MAGAZINE REVIEWS

Inflating the American Dream

by Seth Rogovoy

(WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., May 30, 1998) -- I didn't plan it this way, but this month's survey of articles seemed to strike a particularly ornery nerve in this correspondent. So be forewarned, and proceed at your own risk.

Rolling Stone

The pages of Rolling Stone are typically occupied by frothy profiles of pop-culture celebrities and sycophantic music reviews catering to the magazine's major advertisers (record companies).

But the 30th anniversary issue dated May 28 -- the one with the "Seinfeld" crew bedecked in "Wizard of Oz" regalia on the cover -- attempts nothing less than a wholesale portrait of the state of the union. More specifically, it features about four dozen interviews with ordinary young citizens organized around the theme of "the American Dream."

As Rolling Stone editor Jann S. Wenner explains in the introduction, "We wanted to hear directly from a new generation as it inherits this nation's opportunities and problems. We wanted to break through the media-produced cliches and stereotypes about Generation Xers, slackers, homeboys, Microserfs and rich nerds."

Leaving aside for the moment Wenner's preposterous hypocrisy -- if ever there were a case of the pot calling the kettle black -- I dipped into Rolling Stone's collection of "honest, intimate profiles of real people."

Of course, it took some time finding the profiles, which are buried behind an endless minute-by-minute account of the filming of the final episode of "Seinfeld." Having never seen the show, I wasn't about to break the spell by reading about it, preferring to remain a pop-culture critic blissfully ignorant about the most important pop-cultural icon of our time.

Instead, I sunk my teeth into the profile of Ethan Hill, an aspiring photographer who lives a lonely, monastic existence in New York's Spanish Harlem district, where he dedicates himself full-time to the pursuit of his art, which is synonymous with his work and his life.

A few themes emerged from more of the profiles. The norm in most cases seems to be non-traditional or non-nuclear families, what we used to call broken homes. The generation profiled are the children of divorce, and half-siblings, child-support payments and improperly-spelled names are de rigueur. Edward Hoagland, who teaches at nearby Bennington (Vt.) College, writes of his students, "Some of them, maimed by divorce, hardly know who their parents are and, like amputees, go around as if feeling themselves for a missing piece."

One of my favorites is the story of a young father who works in a fast- food joint. His complaints revolve around money. It seems the payments his wife receives from her previous husband plus government food stamps still aren't enough at the end of the month to make ends meet -- that is, after you factor in the $300 monthly payment for his brand-new Chevrolet pickup truck, the bill for cable-TV and the fee for the rent-to-own big- screen television.

Now, this guy seems to personify the American Dream in all its self- satisfied yearning and hypocrisy.

Of course, this being Rolling Stone, the focus can't all be on nonentities like these folk. Sprinkled through the "American Dream" section are interviews with or pieces written by Bruce Springsteen, Jewel, Marilyn Manson and Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys.

Commentary

Perhaps as an antidote to all of the above, I reached for the May issue of Commentary, where Elizabeth Powers's "Table Manners and Morals" caught my eye. Far from being just a crotchety complaint about the lack of contemporary table manners, Powers's essay is an astute argument about the delicate balance between role modeling and parenting.

Powers decries the increasingly common atomization of family life, wherein both parents work, meals are not taken together, and acculturation -- the imparting of manners, if you will -- is left to hired help, indifferent teachers or the popular culture, in every case a recipe for certain disaster.

As Powers points out, this is not another case of kid-bashing. She puts the responsibility for the problem precisely where it belongs -- with the parents.

"[T]he sacrifices mothers and fathers make for their children provide an example that children absorb into their innermost beings, and that serves them well when they too become parents," she writes. "But there is a universal dimension to the trouble parents...take upon themselves in cultivating decorous behavior...in their children. They thereby help to ensure that intellectual and cultural achievements, indeed the larger spiritual legacy that has been passed down to them, are not squandered but are rather preserved, enriched, and handed on to future generations."

If that's not a clarion call for responsible parenting, I don't know what is.

Mother Jones

What with the summer weather fast approaching, the great American pastime of sunbathing will once again be on many people's Top 10 lists of things to do when they're not drinking watery beer and watching "Seinfeld" reruns.

And as good little trained consumers, the majority will spend many dollars on "sunscreen" protection to ward off those dangerous, cancer- causing rays.

Right? Wrong. According to an article in the June issue of Mother Jones, far from protecting users, there is a growing body of evidence suggesting that sunscreens play a vital role in contributing to the skyrocketing cases of skin cancers.

While sunscreens might fend off the UV-B rays that cause basal and squamous cell skin cancers, they also help suppress sunburn, fooling users into thinking they are not exposing themselves to dangerous amounts of sun. In the meantime, deadly UV-A rays are passing right through sunscreens, causing the most dangerous kind of skin cancer: malignant melanoma.

At this time, there is only one safe (and time-honored) way to avoid these rays: cover up and stay out of the sun.

Wired

I can't hardly even distinguish the ads from the articles, much less understand any of the latter in an average issue of Wired magazine -- the lifestyle guide to cyberspace. It's not that I'm a technophobe or have no interest in the online world; I write on a computer (albeit a Model-T- like, vintage, text-only PC), I have E-mail, and there's even a web-site devoted to my collected works (I have no idea how it's done, but it's at www.berkshireweb.com/rogovoy for those who are curious).

In "The Great American Novice" in the May issue of Wired, David S. Bennahum talks briefly to a handful of fiction writers to ascertain their relationships to cyberspace. William Styron, author of "Sophie's Choice," still writes in longhand. Erica Jong, author of "Fear of Flying," has her own website www.ericajong.com, but does most of her work off-line.

John Updike, author of a gazillion books, has yet to make the leap into cyberspace. "The problem in 1998 is not getting more information," he says, "it's dodging information and keeping some kind of space in your head."

I know exactly what he means.

[This column originally appeared in the Berkshire Eagle on May 30, 1998. Copyright Seth Rogovoy 1998. All rights reserved.]

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