CSotD: We can’t put it together — it is together
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Arlo & Janis is one of the rare exceptions to the complaint that newspapers are killing themselves by targeting all their cartoons to older readers. Jimmy Johnson is actually a couple of years — two or three — younger than I am, and the strip gets better the closer we come to retirement. Which puts it within a few years of perfection.
What makes it different than other strips about mid-life crisis is that it's an insider view of the phenomenon and it doesn't rely on stale jokes that young people make about old people. If every strip on the page were that sharply targeted, it wouldn't matter that this particular one appeals to the Woodstock generation. Other strips of wit and insight would attract intelligent readers of other demographics.
This week, Arlo and Janis have been putting in a garden and Arlo has been waxing philosophical along the lines above. I don't know what put this in Jimmy's head, but it has been well-timed for me. I'm writing a piece on the 40th anniversary of the first Earth Day for Colorado Kids, the publication I edit for the Denver Post, and I needed to find someone who was in Colorado at the time, is still relevant to Colorado, might have been at that first Earth Day and might have something interesting to say about it.
So I tracked down Mo Siegel, founder of Celestial Seasonings, who, on that first Earth Day, was a 20-year-old college dropout wandering through the mountains around Boulder picking herbs for "Mo's 23," the first of the teas he created, and is still in Boulder doing environmentally-geared things. We'd never met back then, but we had a wonderful conversation which I can't use because he had not been at Earth Day, which was essentially a teach-in and thus kind of serious and boring. But we talked for a while, laughed a great deal and it became clear that a lot of us who believed in those sorts of things back then continue to believe in them today. Including the thing about skipping the boring parts.
Later, I did find the right fellow for the story, a guy named Morey Wolfson, who had been the Denver coordinator for that first Earth Day, and, again, a terrific, funny conversation ensued. He's currently working in the governor's energy office in Denver and has not lost his interest in the environment, and when I said that I thought the jibe that the hippies had all cut their hair and gone to Wall Street was a lie, he agreed. He suggested that our generation is out of the streets not because we gave up or changed our values, but because we grew into positions where we had some authority to make things happen, and a very large number of us channeled our beliefs into specific areas like teaching, social work, government or clean industries where we could do just that.
And some of us put that energy into an industry that is hell-bent on killing itself, so that this newspaper guy is closer than ever to Arlo's sentiment about material goods and values. After the death of a newspaper I was editing, followed by six months of unemployment and marginal free-lancing, I've got a job I love, but it's part-time and there are going to be a lot of beans-and-rice over the next few months. And I don't care, because I know what it takes to put a steak on my plate and I know what you have to swallow before you get to bite into that porterhouse.
And it ain't worth it.
We were right. We had some of the specifics wrong, but we had the big picture sharply in focus.
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