Timothy Snyder, the Yale University historian, wrote the book On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the Twentieth Century in 2017, at the beginning of the first Trump administration. Here, in very abridged fashion, are his first 10 lessons, more relevant than ever these gloomy days.

      1. Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.

      2. Defend institutions. It is institutions that help us to preserve decency. They need our help as well. Do not speak of “our institutions” unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf. Institutions do not protect themselves. So choose an institution you care about and take its side. . . .

“The occasional dose of disorientation, discombobulation”

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A minute-and-a-half long

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      An advertising billboard on I-40 got my attention with the proclamation: The best is yet to come.

      But I'm thinking—wait, what if we're so busy hoping and waiting for the Best That Is Yet To Come—that we miss the precious immediate miracle of the Now?

      And, what if—This ... right now … is the Best of Times? . . .

A classic dish for your holiday, updated for this perilous, querulous era.

***

Ingredients

35 years of family squabbles, still stewing

1 gallon of raw anger

1/2 gallon of steaming rage

1 pint of unadulterated guilt

2 quarts of mild frustration

6 cups of exasperation

2 pints of low-fat antagonism

3 pounds of constant complaining

4 ounces of raw milk, spilled . . . .

          No radio on in the car. Television only to watch the new second season of “The Diplomat” on Netflix and old seasons of “The Morning Show” on Apple TV. Instead of reading the front page of The Times, I go directly to Spelling Bee, and frequently stay there all day (not to brag, but I’ve gotten to Queen Bee level multiple times, and never give up before at least reaching Genius level).

      In other words, I’ve tuned out.

      I can’t bear to watch or hear or read the news. I can’t stomach each new outrage, each Orwellian appointment, each more outrageous reminder that the world is and will be different and awful. Most of all, I can’t bear to hear that voice or see that smirk.

      Apparently, I’m not alone. . . .

     When we first started this site, the idea was to make it a conversation among an alert group of people who have shared some wild times and experiences. And we have succeeded in giving voice to a lot of interesting folks with a lot of interesting things to say about Our Generation—where we’ve been and where we are. We could use more perspectives. Please email us at WritingAboutOurGeneration@gmail.com with your ideas.

     However, to our disappointment, we have not yet succeeded in getting a much of a dialogue going. Some of this was the fault of the clunky, restrictive commenting software that came with this Squarespace blog.

     So we have switched. . . .

     One of the subjects I’ve hoped this website might investigate is where the ideas that so galvanized Our Generation, back when we were more galvanizable, originated. I call that mix of ideas “hippy thought,” and I mean by it the multiple challenges to “straight” understandings and values promulgated by anti-Vietnam War, marijuana-smoking, LSD-curious, ripped-blue-jean-wearing, rock-‘n’-roll-dancing young people in the late 1960s and 1970s.

     I suspect many of the ideas that filled our heads back then are still contributing to the way we look at the world today. That does at least seem to be the case for the way I look at the world, although you wouldn’t necessarily know it from the way I’ve spent the last five decades.

     Previous installments of this investigation—this is the introduction to it— have considered the influence of Whitman and Thoreau, and of the Beatniks. Here I want to look at the influence of something that would not have come to mind back in the day as readily as Whitman, Thoreau and the Beatniks: modernism. . . .

      Now that the raging has subsided a bit...what’s next?

      Forty friends and I hosted a Vermont Women’s Rally a few days before the election. We had Taiko Drummers, U.S. senators, musicians and inspiring speakers. Two thousand people showed up at our Vermont Statehouse on a chilly Nov. 2 day to come together in solidarity around all the issues that we knew would be pulverized if Vice President Harris lost.

      And pulverized they will be. We can expect a national abortion ban, the end to Title X funding, trans rights obliterated and, well, you know the rest. We can expect a domino effect—as one human right tumbles it will hit another and another and one by one, they will fall under the crushing weight of MAGA, creating a road of devastation that will manifest in suffering, loss and pain for many.  

      Our country will be transformed by grifters and oligarchs whose hearts and minds are cruel and vengeful.

      Yet we did everything possible to defeat Trump. . . .

The historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism in 1951, nearly 75 years ago. And yet her thoughts on the subject of tyranny and lies speak so very clearly to today:

• “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists.”

• “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth, and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world - and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end - is being destroyed.”

• “When evil is allowed to compete with good, evil has an emotional populist appeal that wins out unless good men and women stand as a vanguard against abuse.” . . .

     After the victory of Donald Trump in the recent election. Christina Hepner Brodie investigated, for her Current Events group in Falmouth, Massachusetts, what would be involved in moving to another country.

     “I eliminated Australia, Canada, Ireland and New Zealand, which I also researched,” she writes. “If I understood correctly, they are only looking for workers, not retirees. Australia even removed their ‘retirement visa’ in 2018.”

     She did put together a chart with considerable information on what would be involved in moving to Costa Rica, France, Italy, Mexico, Panama, Portugal and Spain. “All the research is from online,” she explains, “mostly (but not all) from websites created by the countries.”

• Click here for the introduction to the chart Christina Hepner Brodie wrote for a group of friends in Falmouth, Massachusetts.

• Click here for her chart.

      In many ways, we’ve been living through the golden age of American sports— desegregation and the rise of the black athlete; the ascendancy of pro football; the expansion of baseball, basketball and ice hockey; the growth of soccer; Title IX and the explosion of women’s sports; the ascent of ESPN and its imitators, and the ability to view at home or on our phones almost any major game or match at any time.

