I've thrown around an idea between some loyal (and similar-thinking) friends of mine for an article that I'm thinking of freelancing, to see if I can't prove to myself that I'll be able to achieve some sort of financial independence with my sheer talent once I throw aside this college bullshit (which should happen sometime in my junior year, after all the film classes). The idea is pretty god damn good: the death (or irrelevence) of the modern American counterculture.
The idea came to me one day while I was sitting through an oceanography lecture (required for natural science 'General Education Requirements') with 450 other people, thinking about the impotence of what I was experiencing. I thought to myself, "Do I really need to know this shit? And if I do, why isn't it more god damn efficient? Hasn't anyone thought this through?" Of course they have, I knew, but because they are unfeeling robots who are byproducts of the collegiate system that exists today, they're in no real hurry to correct it.
That led me to a sort of a thorough rethinking of just what I was paying seven thousand fucking dollars per year to sit through. Why should I, as an English major, be required to take natural science classes to graduate? It's not as though I'll need to know ocean depth or the positioning of the stars, or fucking chemistry in my day to day career when I'm through with school. Has not anybody had this epiphany? I've been taking natural science classes since I was five fucking years old all the way through high school - that's thirteen years; will twelve extra credits really mean that much? College is so much about mind control these days and so little about personal discovery and intellectual stimulation. It's become such a formal, structured Cold War Education - sit down, shut up, do what you're told - or as I've come to call it, the "high rise education" - one thing built on top of another, instead of spread around to all corners of the brain. Everything is a system, a matrix, in this new college world. There's no individualism; everyone is just someone else in the 450-person lecture ampitheater. It's all conformism and populist nonsense.
That was the original idea for the article: the death of the collegiate experience; the tremendous and terrible shift from what it once was in the 1960s, the hub of political idealism - the sit-ins, the demonstrations, the faculty strikes - to the hub of the money-driven modern Conservative ideology. Business is the most popular major. Engineering is popular, and I can attest to this, among retards who couldn't change a lightbulb without an instruction manual and a wet cloth to hurt themselves with. Cash, rather than self-fulfillment, is the modern version of the university. It's all that god damn Nixon/Reagan moral majority militant religious conservativism absolute skullfuckery - that's where it started, and it has precipitated down to its current state.
And it's racial too. Ho fucking boy is it racial. Think of the makeup of your modern university. Most of the black people make up the fucking athletic scholarships. Is it any wonder that more and more employers are requiring college degrees, when minorities make up such a small percentage of the modern university? Jesus Christ, if you said yes, you're fucking stupid.
That article alone, with solid research and a great deal of interview time, is worth twenty, maybe thirty pages, and could be a very fine stand-alone piece. But then I sort of saw that the college issue was simply part of a larger issue: the death of the countercultural movement in general. Modern culture has stagnated. It began with the brainwashing of the Reagan administration after the irrelevance of the Carter administration, and then in the Clinton years the country was so prosperous that it was never on our minds, and we faded into a media-driven, lactating stupor. And now, in the age of lies, torture, and murder, when it's needed the most, it's gone. Vanished. No more. Evanesced into thin fucking air.
The university situation is just one of the problems. It's probably the largest, which is why I thought of it first. There's also the influence of the media. In the earliest days of the counterculture (the fifties), there was Edward R Murrow, who took on government bullshit face-to-face, and defeated it. Ruined it. Absofuckinglutely destroyed it, and got a media award named after him. Then there was Cronkite, a man who never lied. And Woodward and Bernstein. Woodward's still trying, but he's getting lost in the woodwork (one Celebrity Jeopardy appearance not withstanding). The media was a truth-seeking missile, a bullet in the heart of government corruption. Even the six-o'clock news was quality journalism (even if a fucking puppet did the weather around here).
But now the media is just as fucked as the schools. Just like them, driven by money starting in the 80s. The rise of Entertainment. Entertainment Tonight. Entertainment Weekly. Entertainment Bullshit. Media conglamerates started popping up in the Reagan economies (there's that name again - god damn it!) and began to buy the news. To change it. The dollar. The dollar. The fucking dollar. Even in our newspaper. With the rise of the dollar, so too the rise of sensationalism. Anything to get the viewer. Anything to get the ratings. Anything to get the dollar. News declined. Sensationalism sprouted like a thousand-thorned wilting rose, a shadow of what it once was. Africanized killer bees. What the fuck was that shit about? And now the media has descended to the very bottom of its barrel. Reality television. The E! channel. Britney Fucking Spears, every day on my god damn television. Where once people got outraged at their politicians, got passionate at their idealism, now they're outraged at Lindsay Lohan, passionate about Britney Spears. Is it any wonder that MTV sprouted in 1981, the same year Reagan took the Oath - good fucking god, there he is again!) The media's priorities changed, rearranged, and quashed all honor and ideal in this vast, ugly enterprise that has replaced the journalistic world.
