You Don’t Critique Another Man’s Meat

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“I love grilling,” Leonard said. “Absolutely love it. Some people do it, and some just do it, but for some of us, it’s a passion.” 

If someone said this from behind one of those sleek, compact, Three-Burner, Liquid Propane grills that feature porcelain-enameled, cast-iron cooking grates, you’d scream, I’d scream, we’d all scream for red meat. Check that, I probably wouldn’t scream, not anymore. I’ve been beat down, brothers and sisters, by all them grill-at-the-parkers hollering about how salvation is near. I’m here to testify that those Willie “the wunderkind” types who man the grill, and who, by all appearances should be the chef du jour, are false prophets.

You’ll be disappointed too, but you, the patron of the park, the family and/or friend of the chef, keep in mind that you ain’t paid a dime for that meat, the seat, or anything in between. You are to be grateful, always grateful, when someone hands you a plate, telling you to “Dig in!” on what you’ve been smelling and salivating over for the past ten minutes. You go grateful and stay grateful, because they paid for that meat, and they’ve been slaving over the fire, and you ain’t paid a dime. 

It’s that smelling that gets us, and it leads us astray, my friends. I’ve been there, you’ve been there. We believed in that smell, and our expectations went sky high. We tried to listen to Niece Maggie talking about her volleyball matches, but we don’t hear her, because of the symphony of sizzles going on behind our back.

When the moment of truth arrives, and I mean that in the most literal sense, we don’t even notice the au gratin potatoes when our plate hits that table. All we see is meat, all we hear is sizzling, and if the Promised Land smells anything like this, we might not mind going there a little sooner than expected. Then we get a taste, our first taste, finally, after all that waiting, and our sky-high expectations hit a gut-destroying, roller coaster dip.

“Is it just me or is this … bad?” we ask ourselves, and we’re all asking ourselves that question. You can see it at the table, especially on Cousin Teddy’s face. Do you have a Cousin Teddy? He can’t hide it? He has an eyebrow raised, but-I-ain’t-saying-a-word look on his face, but that face is just saying what we’re all thinking. Is the meat that bad, or are we all just that picky, and do we have a right to be picky, seeing as how this was all free? “But I had such sky high expectations. Doesn’t that warrant disappointment?”

“No, here’s what you do,” a friend of the family once informed me. “You shut your trap, and you keep it shut. That’s what you do. You open it long enough to put the food in it, then you close it to chew, and you keep closing it, until you’re headed home, whispering it to your wife on the drive home. You wanna be starting something? No, there’s nothing to be gained, at a family picnic, by critiquing another man’s meat.”

And when we talk about meat, we’re not talking about pork, brothers and sisters, because pork is tough to screw up. You know it, we know it, because we all done it, and we know it takes a whole bunch of stupidity to mess pork up. Brats, and all of the other meats that fall under the wiener umbrella, rarely knock our socks off or sadly disappoint, and we’ve had an absolutely horrible piece of chicken, what once? Twice, maybe twice. Red meat is the all-knowing meat. Red meat exposes a man’s under belly. It tells us who we are, who we really are. It tells us something about our attention to detail, the vulnerabilities of our spatula, and the frailties of our fork. Red meat does not forgive and forget, and it’s all about red meat.

Red meat is the reason we just drove thirty minutes to this park. We love our get-togethers, spending time with friends and family, and all that, but red meat is special. Can I get an amen, brothers and sisters? A soft, juicy hamburger is sublime, but a properly prepared steak is divine. I don’t care where they cut it, steak is the meat.  

I don’t keep a ledger on my disappointments in life, but when it comes to steak, I’ll throw out a whopping 95%. The fellas with the finest forks have disappointed me 95% of the time. The gas-grilled steak is edible, most of the time anyway, but it’s not Oh!-I-gotta-have-it scrumptious. It’s usually about two notches above edible.

I’ve seen them roll the most beautiful, top-of-the-line, stainless steel, propane gas machines into the park, and I’ve seen who’s ready and who ain’t. I’ve heard the grillers-in-the-park talk about those machines and how their top-of-the-lines can distribute heat so evenly across the grate, and how their four stainless steel burners can produce incredible amounts of BTUs that enhance heat retention so all that cooking “is not only more efficient, it’s convenient and quick.” And I know nothing about their world. I know nothing about all the knowledge they’ve attained from their research. But I’ve done my own research. I’ve researched what they generously produced for me with all their time and effort, between my teeth and gums, and I can’t remember eating a gas-grilled piece of red meat that’s earned those blue-ribbons. It’s quick, your propane grills with all their fixings are quick, but blue-ribbon? What are you smoking son?

