Silent Sunsets

Last Friday evening I was standing on the sidelines of a Little League game in North Baltimore, immersed in a delightful conversation with another parent, when, despite the noisy whir of rush-hour traffic just beyond the confines of the field, an 11-year-old hit a baseball with a crack so clear you knew it was heading toward an undefended gap in the other team's defense. The sun, about an hour before its quick disappearance, was brilliant, and I could feel the burn on my forehead and cheeks but couldn't care less. My friend, a British gentleman whose talented son is both a teammate and classmate of my own, interrupted his reverie about this particular moment of urban beauty to point out a cluster of adults gabbing on their cellphones and ignoring the contest.

"I'm not a technophobe," he said, repeating a refrain one hears with increasing frequency in the 21st century, as if the stigma of not being familiar with the latest iPod version was the equal of smoking a cigarette in public. "But you'd think these people might sit back, watch their kids play ball and just relax."

As it happened, the father of the youngster who tripled in that inning wasn't far away, barking orders into his cell, presumably to his wife or au pair, about making sure the pizza arrived at exactly the moment they returned home. A Domino's pie, no less. This vaguely creepy fellow not only missed his son's prodigious hit, but also the wild cheers of the team as their slugger slid safely into third.

This led to a conversation about a New York Times news story the day before on the subject of cellphone restrictions in the city's schools and the reporter's quotes from infuriated parents. Elissa Gootman wrote, "Cellphones are the urban parent's umbilical cord, the lifeline connecting them to children on buses, emerging from subways, crisscrossing boroughs and traipsing through unknown neighborhoods." Gootman spoke to Lindsay Walt, an artist (but of course), whose sixth-grader attends the Salk School of Science, about this latest obstacle to complete control. "The chancellor will have civil disobedience on his hands," she said. "No one in New York is going to let their child go to school without a cellphone."

Except maybe the parents-a collective group that would dwarf Woodstock Nation-who can't afford cellphones.

A Times editorial on April 28, "The Cellphone Wars," took the middle ground, arguing that of course cellphones are a necessity, but the Dept. of Education officials are correct to ban their use inside school buildings during class hours. "The teachers and administrators are the best judges of what rules would work. But there has to be a way to maintain discipline without severing the communication links between young people and the parents who constantly worry about where they are and what they are doing."

I have nothing against cells, especially since they're not as clunky as when first introduced in the '90s, and our family uses one on many occasions. My younger son, 11, has lobbied for his own cell for a year now (along with a debit card, which cracks me up); his older brother, 13, prefers communication by computer and can't tell the difference between a dial tone and a busy signal.

But the obvious question is, if Lindsay Walt's complaint is widespread-that no parent can send kids to school without cells-how in the world did families communicate as recently as the 1980s? It's not as if the city is far more dangerous now, as crime doesn't compare to the last days of the Ed Koch regime and David Dinkins' abysmal one term as mayor. Going back a few years more, New York, while vibrant and exhilarating as ever, was really chaotic in the '70s. Somehow, without cellphones, parents were able to keep tabs on their kids.

The point here is that cells are a welcome convenience that are relatively new to society, like the Web and quickly-released DVDs, but not a necessity. That the Times chose to even editorialize on this fairly minuscule controversy is just another indication that in the constant discussion about class division and "warfare"-which the paper has reported and editorialized extensively upon-the guardians of high-minded "upmarket" journalism have sided with the "haves," and ignored the "have-nots."

Come to think of it, maybe the Times editorialists have finally abandoned all pretenses of not catering to an exclusively elite audience. An April 29 edit-a reasonable pro-immigration blurb-used language that wouldn't have appeared in that space even 10 years ago. "Whether [the May 1] protests stumble or soar, participants should strive to avoid damaging their worthy cause. Boycotts and walkouts could cause many struggling workers to lose their jobs, send students the wrong message about the importance of education, give the Minutemen and talk-show morons a chance to strut and preen, and unnerve and embolden the lawmakers who are itching for a simple crackdown."

(A backlash might also lead to the deportation of countless housekeepers and nannies employed by Times workers.)

This colorful prose is fine by me-I can think of any number of "morons" who pollute the airwaves and newsprint in the country, and Frank Rich is just one example-but this is a real leap from a paper that's traditionally been so rigid in its stylebook that long-forgotten entertainer Meat Loaf was once referred to as "Mr. Loaf."

Back to reading, writing and computer science. The other day I had a long conversation with a journalist in Chicago and the subjected drifted to the spotty record of the Times' alleged conservative columnist David Brooks. I said, repeating an old, but true, canard, that Brooks is engaged in a valiant effort to become this generation's Gail Sheehy, with his nauseating sociology, examining suburban Americans as if they were ladybugs. This was lost on my friend: not the criticism of Brooks, but the comparison to the odious Sheehy, a wrecking-ball author he wasn't familiar with. No small wonder, since this extremely bright fellow isn't yet 40 years of age.

Anyway, Brooks, going back to his dry well, wrote on April 30 that life imitates high school. Now that's an original theory! Good golly, I wrote about the very same idea 30 years ago and certainly wasn't the first to do so. Brooks said, "College is still probably a good idea, but everything you need to know about America you can learn in high school. For example, if you want to understand American class structure you'd be misled if you read Marx, but you'd understand it perfectly if you look around a high school cafeteria."

I'm sure Brooks will suggest to his own children that college isn't a necessity, and that perhaps they should ditch higher education and find themselves, maybe tacking along with Nicholas Kristof on one of his humanitarian jaunts. There's no need to recount Brooks' ruminations on jocks, nerds and geeks, and the adults they develop into, since his concluding sentence says it all. "The central message, though, is that we never escape our high school selves. Vote for Pedro."

Hey, cool, Brooks is familiar with Napoleon Dynamite!