"I think you overstate the case."
That would be nice.
"To an element of our society, as illustrated by Hollyweird today and the gangsta-rap bling-bling culture, those schmoes are heroes. But only to an element of our society."
It's easy for a person to get a distorted picture, but I work with a bunch of younger people, all college graduates, some Americans, Australians, Englanders, Gaynadians...trying to have a discussion with them is like talking with people who have lived their lives in caves.
Just this morning we were talking about the Sopranos, and I brought up Hannah Arendt (blank looks) describing Adolf Eichmann (blank looks) as representing "the Banality of Evil" (looks so blank I wondered if I had given them a hernia of the frontal lobes).
I mentioned Walter Mitty (blank looks). I used the phrase "hoist with my own petard" (blank looks). I mentioned that the movie "10 Things I Hate About You" was a ripoff of "Taming of the Shrew" (never heard of it).
I said to one of them, "Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?" (Do what?) Fulda Gap (never heard of it). Bay of Pigs (heard of it, but no idea what it was about or what happened). Douglas MacArthur's father Arthur (never heard of him). The Spanish didn't completely throw the mooselimbs out of Spain until 1492 (amazement). American Indians practiced slavery (No!). Audie Murphy? Never heard of him.
Casablanca? 12 O'Clock High? High Noon? Treasure of the Sierra Madre? From Here to Eternity? Fergit it. And don't even get me started on the books they never even heard of.
Their schools may have taught them to think, though I doubt it, but their schools certainly didn't give them anything to think *about*.
They don't know how many people there are in congress. They don't know how many Supreme Court justices there are, nor do they recognize their names when I bring them up.
I passed around the book, "Cultural Literacy," and the only response I got was, "Man, I don't know *any* of that stuff."
They are functional morons, and yet they are convinced that they are among the best and the brightest. The frightening thing is that they may be.
A chilling post. Especially since teaching kids "to think" no longer retains any elements of logic.
Allen Bloom, isn't that? Same cat wrote The Closing of the American Mind?
I have both those books on shelves somewhere or other. Haven't read them since soon after they came out, but both stuck in my mind; at least the theses did.
I have young friends who are as wilfully ignorant as your co-workers; and yet I know other young people that seek and read the great works of Western Civilisation. I suspect that the latter are a minority, and that they have always been a minority.
Yes, the officers of the British Expeditionary Force in France in 1917 could all chart out Latin cases and knew their way around the classics, as could the women of their class. But the great bulk of the soldiery could not, and yet the British Empire was at its historic peak.
No doubt, some prissy academic wannabee of the day could have looked at the music-hall entertainments of the troops and pronounced the collapse of the English language then, at the very time some of the finest and most moving poetry in this tongue was being written.
d.o.l.
criminal number 18f