You will enjooy THE MINDSET LISTS OF AMERICAN HISTORY: FROM TYPEWRITERS TO TEXT MESSAGES, WHAT TEN GENERATIONS THINKS IS NORMAL (Wiley, 2011), an Amazon best-seller that Brian Williams (NBC) calls "one of the highlights of the year in our newsroom!"

ROM is a blend of Ron (Nief) and Tom (McBride); it also stands for REALLY OLD MEN. ROM offers advice every Monday, Wednesday and Friday to those, young and old, baffled by the generation gap. Here are our replies to latest letters from folks who apparently agree with ROM's dictum that "Generation gaps have always needed glue." 

Chicken McNuggets have always been the new Spam. 

Dear ROM,

Although a person of a certain age I’ve gotten used to the term “spam” as meaning “junk mail” or “unsolicited and unwanted email.” But do today’s youngsters, with all their computer savvy, know about the original Spam, by which I mean the meat that helped win World War II? Please say yes. –Melba Smeal, White Muskrat Bay, Minnesota

Dear Ms. Smeal,

We wish we could say yes, and there’s little doubt that today’s young people have seen cans of Hormel’s Spam on grocery shelves in contemporary supermarkets. It’s unlikely though, that they know all the jokes about Spam during World War II. Although it was cheap and plentiful meat for the soldiers, they heartily disliked it and called it “ham that didn’t pass its physical” and “pork that lacked basic training.” It’s also not likely that today’s younger generation is aware that Spam is some blend of ham and pork, along with various other ingredients that most certainly deserve to go unmentioned. Few if any have attended the annual Spam Jam in Austin, Minnesota (though perhaps you have, coming as you do from White Muskrat Bay). Nor do they know the old Monty Python routine about the frustrations of restaurant patrons who learn that every dish on the menu is just some variation of Spam—thus the term “spam” for inferior and undesired emails that are served up anyhow.

For all their lack of knowledge about Spam, however—for all their inaccessibility to information about its associations with poverty, soldiers, Jams and British comedy groups—this generation has had its own Spam-like experience. We refer of course to Chicken McNuggets. Just as Spam does not taste like ham or pork or anything else but rather tastes like Spam, so do Chicken McNuggets not taste like chicken or any other known ingredient but taste like…Chicken McNuggets. Thus Spam and Chicken McNuggets are, like jury decisions and sausage, the sorts of things you don’t want to see being made.

The more things change, the less they really seem to change at all. (The French or maybe the Norwegians have a famous expression about this point.) Someday there may even be, parallel to the Spam Jam, an annual Gold McNuggets Week, and perhaps it will even be held in your hometown of White Muskrat Bay, although somewhere in California would likely be far more appropriate. That state is the site of the original rush for gold nuggets. Besides, out in California they sit around dreaming up such things. In Minnesota, not so much. 

The Artist has always been a great Mindset List® Movie. 

Dear ROM,

I recently saw the silent film called “The Artist,” about a silent film actor who couldn’t adapt to the talkies. Don’t you think the film is an excellent illustration of what you guys are doing with The Mindset List—portraying how new technologies leave the old behind and the young in charge? Have you seen the movie? Mary Francis Riversmith, Valley Forge, Pennsylvania

Dear Ms. Riversmith,

We have seen the movie and agree with your assessment. We noted that the new start of the “talkies” in about 1930 was a young woman while the cast-aside silent star was probably twenty years older. The old must make way for the young, the talkies star says; and the silent star, soon to become a nobody, bitterly agrees with her. That’s the way it always is: the old get out of the way for the young to take their places. This was true before, but new technology supplies it with an extra, often sour, edge.

The old silent star was too proud and (as he later said) “stupid” to give up on silent movies, and tried to keep making them long after the public yen for them had collapsed. Older people are frequently scared by new technology but use their false pride to cover up their anxiety. We can recall the elderly in our hometown making outlandish claims; one of them, addicted to the past, said that “Mr. Keene, Tracer of Lost Persons” (a hokey 1940s radio show) was better than “I Love Lucy.” This was stubborn hubris of the highest order.

And in “The Artist” the old silent actor was right in another of his remarks: when the talkies were new, it wasn’t a matter of hearing a star talk but of seeing him do so. Actors’ voices, gestures, and close-ups in the moving picture had to mesh: image and sound had to play together. If not, these actors had no future in the movies. One actor, John Gilbert, was an accomplished silent star—great at movement and mugging and grace—but had a squeaky voice that went better with a rusty door on its hinges than with any swashbuckling movements or lithe dances. He never recovered his career. He was ruined by sound.

