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Ron Charles, a senior editor at the Washington Post, has an op-ed in today’s paper  (“On Campus, Vampires Are Besting the Beats“) about how much the current generation of college students … well, sucks. 

They don’t read great literature, apparently. They don’t read Richard Brautigan. (Really? Richard Brautigan?) They’re not interested enough in books of poetry, or in artsy smutty (published) diaries. And this lack of interest in the printed-and-bound word is the source of their lack of interest in politics.

Or maybe it’s the other way around. It’s not clear. The piece is a mess, frankly. Examples:

• Charles doesn’t see any contradiction in quoting a prof who sniffs that today’s college students “do not have any shame about reading inferior texts” and complaining that this generation hasn’t produced its own Jerry Rubin.

• When he wants to know whether there’s any activism on the campus of today, he asks the co-editor of the Kent State literary magazine.

• He grounds his claim that students are politically disengaged by linking to a web essay whose first line is “College freshmen are more politically engaged today than at any point during the last 40 years.” 

Charles says this generation isn’t reading, or producing, radical novels or poetry — but most of the radical writers he cites are polemicists. Eldridge Cleaver, Abbie Hoffman, and Malcolm X weren’t writing novels, and Sylvia Plath, Anais Nin, and Richard Brautigan weren’t leading revolutions. (If a great political novel emerged from the ferment of the late 1960s, Charles doesn’t mention it.)

The moment that Charles is lamenting is not a moment of radicalism’s ascendance in culture, it’s a moment of counterculture’s ascendance in mass media, and of publishing’s dominance in the media mix. Is Soul On Ice a more incisive critique of American racial politics than The Wire?  Was Soul On Ice more read in its heyday than The Wire was watched when it came out a few years ago? Charles doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care. 

Charles is eager to juxtapose books with the internet, as if books and Twitter are the only two media in existence. But The Autobiography of Malcolm X wasn’t published until after Malcolm’s assassination — Malcolm didn’t get his word out through writing books, he got it out through newspapers and speeches. Abbie Hoffman did write books, but he did it for a simple reason: television and radio didn’t have a place for him, and the internet hadn’t been invented yet.

This is a core truth that passes Charles by — college students read Soul On Ice in the late 1960s because it was their only way to find out what Eldridge Cleaver was all about. They read Anais Nin because she, and writers like her, were their only source of smut. They read Jerry Rubin’s Do It! for the cartoons, and the grainy black-and-white photos of naked hippies, and because there was no way in hell that Rubin was ever going to get a chance to do his schtick on television.

Jon Stewart doesn’t exist in Charles’ conception of today’s college student’s intellectual universe. The millions of hits that political rants past and present are getting on YouTube don’t exist. Barack Obama exists — Charles mentions in passing that he’s a top selling author on American campuses — but as Meredith Sires notes, that fact seems to have left no impression on him.

We are living in an age when political discourse is more open — and more open-ended — than it’s ever been before. We are living in an age of sharply rising youth political engagement, of the production and consumption of tremendous new cultural artifacts, of the redefining of what culture is and who it’s for. But Charles can’t — or won’t — see any of it.