The Generation That Played Cards

Sunday we went down to J's parents' place in Mesa to have a Fourth of July bar-be-cue, a day after the actual holiday. They live in a newly built permanent house in one of the many retirement parks in that city, having moved down from Ohio permanently after several years visiting the same park over the winter in their RV.

As they are Trump supporters, we were able to discuss politics freely with each other. As usual, I gave them my frank update on the election, assuring them that things were going to turn out fine, as I had assured them in 2016, which had earned me a modicum of trust regarding my predictions.

Around the table at dinner we discussed Trump's idea for a national sculpture garden of heroes. "To Harriet Beecher Stowe!" I said, holding up my open beer bottle, and referencing one of the people on Trump's list of initial honorees, who happened to be a local hero in the part of Ohio where they had lived.

J's mother brought up the announcement the previous day by Kanye West, a famous rap musician, that he was running for president. Can you believe it? Was he serious? We laughed about it. It was the latest wackiest-thing-ever in one of the wackiest years of all time.

"The Democrats on social media are freaking out over Kanye West right now," I said. "They hate it. It's a Trump conspiracy, having him announce a presidential run."

We discussed how this might effect the race, if West actually ran, and how he might go about the task.  Only half joking, I said that West's candidacy might put the District of Columbia's three electoral votes in play for Trump, as he could win them with barely a third of the vote in D.C.

"538 to zero would be nice," I said. "A unanimous Electoral College is exactly what the country needs. Maybe the only thing that will save it. Biden might still get Delaware, though, and I guess that would be ok."

After a pause I added, "It just shows you how the Democrats are a razor-thin margin away from complete collapse."

After I was done, J's step-father said: "I have a stupid question. Who's Kanye West?"

The rest of us laughed. I confessed that until a few years ago I hadn't known much about him either, just that he was a famous rapper, and that many people considered him an artistic genius. I told them how a couple years ago my co-workers at the design firm in Portland had shaken their heads in disbelief after West had come out that he was a loose supporter of Trump, wearing the famous red baseball cap with Trump's slogan on it after visiting the White House.

"I really think he's gone insane," said one of my co-workers around the table, staring down at her vegan lunch in disbelief as if she'd lost a good friend. They never knew my own political beliefs, I'm certain. I would have known if they had. I could say I kept silent because it was Portland, that I had to make a buck, and there was no point in hashing out those kinds of things when there is a deadline for a client. That's certainly true. But in my most recent job, I knew one hundred percent my boss was a conservative from his leisure activities, and yet we never brought up politics. In other words, I strive to be a professional at all times at work.

To clear things up for her step-father, J mentioned the famous woman that Kanye West is married to, and then he understood who we meant.

The retirement community in Mesa is very social, like a permanent summer camp. There is a common room busy with constant activity in season. The park is staffed by a corps of people who live there, almost like Burning Man. The park is full in winter, but in most years it empties out in April when the Canadians and the Midwesterners go home or hit the road in their rigs for cooler climates. This year of course it's been a bit different, but it hasn't impacted us and our visits.

One of the aspects of socialness of the park is that people frequently drop by each other's places, the way one did in my childhood "going over to someone's house." In season, there are constant spontaneous get-togethers and parties. The residents are retirees, to be sure, but there is more to it, as I like to tell them.

"No way my generation is going to pull this off," I said, referring to those of us born in the mid-1960s and later. "We don't trust each other enough to have this kind of living arrangement. even when we get older. We have to have an ironic detachment from each other,"

Baby boomers, I told them, were raised with more natural community than we were, although at least we got some of it, which is better than what later generations have gotten. It was still alive for a season in our youth. At least we know what it is supposed to look like.

J mentioned how her grandparents---her mother's parents---lived in a retirement community in Florida for a while before they passed away.

"That was the generation that played cards with each other," I said.

J told me I was right about that fact, based on her visits. I had seen that kind of culture in Europe and other countries in my youthful travels. Those cultures, especially the further East you went, had an assumption of ongoing, unbroken communal activity that felt like a time machine to me when I experienced it directly. I loved it. It was one of the main reasons I went back there several times. It had once existed in the United States but had disappeared from everyday adult life. Past a certain age, after college, one didn't keep doing those kinds of communal activities with large, interwoven, flexible groups of people. You were supposed to grow up, start your family, and live alone. You found connection to other people through your work place, and through shared consumption of Pop Culture.

Maybe you hung on to some college friends, but you saw them on special occasions, resolving to see each more often. And these got less frequent through the years. You certainly didn't play cards on a regular basis with friends and strangers, unless you joined a special league. The time spent doing those kinds of activities had to be serious, not just a way to be among other people to break one's loneliness, the admission of which was the worst taboo. If you did find some kind of community amidst the apartness, it might feel like you were battling a tide of societal apathy in keeping it going, like a struggling community theater trying to stay afloat in a small town.

Or you pay a large sum of money to "experience community" at an event or retreat in the desert, the woods, or the mountains. You get to drop the persona of your work and home life and, simulating a permanent community, be among other people just living life in an immediate way that seems inaccessible in the daily world. Free of certain duties and restrictions, and organized around a common activity with others, you feel like you've discovered what life really means. Then at the end of the week you go back to your exile in the broken, isolated world outside the walls of the property, and tell everyone at work how incredible it was, and how they must go too. But unless you are very special person, you don't get to have it as part of your daily life. It's unnatural, we now say.

Visiting the park in Mesa, the most striking difference among generations to me concerns the expression of politics. From my impression, the park has a healthy mix of political opinions from people of various voting backgrounds. Among the friends who drop by at J's folks' place is a genial couple who happen to be strong Democrats, and with whom J's parents share good times but have little in common in their political world view. I would have never known this except I was warned about it a couple weeks back when this couple showed up on the porch smiling, just as we had been discussing the election.

"We never talk about politics with them," J's mother told me, hastily as she went to open the door for them.

I understood, and for the next couple hours during the visit, we managed to talk about current events without getting into our various political opinions, even as the bourbon was poured in several rounds. It was pleasant and I like the company of their friends. They're good people. Only in one case did I accidentally press someone's button, rather innocuously, I thought, while discussing the history of Oklahoma. When I realized I'd hit a point of contention, I dropped the subject, One never knows where the sore points will be.

It wasn't quite true, however, that they don't talk about politics with each other. They just keep it confined to a small area of skirmishes and healthy, brief reminders to each other where they both stand on things. I noticed that both sides had their moments of making clear their opinions in the battle going on in the country. But it never led to anything beyond that.

"Wow, Baby Boomers are still able to agree to disagree," I said later in the car. Had those little entrées into politics that I witnessed happened in a conversation between me and members of my generation, it would have been like lighting a match and throwing it into gasoline. Just reminding someone that you don't agree with them can lead to yelling and screaming within seconds, in my experience, in a way that makes it impossible to continue any normal conversation after that, and can put an entire friendship in jeopardy.

I envy them that ability, the older generation. But it makes me wonder what life is going to be life in this country after the Baby Boomers---the last generation that can get along with each other---are gone, and we Gen Xers remain as the old guard. Will we be sitting at home, isolated, posing in our coolness from each other, while complaining the youth don't have any respect for us, all because we never learned how to trust each in some fundamental way, or had that trust ripped out of us over time? Retirement communities will exist, of course. Cliques will form in them, but will it feel like a big moving party to which we all are invited? Or will it be about who isn't welcome? Or will something else entirely unexpected happen between now and then?