Ian Frazer empathizes in Mother Jones, May/June 2001:

I am a few years younger, but I belong to the same generation as W. Bush and Quayle. I know how many classes we skipped, how much we partied, how much TV we watched. I have a generational sense of the vacancy in their state because I share it. I myself don't know what I am doing a good forty percent of the time. I am now the kind of white-haired, thick-waisted, superficially presentable male who people give responsibility to and ask directions of on the street. And often I'm just making it up. The situation is one I've become quite familiar with—I'm asked a question, no answer presents itself in my brain, and I begin to answer anyway. My mouth moves and words come out, propelled perhaps by pure syntax or by momentum of language, while I watch from a distance, as curious as anybody to hear what I'm going to say. And somehow words do emerge, and my listeners somehow accept them as an answer representing thought and knowledge, and I alone, apparently, know that no thought or knowledge was involved.

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