Also this issue:

Land Locked
Warren Rohrer kept his work earthbound.
-Susan Hagen

artquicks
More Stuff Going On This Week...

Karen E. Quinones Miller
-Alex Richmond

Beauty and the Beast
-Debra Auspitz

Summer Invitational
-Lori Hill

Latin Jazz: La Combinación Perfecta
-Brian White

Mick Foley
-Maura Johnston

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
Walter Isaacson insists Franklin’s prose is the standout among the man’s countless endeavors.
-John Freeman

July 17-23, 2003

books

bookquick

Dispatches from the Culture Wars: How the Left Lost Teen Spirit

By Danny Goldberg Hyperion, 312 pp., $23.95

If baby boomers of the 1960s cried "Don’t trust anyone over 30," today’s boomers, Danny Goldberg claims in his provocative new book, have precisely the opposite approach:

--During the 2000 presidential campaign Bush and Nader representatives regularly met with Rock the Vote organizers, while Al Gore's people did not. "Young people were obviously not part of the Gore-Lieberman campaign strategy," lamented a Rock the Vote spokesperson. Gore drew two million fewer votes from 18- to 24-year-olds than Clinton did in 1996, contributing to his defeat.

--Intellectual Stanley Crouch "recently explained to his 19-year-old daughter that she was too young to have valuable opinions about anything."

--Harvard president (and former Clinton Treasury secretary) Lawrence Summers drove professor Cornel West from Cambridge after West recorded a rap album.

How is it Ozzy Osbourne is welcomed by a GOP president and liberal politicos don't know Eminem and Austin Powers? Goldberg, a longtime record producer (as the subtitle implies, he discovered Nirvana) and former head of the Southern California chapter of the ACLU, offers some history. In the '70s, Democrats actively sought support from music and movie stars. Jimmy Carter quoted Bob Dylan on the campaign trail in 1976 and thanked rock groups like the Allman Brothers for financially supporting his candidacy. By the mid-1980s, humbled by landslide electoral defeats (and perhaps, Goldberg says, their own middle age), boomer Democrats tried appealing to middle-of-the-road Americans by attacking pop culture. While Clinton won these swing voters in two elections, the pop-bashing strategy of Al Gore (and his even more reactionary running mate, Joe Lieberman) held no appeal for young people.

The book meanders between memoir and manifesto. Goldberg's chief argument is that the left is dominated by "liberal snobs" who don't understand working-class Americans, but he undermines this with an endless list of glitzy showbiz people he's on a first-name basis with (Barbra Streisand is "extremely well-read and thoughtful," James Taylor happens to have "gorgeous blue eyes staring into space as if focused a thousand miles away" and Don Henley "does not hesitate to step up to help a cause he believes in"). He's on firmer ground when describing his battles in Washington. Goldberg became friendly with the disarmingly nice Tipper Gore and her more volatile husband ("You and your fucking group sent out that letter. You and your fucking group tried to embarrass me").

Dispatches from the Culture Wars concludes that boomer liberals can win over youth by speaking their language and treating their concerns with respect -- in short, treating kids like any other constituency. (Perhaps it's a sign of the times that in June, the ACLU's membership conference held four youth seminars and invited pop and hip-hop musicians to entertain.)

"To turn our aspirations and anxieties into hostility toward the younger generation," Goldberg writes, "is morally wrong and, for progressives, politically wrongheaded." He recalls a dinner party with Mario Cuomo, where the liberal icon was reassured that teens continue to go out dancing. "As long as they still dance," Cuomo said with a wave of his hand, "it's OK."

--Andrew Milner