So, we all giggle when Terrance rolls in with his $89.00 charcoal grill that he says he bought on sale at Walmart. We join in the giggles with the fellas-in-the-park, with a beer in our hands, because we know that they know, because they’ve been grilling for thirty-some-odd-years, so we trust they know their ins and outs. When the unassuming Terrance reveals his charcoal chimney starter, his flipper, his forker, and some tongs, the very, very basic three-tool set, that he purchased with the grill “all for a little over a hundy,” we join their public chiding, their gentle public shining, and we even join in on their private, and less gentle, scorn.

Terrance doesn’t talk the talk or walk the walk, because he don’t know it. He lived in an apartment and worked in an office for most of his life. Terrance is the type who prefers to eat out. He prefers restaurant food, and we all whisper that while he’s cooking, and we do it in the most condescending manner you can imagine. Terrance is the “doesn’t get it, and he probably never will” type of chef, because he started grilling late in life. If we talk about grilling with him, we started the conversation, not him, and we find he’s pretty insecure about his ability to cook a meal for the entire family.

“I let you guys do it for so long, because you love it. You all love doing this far more than I do,” Terrance whispers to me. “But I got a wife, and I got a life, so I decided to what-the-hell it.” So, it was the wife who talked him into grilling for the whole family. She also told him he was pretty good at it.

“But, for the whole family?” he complained.

“You’ll be fine,” she said.

We don’t think he’ll be fine. We wonder what she was smoking. I mean, Terrance doesn’t even own an apron that says something funny about the chef on it. He’s so insecure about his abilities that he doesn’t even join the joke Aunt Pat is telling about the time “Terrance couldn’t find the anus on a trout for cleaning.” He doesn’t know what he’s doing behind a grill, so he ain’t got time for her playtime. He needs to concentrate on trying to cook a fairly decent meal for the whole family. He also doesn’t want to make anyone sick, so he keeps plugging his “Walmart temperature gauge thinger-diller” (a term he uses because he can’t remember the word thermometer!) in the meat, and upon grilling, the verbal kind, we find he isn’t “totally sure what’s the difference between a sirloin and a ribeye”.

The “Oh, boy” we give is not kind. “Oh boy, we might need to get someone else to man the grill Helen,” our brother Jerry says about halfway through. “I’m not sure if Terrance is da man,” he adds, and oh boy do we laugh.

That “Oh, boy” consensus quietly turns kind, about twenty seconds after we sink our teeth and gums into Terrance’s finished product. “Oh, boy!” we want to say, but when no one else says a word, we quietly devour this tender and soft piece of meat that quietly changes everything we thought we knew about grilling-red-meat-in-the-park.

A hint of crisp on the outside is expected, but nothing can prepare us for the soft and chewy 145 degrees of medium-cooked insides that informs us how much dopamine the brain can reward a human being for the sense of taste. Everyone has Aunt Phyllis’s green bean casserole on their plate and Aunt Donna’s au gratin potatoes, but no one has touched any of that yet. There is no talk of trout anuses, fishing trips with our recently-deceased Uncle George, or any of the other great times we’ve had at this park over the years. There’s also no talk about how Terrance and his “under a hundy” arsenal just upended thirty years of grilling research the fellas attained with their top-of-the-line materials. We just quietly devour what Terrance made on his “one healthy sneeze and that thing’s going down” piece of junk, Charcoal grill that he purchased, on sale, from Walmart ten years ago.

Now that our course has been corrected on grilling at the park, we love hearing Leonard go on about how he knows his way around a grill, and how it’s all about love and passion for him. He has all of the latest and greatest cooking utensils, coupled with his ‘Kiss the Chef!’ apron. His stainless steel, propane gas grill has a brand name with numbers behind it that Leonard spouts as if it’s a limited model Lamborghini, and the aesthetic design of it is an absolute feast for the eyes. His wife further amplifies whatever Leonard says about himself and his new grill, and you watch him to see if there’s anything you can learn from a bona fide master. Leonard has a wide variety of wood chips, and he “ain’t afraid to use them”, and he “ain’t afraid to season neither.”

