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MUGGER

By Russ Smith
mug1988@aol.com

Early last week, while perusing the irritatingly ragged Boston Globe website, I made a detour from the sports section—filled with Daisuke Matsuzaka stories—and wound up reading a lifestyle feature about intergenerational bonding. It’s not a new story, obviously, although I’ll never believe that 60 is the new 40, but just the headline was enough to make a grown, non-arthritic man wince: “Men will be boys: From video games to music to clothes, fathers and sons have a lot more in common than past generations. And that’s cool.”

Don Aucoin’s Nov. 14 space-filler got my goat almost immediately, as he started off with the example of Jeffrey Stone, 51, and his son Zachary, 14, two free wheelin’ dudes who burn CDs by the same artists, swap clothes and watch the same TV shows. “When Stone bought Zachary a World Cup T-shirt,” Aucoin writes, “he made sure to also buy one for himself. ‘My friends, they always say my dad is pretty cool,’ reports Zachary.’” As it happens, I’m also 51, and my older son Nick is 14, and it’s likely he’d puke if I brought home matching T-shirts; he gets annoyed enough as it is when strangers assume that he and his 12-year-old brother are twins despite their difference in height and hair color.

Let’s get something clear: There’s nothing “cool” about fathers and sons living out real-life buddy movies. I greatly enjoy the company of my kids, whether it’s watching a ballgame on the tube or at a stadium, going to museums or combing through the junk at local flea markets, but there are unspoken barriers in our relationship, ones that are more similar to those of that ’60s/’70s catchphrase, “the generation gap” that existed in my household growing up than the “pass the bong, man” ethos that’s implicit in Aucoin’s story. Like a lot of middle-of-the-pack Boomers, it’s a given that I’ll consider myself cool until the death rattle sounds, but the “cool” of my youth rarely intersects with the definition of that word in 2006.

Unlike some of the men interviewed in the Globe story, I’ve never played a video game—pinball is still tops—and it was pure torture when the boys were pre-kindergarten and I had to read the words on the screen so they could figure out what Mario or Luigi were up to. Another fellow interviewed by Aucoin, a New Hampshire therapist named Andy Gersten, contributed this gem: “A generation ago, fathers and sons could connect and have a bond through hunting. Now, fathers and sons bond through video games.” The only hunting I did 40 years ago was catching lightning bugs and box turtles and Dad wasn’t involved. Actually, no one ever thought about “bonding” back then—that’s an unfortunate phrase from the post-Earth Day years—but I do remember watching re-runs of I Love Lucy with my parents.
Maybe Gersten and his 19-year-old son, Ben, who share an uncool “passion” for the Dave Matthews Band, camped out last week for 24 hours to buy the new PlayStation 3 console. I lucked out on that score since Nick and Booker have thankfully showed diminished interest in gaming. Admittedly, the furor over the PlayStation frenzy was sort of amusing. A Boston Herald story last Saturday reported that Mayor Thomas Menino “vowed to bill Sony Corp. for the chaos” that caused him to send extra cops to control crowds at local malls. Good luck collecting, Mr. Mayor.

And Baltimore Sun columnist Dan Rodricks, a father about my age, hijacked the hysteria to deliver a lecture that was ripsnortingly mean, a rant worthy of Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity, personalities who are definitely not his soul brothers. Rodricks wrote: “I know I speak for many Americans—some your own age, believe it or not—who find your obsession with video games, your dopey surrender to the hype, and your willingness to give time and money to the pursuit of an overpriced, made-in-some-other-country electronic toy [that’s Democratic protectionism peeking out of his pocket] to be wholly vulgar, crass and (insert synonym for wholly vulgar and crass).

“Yours is the most leisurely, pampered, tattooed generation ever. Some of you still live with your mommies and daddies, and there’s no military draft [say hey, Charlie Rangel!] so, compared to guys who came before you—your fathers and uncles and grandparents—you have a pretty cushy life.”
So, take that Kerry-voter Andy Gersten!   

Anyway, I gag upon watching the smug Jon Stewart, who’s a media god in Nick’s world. Sure, he’ll take some of my suggestions without a roll of the eyebrows, like buying high-top Converse sneakers instead of those ridiculous Adidas or Puma versions that clog up stores today. Seriously, when walking in the halls of my boys’ school, you see almost all the boys wearing these clown-like contraptions, and it reminds me of the futuristic exhibits at the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing.

And, on occasion, Nick will deign to download one of my favorite songs and actually like it; a few that stand out are Donovan’s “Sunny Goodge Street,” the Stones’ “Paint It Black” and Marty Robbins’ “El Paso.” But mostly, even though we each have fairly extensive music collections, there’s a lot of humoring going on. He’ll give me a Lightning Bolt album, and I’ll listen to it once and think it sucks, much to his chagrin. I’ll counter with the Pogues’ Rum, Sodomy and the Lash—and really, how could anyone not go nuts over that classic!—and he’ll shrug it off with a “not bad, although the sound’s kind of primitive.” So then I’ll tell him to get cracking on his Latin homework.

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