New technologies call for new skills. Those who could never master typing were done as secretaries. Those who could not adjust to comprehending anything they read on a screen could never quite use a computer. Those who looked homely, however basso or dulcet their voices, could never make it on TV. Pride about these matters might make the poorly adapted person feel better, but it didn’t make them do any better.

We had this experience as youngsters, and it prepared us for the possibility that as adults we ourselves would face new technologies to which we could not adjust. We refer to the hula-hoop. All the kids in the neighborhood were excellent at swiveling this large round metal circle, coated with plastic, around their hips. Some of them could do it for hours, or so it appeared. We could not do it for even seconds—for even one second. Have you ever, Ms. Riversmith, seen someone failing at hula hoop? If so, you know it is the most ignominious unsuccess of all.  As a result, we were cruelly unpopular among our peers, until the trend changed. We were superb at cards, especially Old Maids, so our prestige soon rocketed back to the top, and stayed there until much later when we lost thirty Super Mario Brothers contests in a row to our own teen-aged children. After that, we couldn’t get anyone to play with us any more outside of our sisters’ toddlers, whom, however, we beat handily. 

"The Morning After" has always been a pill, not a movie about nuclear terror. 

Dear ROM,

I’m a fiftyish man who has coffee every morning with my co-workers. The other day one of them mentioned that there are in fact two distinct meanings of the term “the day after,” and that one of them refers to a TV movie and the other to a pill. Do today’s young people know either of these references? Will Gladwell, Spurlock, Kansas

Dear Mr. Gladwell,

It’s rather unlikely that today’s young have much knowledge of the ABC-TV movie, which was set not far from you in the Kansas City, Missouri and Lawrence, Kansas areas. It’s a graphic study of the American Midwest the day after a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union. The television set has rarely if ever been filled with such horrific images—such as flash blindness, radiation illness, the collapse of civil society, the impossibility of growing or getting food, and even electromagnetic blocking so that autos no longer function well enough to drive down Interstate 70 (which has itself mostly vanished). The movie depressed President Reagan, who later said that the film played a role in his determination to strike a nuclear arms reduction deal with the Soviets four years later.

Today’s young, however, have almost no fear of a nuclear balance of terror. For them “the day after” refers to emergency contraceptives in pill form. This too can lead to sickness, such as nausea and vomiting, but such difficulty pales in comparison to that other “morning after.” Nonetheless, both meanings of the term suggest vital emergencies. Thus we ourselves are now going to bed early, without (for a change) having several lethal Old Fashions, so that in the morning after tonight we will have no need for our own emergency measures. After wrestling with your question--which frankly, Mr. Gladwell, brought up all sorts of unpleasantries--we think a comfortable sobriety on the next morning after is the least we deserve.  

John McCain has never played in a rock band. 

Dear ROM,

In 2008, while we were watching election coverage of the presidential race, my parents said something about how John McCain had been a member of “The Keating Five.” I replied—quite sincerely, I should add--that I had no idea that such an old guy could have once been a rocker. They laughed at me, and have been needling me about it ever since. Tell me, ROM, is this fair? –Charity Grimes, Aiken, South Carolina

Dear Ms. Grimes (Charity),

The short answer is: no, it isn’t fair. We ourselves can barely remember The Keating Five, and we are supposed to be x-spurts on the popular culture of the American past. We’ve now refreshed our memories and discovered that of the five senators accused of interfering with the regulation of a corrupt savings and loan company, four of them are now long-forgotten Democrats, while only Senator McCain remains both famous and still in the United States Senate. To be sure, though, one of the Senators was John Glenn, who was once famed for riding around in space. You’ve probably never heard of him, but it would be terribly unfair to call you ignorant. In fact, you don’t need to know the specific facts of any Congressional chicanery. You really need to recall only the words of Mark Twain: “Suppose you are a liar and suppose you are in the Congress. But I repeat myself.”

Young people your age have also been known to be astonished when they learned that “Paul McCartney used to play in this band.” They would be equally surprised to learn that doddering Senator James Bunning of Kentucky used to be an on-the-ball star pitcher in the major leagues. Jack Nicholson used to be an angst-ridden rebel on the movie screen, not just the comic Joker or retired has-been named Schmidt who drives between Omaha and Denver in a mammoth recreational vehicle. You may know George Foreman as a man who hawks barbecue grills. He used to be a boxer, and they say he was a good one, though at our age we can barely remember. There’s no cause to call you ignorant if you don’t know these things about people’s first acts in American life. Are you aware, however, that ROM (both of us) used to be celebrated ballroom dancers, in Texas and Connecticut? That was years before we became famous advice columnists. If you didn’t know that, then, well…then maybe you are ignorant.