THIS IS WAR!

There's a war going on. No, not that one. The bloodless one here at home in which the stakes are not about security as much as style. The style of a culture which has lately replaced Mozart with Rap, Shakespeare with Disney, Steinbeck with Twitter, and Rodin with billboards. Is this simply cultural evolution or a whiff of extinction...?

Some of the battlefields are the college classrooms, the professional journals, the New York Times best seller list, and Charlie Rose. There's where effort and elegance still combine to speak to a style that has long made the American culture a continuing burst of the best. Now, however, our best is often Blackberries, iPhones, iPods and iPads whose priorities are essentially process more than product. Shorter, faster, cuter.

It's grossly predictable that one generation should rally to its style over that of the next. However, this war is more than generational. It's foundational. Its battle lines criss-cross almost every field of human endeavor -- from how we write, speak, compose, paint, dress and eat, to how we explain our very body and being. You've heard of total-war...? Right now we're so totally engulfed in so much so fast that we're likely to become not simply more but actually different. To emerge as that "new human" each generation is always projecting, but never quite realizing.

Change of course is nothing new in the affairs of our species. Today, however, change has changed! The culture is exploding exponentially to the whoosh of more new facts, feelings, functions and furies than ever before in the history of humanity. Not only have the limits of our brain circuitry been reached, so also our capacity to navigate this whoosh.

The young see visions, the old dream dreams. Either way, we have all been scooped up in this rush of changing reality. What to save...? What to discard...? What to blend...? Do we even have the time or inclination to ask...?

This much I know. From Beethoven to Tony Bennett to my old bathrobe, some things belong on this battlefield with me....