“Delicate and measured,” he says. “I know it’s verboten among the smoke whisperers, but if you keep it delicate and measured, seasoning enhances as opposed to overwhelming.”

When we finally sink our teeth and gums into the finished product of Leonard’s decades of fine-tuning, through trial and error and research, we find a truth about his marvel of science and engineering. We didn’t want to find it. That’s the most important note I want to leave you with today. When Leonard started going on about his passion for grilling, we thought we were going to be rolling around in it minutes later. Our only concern was that we would love it so much that we might make noises when we eat, and some of them might not be human noises. 

We didn’t want him to be wrong. We didn’t want him revealed. We wanted a savory slab of steak between our teeth and gums. When Leonard graciously gave us one of his steaks, we were grateful, but we couldn’t help but notice that it produced a flavor so close to steak that it was edible, but compared to Terrance’s amateur production, Leonard’s steak was anything but we we call a tour-de-force.

“It was actually pretty bland,” we whisper to our wives on the ride home. We don’t say this to Leonard, however. We lie to him, as any respectful guest who just ate the product of another’s effort and generosity will. We whisper that Terrance, and his piece of crap $89.00 cooker, “Actually grilled up a better steak.” We whisper that because we don’t want anyone to know what we don’t. 

“I know,” she whispers back, “But shhh!” We’re in the privacy of our own car, and we’re whispering, and she’s shushing me to try to prevent me from carrying on to the point that someone might hear us and know that we don’t know what we’re saying. We don’t know anything. We know so little that we don’t even know what we don’t know, but we know what we know, and we know you don’t critique another man’s meat.   

Fear’s Veil: Decoding the Leadership Mystique

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“You’re getting a detention for that,” were the scariest words we could hear between fifth grade and eighth grade. To avoid hearing that from a teacher, the principle, or any of the other authority figures who stalked the halls of my school, I walked straight lines, stood as straight as I could, and I didn’t respond to neighbors who whispered something funny that required a rejoinder. We were not only scared, we were terrified to the point of anxiety attacks when the teacher would give us the pre-detention eyeball. 

A detention required us to spend one half-hour after school. Thirty minutes. You might think that serving a mere thirty minutes after school would lead an overwhelming majority of us to think, “Hey, that wasn’t so bad after all.” No, it was so terrifying that some of us had nightmares about being caught in the act, the teacher writing out the detention, and the din of silence that followed with everyone staring, looking away, and staring again. Thinking back, it’s almost funny to think how powerful the culture of fear was, but we all knew it, and we all participated in it in our own individual ways. 

The tradition of forcing a student to stay after school, as a punishment for bad behavior was not new, or unique, to us. This punishment has probably been handed out for hundreds of years, the world over. It was also not unusual for us to fear getting in trouble in grade school, nor was it unprecedented that the kids in my grade school were absolutely terrified. This article isn’t about the silly effort of trying to suggest that our experience in grade school was worse than yours, better, or any different. We’re far more interested in the culture of fear that some institutions, such as my grade school, instituted to modify behavior.    

As scary as our principal was, and Mary Jane Meyer (aka Mrs. Meyer) was as scary, and as angry, as any individual I’ve met in all the decades sense. You might suggest that she thought she had to be to keep the hundreds of grade-school-aged kids in line.

“And if you just happened to catch her tending to her garden on some sunny day, she was probably a sweet, elderly woman.”

I just can’t picture it. I can’t picture her being gracious, warm, or even smiling. I’m sure she was quite pleasant to certain people, but I can’t picture it, and I don’t think any of my fellow students who attended this grade school during her reign of terror could either.  

Mrs. Meyer provided us a more tangible fear of God, and she was the wizard behind the curtain who orchestrated the culture of fear we knew. If we messed around in class, our teacher might scold us. If that wasn’t enough, she could threaten and/or give us a detention. That was enough for an overwhelming majority of us, but there were a few, and aren’t there always a few, for whom that wasn’t enough. For them, there was the ever-present threat of being sent to Mrs. Meyer’s office. That was enough for just about everyone else.

