How would Ginsberg have put it? There is no arrogance to claiming 'the best minds of my generation;' we all have fine minds, it's just how we use them.

My thoughts are again provoked by a thoughtful author, Nicholas Carr, of a thoughtful book, The Shallows, and one can hope it's not too late.

I saw, in a generation slightly younger than mine, a bipolar ability to gather information and handle it in a sophisticated way and yet to be untouched by it all. The world came available to their fingertips via the Internet. Communications became instantaneous, and they grew to expect it, not just in certain situations, but everywhere. Bipolar, I say, because at the same time, full of information, it seemed that whatever could be garnered through careful thought and converted into substance and moral fiber and conviction--things ruminated on--had with them very little traction. In one door, out the other, with a blindness toward holding on. (Bipolar, I use, I guess, to describe the odd connection with one the one hand lots of information, and, on the other, no meaning that sticks.) Yes, they could certainly talk the talk, and grasp issues, but like parroting automatons, there was a great disconnect, and a real dimwittedness that followed about being able to distinguish who was real and who was good sounding fluff. And we can blame the pervasive reach marketing has in our lives, preaching that all things are the same, just that some are more promoted into some form of dominance and popularity. "Oh, it causes obesity and cancer? Who cares... buy it anyway, everyone else is." The political candidate become a celebrity, antics to be voted for on the basis of popular behaviors.

So, though it would sound very much like they could grasp time-honored stuff like the Golden Rule, or a sympathy toward their fellow earthly beings, when called to implement such things into action and sentiment of the kind carried through, one found a complete disconnect. For them, it seemed, the idea had been found, and having held it for two seconds, it could then be put away, effectively glossed over, as they went looking for the next little thing that caught their eye. All information, be it a statistic on dog-catchers, to a celebrity's latest habits, on up to the Beatitudes, was all the same shit, the same distant matter in a cubbyhole.

How to act around such a crowd? It's as if you're speaking a foreign language to them. Occasionally a twinkle of understanding, but a lot of blank wall.

Yes, and maybe they looked at me as some slow bumbling peasant-type, off on his walks, while they looked at glowing screens and worked on stuff that would lead to their own selfish successes, not caring about things any deeper.

One has to protect his self-confidence, to not begin to think that he himself is the problem. Yes, one has to take things very carefully.

One is reminded of how people of a certain time not far from our own looked at Lincoln, obsessed as they were about the fresh issues of commerce, expansion and slavery's powerful economic benefits, things like the Missouri Compromise. He even admitted to being slow, and just about everything ever observed about him was concurrent evidence. And here was Lincoln, in the midst of these issues, and some people had this wise intuition, it seems, about him, advancing the prairie lawyer along to a Presidency. Here was a man, in great contrast to the omnipresent 'present,' sat and stood back and thought, and went down deeply to the very root of an issue. He had this crazy idea about carrying on a conviction, and tried to do his best by it, not letting it be compromised or conveniently forgotten. All men are created equal, and endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, and here we are, a nation dedicated to the principle of liberty.

Yes, he was slow for his time too. As if he were completely ignoring the issues at hand, invoking something far away and ethereal to daily practical matters.

Lincoln, to invoke him now, seems to smack of delusions of grandeur. Over that, though, he would have had a fine chuckle, and then told us to not worry about that and just keep going on ahead.

Lincoln might have anticipated a tyranny of the majority, to be held at bay through the courage to be a moral being.

I don't know how much hope one can have though. We created a totalitarian economy, enabled it, fed it, didn't think anything of it, and now it rides us, demands our own minds to be enslaved to its technology.