      More than perhaps any other previous generation, we have been, in fact, inundated with sports for the entirety of our lives; it may be the one common thread running through our times. The greatest athletes of our era have become renowned and almost totemic figures, more popular than politicians, as famous as performers, more influential than writers or artists.

      But who have been the absolute best?

     It's a close call (unlike the 2020 election, despite trump's claims—and did you know that lowercasing the “t” in his name is de rigeur?). And I won't fall for the “law” bait—i.e., it'd be way too easy to cite lawyering as life's worst job. It would be in the running had I not spent my 40 years lawyering as a polluter reiner-inner.

      The candidates are the non-music jobs I had ‘twixt undergrad and grad school. Part of it was about quick and dirty— literally and figuratively—ways of making at least a little money; the other part was about this bougie boy learning what it was like to work with one's hands. Those jobs are in a virtual, and I don’t mean in the web sense, tie for worst.

      First we’ll mention the landscaping job I had in Chapel Hill during an undergrad summer and the one I had outside Albuquerque, NM, in the summer after receiving my undergrad degree. That’s when I first learned how bad I was at manual labor. . .

      Postmortems and finger-pointing following the Democratic debacle on Election Day (i.e., the restoration of a now even more-untethered Donald Trump) are inevitable.

      Previously, I have come down hard on Joe Biden, for his obstinate refusal to step aside in the face of obvious physical and mental weakness—and, also obviously, for going back on his word not to run for re-election.

      At the risk of piling on an old man, I could not help but agree this week with virtually all of what conservative New York Times opinion columnist Bret Stephens had to say in a succinct analysis of where Joe Biden’s presidency went wrong—and how it doomed the Democrats to defeat . . .

      In these post-election days, elites have taken a pummeling. They’ve been repeatedly blamed for losing this election, thus sacrificing our democracy. They’ve been variously accused of contempt for “the great unwashed,” for ignoring the needs of the common people, for disdain toward Joe Sixpack and obliviousness to all those blue-collar folks getting their morning coffee in rural Pennsylvania diners.    

      And that’s, apparently, what voters rebelled against.

      Listen to Bernard Goldberg in the Washington newsletter, The Hill:

      “Trump’s win is a rejection of elite condescension…For quite some time, elites have looked down on ordinary Americans. The elites thought they were smarter than the folks who live in “flyover country,” who they often saw as hayseeds who ate at places like Red Lobster. And you got the impression that they not only thought they were smarter than ordinary Americans, but that were better than ordinary Americans.” . . .

      The voices of artists are essential to democracy. 

      Moving to New York to study dance in 1973, I retailed at Macy’s and was an answering service operator, janitor, artist model and office assistant to support myself. Short-term contracts and unemployment benefits subsidized my performing career. In between tours, I finished my college degree in psychology and was a nanny and pre-school teacher. 

      After a vision quest in the Himalayans, I managed two dance companies and a festival. Philanthropy called; suddenly I was funnier and smarter, until I left the foundation—accolades and joyful embraces ceased overnight. Moving to Minneapolis, the culture wars of the ‘90s had me battling right wing media, religious leaders and politicians who cared little about the truth so long as they could raise money off controversy. . . .

      Before we left the country for a few weeks abroad, we wondered whether it would be better or worse to not be in the states for Election Day. We really couldn’t decide.

      Turns out, it was much, much better.

      Instead of being immersed—really submerged—in it all, we explored ancient streets. Instead of following minute-by-minute vote tabulations, we drank some ouzo. Instead of falling into despondency after the tabulations were finished, we ate moussaka. Instead of commiserating with friends on the days after, we wandered through the ruins of the Minoan civilization.

      It was, that is, easy—maybe too easy—to forget what was happening, what had happened, 6,000 miles away. . . .

     This fall, I’ve been reading Clara Bingham’s book “The Movement: How Women’s Liberation Transformed America 1963-1973.” It has immersed me in this decade of turmoil and huge social and cultural changes.

      I was too young to really experience and understand the events happening in the U.S. during this time period. As a young woman in the early 1980s, I didn’t realize how lucky I was to be able to walk into a bank and open a checking account without a man’s signature or to apply for a credit card or to get a prescription for birth control pills and walk into a pharmacy to have it filled, no questions asked. . . .

      You know that Donald Trump, President-elect Donald Trump, has in recent days nominated some flagrantly unqualified and deeply wrongheaded nominees to fill some of the most important positions in the government of the United States.

       To review, a few:

•       Now-former Congressman Matt Gaetz, himself the subject of an ethics investigation in the House, as Attorney General.

•       Former Representative Tulsi Gabbard, whom Republican Senator Mitt Romney has accused of having embraced "actual Russian propaganda," as Director of National Intelligence.

•      Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who subscribes to a number of unsubstantiated scare stories about polio and Covid vaccines, as Secretary of Health and Human Services.

Allow me to note that these appointments are not only terrifying but surreal. . . .

    Trump is saying the election gave him a “very big mandate.”

    Rubbish. It wasn’t a mandate at all. It wasn’t even a “red shift” to Trump and the Republicans.

    It was a blue abandonment. 

    We now know that nine million fewer votes were cast nationwide in 2024 than in 2020. . . .