As scary as she was, however, Mrs. Meyer couldn’t have created the level of fear we knew on her own. She delegated much of the responsibility to her teachers, but they couldn’t have terrified us to the degree that some of us had anxiety issues, and others had such horrible nightmares they couldn’t sleep at night. For that level of fear, the institution needed compliance, our compliance. It needed our participation, and our promulgation of the culture that suggested that getting a detention was the most awful thing that could ever happened to a human being. No matter what they did to establish this climate, it wouldn’t have been half as effective as it was if we didn’t participate and fortify it. We did that to ourselves.   

“Did you hear that Gretchen and Marla got detentions?” someone would say in conspiratorial whisper.

“No way! For what?” No matter what the conspiratorial whisperer said there, the gossip mill spun the threads out to ultimately characterize the alleged perpetrator as the most horrible person of the day, and they often had a difficult time recovering their reputation in the aftermath.

When we approached one of the pariahs to get their perspective on what happened, they usually broke down like a politician in the midst of a career-ending scandal. Some tried to maintain a strong façade, but most couldn’t. Their defense usually devolved to those scared, uncontrollable tears. We empathized, because we knew firsthand the idea that nothing this bad had ever happened to them before.

It was our fault that she felt that way, because when she’d walk down the aisle to receive her detention, she felt our eyes on her, and she heard our whispers. The minute she turned around, we’d turn away and go silent. When it came to defending herself against the mob, she’s lie, obfuscate, try to shift the blame, and try anything and everything she could to salvage her reputation. We empathized here too, because what else are you going to do? 

We did more damage to her than the teacher, the principal, or any of our other authority figures could to demonize her, the detention of the day. We did it to ourselves. We policed our own and promulgated the culture of fear that surrounded the detention.

The idea that we cultivated their culture of fear wasn’t apparent to me in the moment, of course, because I was too young to grasp such complicated concepts, but it was crystallized in the form of a transfer student named Billy Kifferly. I knew Billy Kifferly before he transferred to our school, he was a friend of a friend, so when he got a detention I was the emissary sent to find out what happened, and how he entered into our dominion of the damned.

I asked him about it in the most empathetic manner a ten-year-old could. “… And it’s fine if you don’t want to tell me …” I added. I was fully prepared for his tears and/or the anguish that followed, and I had my shoulder all ready for him to cry on.

Not only did Billy not cry, or show any signs of fear of remorse, he told me all of the damning details of his detention, as if … as if they didn’t really matter. He didn’t try to wriggle out of it, or spread the blame. He said, “I did it. It was all my fault and all that, but it’s a half hour, so, big deal, right? I could do that standing on my head.”

That put me back a step. I couldn’t understand how he could be so blasé about it. As his only friend and confidant, I wanted to say, ‘Billy, you don’t understand,’ but Billy’s reaction to it informed me that there was something larger going on here that I didn’t understand. I didn’t get the fact that he was more accustomed to getting in trouble, or failing to meet the standards. He just got expelled from his prior school, so on that scale, a detention, or a half-hour after school, was nothing to him. I also didn’t understand that I was not only a part of the institutional culture of fear, but a promulgator of it

“It’s just a half-hour,” he said, and he was right, but ‘It’s so much more than that’ I wanted to say. I couldn’t back that up though, because I was too young to understand the nature of authority, rebellion, and Billy’s far too mature definition of the system-is-a-farce reaction. I knew Billy was the rebel, on some complicated level, I knew I’d become the standard bearer for the status quo if I said anything further.  

By not fearing the institutional hierarchy, and the elements that propped it up, Billy essentially informed me that the whole system was a farce. “Why should I fear spending a half-hour after school so much?” was essentially what he said. I thought of instructing him in our ways, but I was too young to understand the nature of our ways, and I was also far too immature to understand that we weren’t just ceding to authority, we were contributing to it.  

***

We can now all laugh at this kid, I call me, now. We’re sophisticated adults now with a more sophisticated understanding of authority, rebellion, and the balance of the two that forms a foundation that helps maintain a system, but when we look back at our naïve, immature understandings of an authoritarian world, we laugh. While we’re laughing, we should also take a look at how we sophisticated adults not only cede authority to authority figures in our lives now, we contribute to the underpinnings of their authority?

We call certain individuals in our culture authoritative experts, and we allow them to dictate their facts and opinions in a manner that changes the direction of our lives. “Why?” we ask rhetorically, “because they are more informed.” Are they? “Sure, they use the scientific method to arrive at dispassionate theories based on empirical data.” We learn from their research that there is “there is no conclusive evidence” for what we see and hear. How can that be? “After exhaustive research, the team at (fill in the blank) has determined that there is no conclusive evidence to suggest that’s true.” We learn to accept what they say, until we develop a level of faith in their point of view, their expertise, and their authority on the issue. We learn to accept their values through their lens. Are they right? “They’re experts, what are you asking here?”

Analysts call the dynamic of subjects contributing to expert analysis and authoritative dictates the leadership mystique. We now have unspoken requirements of our leaders to which they must adhere. We require them to exhibit, display, and provide some semblance of leadership qualities to fortify the facade. What are these requirements? They vary, but anyone who knows anything about icebergs knows that 90% of an iceberg is underwater. It could be argued that we create 90% of the foundation of leadership mystique for us, and we contribute to it in our interactions with other, fellow subjects.

We see this at play in the workplace when someone everyone considered an oaf yesterday, receives a prominent promotion today, and we agree to their leadership qualities tomorrow, characteristics that we never saw previously. Our authority figures obviously saw something special in them, and that’s enough for us, for some of us, and the onus is on us to help others see, accept, and promulgate their authority tomorrow.

Coupled with our concessions and contributions to authority figures and their rules and punishments, is the inherent recognition that even if we disagree with all of the above, we can’t choose our leaders. We are subjects who are subjected to those who make the rules, and we don’t even know who to blame when those rules prove silly. We blame our supervisor for imposing a rule passed down by a manager; we blame the policeman for carrying out a silly law passed down by a state legislator or federal official. We blame the person who is in our face, enforcing the rules, because most of us don’t dig through the layers to find the person who is to blame for drawing up the rules/laws, and those who pass them. 

The United States citizen lives in a Representative Republic that permits us to choose those we deem our authority figures. Yet, how many of us choose a representative of what we want to be as opposed to who we are. An overwhelming majority of us live within our means, and we’re quiet, unassuming types. We’re more like the character actor who quietly assumes the characteristics necessary for a role, but we prefer to vote charismatic game show hosts types into office. That guy looks like someone who would be fun to hang around. If that’s our choice for a leader in a Representative Republic, who are we? Who do we deify and assign leadership qualities to satisfy our role in the leadership mystique? How many of us assign such qualities to the manager of our local Wendy’s? We don’t, we hold them accountable for producing an inferior product.

Most of us don’t condemn representatives we charge with voting the way we would or the manner in which they spend our money. We direct our ire at those who don’t pay enough in taxes instead. We police our own. The governments can levy fines, put liens on our property, and take away our freedom if they determine that we didn’t pay enough taxes, but they cannot convince us to condemn our neighbor as a pariah for not paying what we deem enough. That’s our job, and we relish it.    

This article is not about the rebels or the figures of authority in our lives, though those would be interesting pieces. It’s about us, and our amenable and compliant ways of helping authority figures establish and maintain a level of authority in our lives. It’s about ceding elements of our lives to authoritative experts who sit behind a type writer telling us how to live our lives, raise our children, and go silent when they need us to just be quiet. 

In grade school, we were little kids who were easy to manipulate and cajole into carrying out institutional planks, but how many adults aid in the culture of fear of government edicts on paying “enough” taxes? We’re not half as concerned when our government officials spend our money in foolish ways, as we are the CEO of a company not paying what we deem enough in taxes. We not only cede authority to government officials. We contribute to it by condemning our neighbor for not paying enough.

As someone who has been on both sides of the paradigm, on a very, very minor scale, one thing I recognized when given an relatively insignificant level of authority was that my level of authority was not recognized or appreciated by my fellow authoritative figures. As a huge Letterman fan in the 80s, I’ve always found some inspiration in his idea that he was a bit of a joke. You can be king of the world, and he was in his own little way, but you’re still that goofy kid from the Midwest who had some really stupid notions about the world. His influence led me to consider myself a bit of a joke, and I saw the joke in everyone around me too, especially those in leadership positions. Everyone enjoys hearing that what they’re doing is important and substantial, and they don’t mind laughing at themselves, but they do no enjoy hearing that they’re kind of a joke too. When I learned to control my comedic impulses, and I ceded to their authority, they began to appreciate and contribute to my comparatively meager mystique. 

“It’s called reciprocity,” a friend of mine said, “I scratch your back, you feed my need!”

It was the Best of Times … In Entertainment

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“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness.” –Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities 

It’s the human condition to believe we live in the best of times and the worst. Psychologists have terms for various strains of bias that inform our opinions, and Dickens’ famous line encompasses them all. I’m biased, you’re biased, and the whole damned system is biased, but this particular article focuses most on what could be called a generational bias, or nostalgia bias. Our generational bias leads us to believe that everything was funnier, more intellectual, and more stimulating than anything before or since. While I admit that the bias is strong in me, I challenge anyone to defeat the opinions in this article. 

“I am biased.” There, I wrote it, and I’ll write it again to satisfy anyone who challenges the biased nature of this article. The one thing I’ve found is that we can write this over and over again, but there will always be someone who stands up and says, “Yeah, but aren’t you biased?” and they say it with one of those grins that suggest they caught you. 

“Ok, you caught me,” I confess, “but I wrote a whole paragraph about it at the beginning, I added it in the middle, and I concluded with it. Check the minutes of your transcript of our little conversation in this intangible bistro.” So, rather than try to qualify every single nugget of what I’m about to write, go ahead and place a parenthetical (back to top) at the end of each statement if that’s what you need to do to assure yourself that I admit to having a mean case of generational bias, which might be nostalgia bias, considering that the time frame stretches from 1975 to 2001.

If you’re going to challenge my recency bias, however, I ask you to name an era of entertainment that matches the total output from the 1975 to 2001. We’re talking top-notch, quantity and quality, from the era of your argument to mine. Everyone has their opinion, of course, and some say that some of the artists listed in those productions were overhyped by the marketing teams spending huge dollars to see to it that their artist made it to the A-List. This happened frequently during this twenty-six-year chunk of time, as the individual eras therein were chock full of money to be spent in all avenues of entertainment, but with the advantage of hindsight, we can weed through the A-List to ferret out the true artists from the pretenders. Even after doing this, the A-List from this twenty-six-year era is still daunting. 

We can all go through this twenty-six-year era and parse out which was better than the other, but taken together as a whole, I believe the total number of good-to-great movies, the sheer breadth of music, and comedy from the era between 1975 and 2001, will not only go down as the greatest era of entertainment in the United States, but most future eras won’t even try to compete. They’ll just go retro, and try to buy the back-catalogs of the artists from the era, from whomever owns it “now”, to pursue ways to use it and re-use it, market it, and merchandise it in the future. Some might include the 1960’s in some of those entertainment venues, and others will include the 2000 to 2010 era, but after watching, reading, and listening to just about everything from those eras, everything in the 60s now seems to prelude this thirty-year peak, in retrospect, and just about everything that followed seemed to be trailing off.

There are exceptions to the rule, of course, as there are always going to be exceptions to every rule. There will always be a couple great movies in any given year, a few great albums here and there, and future comedians who deliver exceptional material in the future. If you lived through this era though, you knew to expect that an exceptional artist would deliver something exceptional in any given month. It was also “an event” when an actor, director, musician or band, and this author came out with something new. Tuesday used to be “the day” when new albums came out, Friday was “the day” when new movies came out, and I when one of my favorite artists was coming out with something new, I knew months in advance. I realize I’m old now, and no longer on the cutting edge, but does anyone look forward to such things anymore? The new music is downloaded on your music subscription service on Friday now, and your new movies are downloaded into your streaming service. There’s still theaters, in the present tense of this article, but most people are willing to wait, the on average 30 days for it to appear on a streaming service. Do modern artist still have “event” status with their new releases? 

While reading this, I’m sure you thought of some exceptions to the 1975 to 2001 timeframe, The Beatles, The Godfather I and II to name but a few of the exceptions you probably considered. The point of this article is not to quibble over the merits of some critical greats that happened before or after but the general whole. 

My biases came into play in the 90s, because that was the first era when I had real disposable income of my own, and I almost went broke numerous times, trying to rent every movie that had ever been made, listen to every album of music ever created, and I stayed up late to listen to every comedian the late-night talk shows invited on. The reader might consider it a bold statement to say I know everything vital and important to come from this thirty-year peak, or they might consider it a little sad that I devoted so much of my free time and disposable income to this pursuit, but few who know me would challenge my reference base of the mostly inconsequential information from the field of entertainment that occurred during this era. 

I don’t view this cast knowledge of movies, music and books a brag, because other than winning some Trivial Pursuit games and winning some trivia games in bars, I haven’t profited from my mastery of useless knowledge in any way. It’s useless, inconsequential information that doesn’t serve a purpose. Yet, from 1975-2001, I was entertained. The movies, music and books filled my free time. 

Another area to which I devoted too much free time and disposable income was in the area of others writing about the music, movies and books from this era. Some devoted too many calories to framing artistic creations in political orientation. These sophisticated sophists declared some chunks of time “the dark ages,” if that artistic creation occurred during an era in which the office of the president was of a political orientation different from theirs. It was so over the top at times, that it was almost funny. As one who lived through it, and now looks back with a wistful eye at the glorious times these decades were, that’s a big ball of nonsense. It’s a feeble attempt to rewrite history through a politically biased lens, and I write that asking the reader to consider that when one goes down the list of parties in that powerful seat, over the course of this thirty-year chunk of time, it’s mostly even.    

Unless you consider The Cold War with Russia an actual war, the 70s were the first era that was largely free of war. The Vietnam War ended in 1975, and that was preceded by the Korean War, and WWII. Except for a few skirmishes here and there, the era between 1975 and 09/11/2001 was largely free of war. Except for a few moments here and there, America experienced such a great era of stability and prosperity for thirty years that we had too much free time on our hands. In order to keep ourselves intrigued, we invented scandals, controversies, and we spent most of our free time worrying about what could happen if things weren’t this great. The best thing politicians could think of, to keep us mired in fear was, “Things are great, now, sure, but they could be worse, and if elect that other guy, they will.” Our movies needed to invent possible tragedies and catastrophes just to remind us that tragedies and catastrophes could happen. Now that we’re through that era how many of us wish we could go back and realize how many calories we wasted worrying about stupid stuff that never happened. How much would you give to go back in time right now and tell yourself to avoid worrying about that, “because that won’t happen, because it didn’t happen, and it probably never will.” It worked back then, of course, as we all worried about it, and the politicians and the groups all benefitted from the fear, because we all agreed that it was such a scary prospect that we agreed to devote billions of dollars to try to stop something that would never happen. As much as we hate to admit it now, in a historical perspective, we lived and still live, in the best of times. 

There were so many factions and fractions in movies, music, TV, and books for the average consumer to consider, and yet we all agreed on most topics. A walk through the A-List contributors in the early 70s, in music and the movies, is so daunting that I won’t even try to list them. The list in the 80s and 90s not only continued this legacy, but these eras may have topped the 70s by sheer volume. Before we move on, think about that A-List for just a second. How many different, varied, and talented artists littered that A-List compendium. We usually try to shorten that list a little, just for sake of conversation, but the A-List of that era is so long that we feel a need to limit entrants just so we can have a decent conversation on that topic without putting people to sleep when we try to avoid missing someone. Think about all of the great directors, and how many movies they released during this twenty-year chunk of time. Think about all of the various musicians, and all of their various templates. We could devote this entire article to the Billboard Top 100, the Top of the Pops, or any of the other publications and venues that tried to top one another with the A-list artists they featured. Now, think of the magazines, both mass market and the niche ones, that tried to cover the A-Lists of music, the movies, books, and entertainment in general.

As one who wasn’t exclusively enamored by A-list celebrities, and rock stars, I often found myself enjoying the entertainment put out by those others might call the B-List artists, C-Lists, and D-lists, but I only did so, because I exhausted myself trying to watch, listen to, and read everything at the top of those lists in the first half of the era. At some point, also, the influenced began to appear to parody the influencers. I almost went broke numerous times trying to keep up, stay hip, and know every reference point, joke, and conversation topic people were having. Some call these conversations “water cooler” conversations, the coffee shop, or the break area. Whatever the case was, I was one of those who had to know everything, and there were so many movies, so much music, and so many great books and comedians to know about, for someone who had to know, that no past era compares when it comes to pure output and I dare say no future era will even try to compete. If you love music, movies, books, and comedy it was the greatest era in human existence to be alive.  

My nephews, some thirty years my junior, insist that the 80s were greatest musical era ever created, and they don’t even bother trying to defend “their” era. They have no allegiance to it in anyway. They state that the 80s were the greatest era of music as if it’s not only a fact, but such an obvious fact that it’s not even worth discussing. They don’t list one particular artist as the game-changing artist, as many of us will, but they do try to compile a list of influential artists that I considered quite daunting, and they insist no other era can compete. Even though I had nothing to do with creating the music in this era in anyway, I took some pride looking back and hearing an outsider consider this era I lived through the greatest era ever. Due probably to my age, more than anything else, I’m more of a 90s guy, and being a 90s guy, I always considered the 80s a silly era of music, until my nephews put their spin on it. I also write all of this with the asterisk pointed to the notion that proponents of any era between the 60s and the 00s have valid arguments for “their” era.

My rhetorical question, sent out to the ether, is will future inhabitants in the United States be having arguments over the specific eras of this thirty-year chunk of time for the next 60 to 70 years? Will there be a “rock revival” in 2050 that puts the 80s music to shame? Will there be a return-to-roots revival in the movie industry that puts the quality and quantity of the movies from the 70s in the dustbin? 

Some argue that with the proliferation of streaming services and the various outlets on the internet, Americans will never collectively agree on great artistic outputs ever again. They argue that there’s just so much to choose from that it inhibits the idea of a Michael Jackson, a Star Wars, or even a more recent release like the book The Da Vinci Code from ever rocking our world in quite the same manner. These arguments discount the genius effect, of course, as every era has their own geniuses. The question I have, and it seeks to be as objective as possible for someone obviously imbued with a whole bunch of biases, is will those future geniuses ever be able to take future generations to the point that they can finally put 1970 to 1999 to rest, or will 2070 America still be arguing the relative merits of Michael Jackson vs. Madonna; Spielberg vs. Lucas vs. Coppola; Seinfeld vs. Leno; and Chevy Chase vs. Steve Martin vs. Bill Murray?   

One of the primary reasons there might never be an era that tops this era is the topic no common fan wants to talk about but they are know: money. There was so much money to be made in movies and music that the executives and their boardrooms didn’t mind pouring money into projects, because they knew they’d make it back eventually. They had money makers and artistic projects, and they devoted huge chunks of money and resources to both, because at the end of the year, they knew they would always be in the black. 

How many guys with nothing but a guitar strapped to their back receive the kind of funding and support they may have made twenty years ago? How many “good looking waiters who can act” is a movie studio going to bank on if a majority of the money they see is from the comparatively flat streaming services? The amount of money that man may have made for himself and those who supported his rise, just isn’t there anymore, not like it was between 1975 and 2001.

My unusual hunger to know everything about everything was born watching Johnny Carson and David Letterman. I paid hard money and devoted way too much time trying “to get” every reference they included in their jokes, so I tried to watch every movie ever made, listen to every song, and read every book. And I didn’t just want to get the references to movies, songs and books from my generation, I wanted to get the jokes and references to their generation and the generation before that. This was nearly impossible, of course, but I did try. When I couldn’t understand their jokes in the moment, I faked it, but I was so embarrassed I didn’t get that particular joke that I researched it, so I would get it next time. It was that important to me. I don’t know if the younger generation is intimidated by the qualitative and quantitative output of that era, but they don’t care about this near as much as I did. 

They basically ignore most of my reference jokes, and when I ask them if they get it, they say no. “You don’t get it, because you haven’t seen one of the greatest movies ever made,” I say. (I’ve said this about various books and music too.) Again, if someone of a prior generation said this to me, I probably would’ve experienced such a powerful FOMO that I might have watched it, read it, or listened to it that night. If I drop such a reference on them, they immediately dismiss it as “Old man,” stuff. 

“It’s probably an old man humor,” they say, if I tell them a show or movie is must see. It’s funny when they insult me in this manner, don’t get me wrong, but it amazes me that there’s no curiosity on their part to “to get” my well known references from the best of … lists. When I’ve survived the insult of my vicarious ownership of such productions and insisted that they watch that essential show or movie to up their reference base, they’ve watched some of them and returned with: “It’s old man humor.”

If the younger people who surround me are endemic of their generation, this article is the equivalent of screaming into a well. Yet, I maintain that the sheer output from so many different, varied artists, from so many different corners of the country, that occurred in these thirty years, will probably never be matched in my humble opinion, an opinion obviously derived from generational, or nostalgic, bias.