I'm thinking the decline of music, too. (Jesus, you can tell where I got stoned - right there towards the top of that last paragraph. You can see it.) The fall of some political music, like the hippy protest songs and neo-folk of the sixties. The media marketization of other brands - punk, metal, rap (in the case of Rage Against the Machine, the combination of all three) - that also had significant political influence in the American counterculture. MTV. MTfuckingV. And all the ugliness it's borne. Modern pop radio, repetetive nonsense. Mind-rending. It's encouraged the national conformity more than anything else, really. Dress like a rapper. Dress like a pop star. Listen to this music or be an outcast, and nobody likes outcasts. Rolling Stone, what has become of you?
I have a three-page outline of the college angle. There's no way the article could be published as a whole; not a chance in hell. It would have to be spread out, a series of three or four (I could probably write an entire article on Reagan's influence in the downfall of American culture), and I don't know what kind of publication would commit to something so long and risky from someone so young. And I can't wait until I'm, say, 26 to write it, because almost the entire collegiate angle would be wiped out by sheer evolution. And I plan to be out of college before 22, after all the film classes, and probably move out West to California to seek my fortune in the hills. Gold, I tells ya! So the whole thing will probably be worthless; in all likelihood (which is still a slim fucking pickle), if I get any at all published it would be the collegiate piece, because it's an angle that hasn't really ever been taken, and because it would be much more effective coming from a college-age kid (whose been there - no offense, Garrett).
I just needed a place to vent the idea, and maybe someone here will pick up on the idea. Also, because people on this site tend to know people, and there have to be plenty of publishing connections out there. In the olden days, you could pitch the idea to Rolling Stone, and they'd be plenty open to those kinds of freelance pieces, but now they're not even in fucking San Francisco anymore, but New York - the capitalist pig capital of the world - and have completely eradicated all their old policies in favor of the same media/celebrity drivel that's attributed to the very concept I'd be indicting. Dr Thompson used to look over these types of ideas, but he's dead. So even though I haven't written a single lick of this fucking beast, I think the idea is certainly worth pitching, and would be mighty thankful if someone out there knew someone and passed on the idea (if not the blog itself - I give permission). I have a strong feeling that shit like this is going to finance by living while I try desperately to get into the filmmaking business, and ideas like this, if done properly, could provide mucho dinero to put me through. But, if anything, the blog was worth just venting and putting this idea into some kind of concrete existence, rather than simply being jumbled around in my head.
Jesus Christ, that 8th paragraph got me so fucking stoned.
The idea came to me one day while I was sitting through an oceanography lecture (required for natural science 'General Education Requirements') with 450 other people, thinking about the impotence of what I was experiencing. I thought to myself, "Do I really need to know this shit? And if I do, why isn't it more god damn efficient? Hasn't anyone thought this through?" Of course they have, I knew, but because they are unfeeling robots who are byproducts of the collegiate system that exists today, they're in no real hurry to correct it.
That led me to a sort of a thorough rethinking of just what I was paying seven thousand fucking dollars per year to sit through. Why should I, as an English major, be required to take natural science classes to graduate? It's not as though I'll need to know ocean depth or the positioning of the stars, or fucking chemistry in my day to day career when I'm through with school. Has not anybody had this epiphany? I've been taking natural science classes since I was five fucking years old all the way through high school - that's thirteen years; will twelve extra credits really mean that much? College is so much about mind control these days and so little about personal discovery and intellectual stimulation. It's become such a formal, structured Cold War Education - sit down, shut up, do what you're told - or as I've come to call it, the "high rise education" - one thing built on top of another, instead of spread around to all corners of the brain. Everything is a system, a matrix, in this new college world. There's no individualism; everyone is just someone else in the 450-person lecture ampitheater. It's all conformism and populist nonsense.
That was the original idea for the article: the death of the collegiate experience; the tremendous and terrible shift from what it once was in the 1960s, the hub of political idealism - the sit-ins, the demonstrations, the faculty strikes - to the hub of the money-driven modern Conservative ideology. Business is the most popular major. Engineering is popular, and I can attest to this, among retards who couldn't change a lightbulb without an instruction manual and a wet cloth to hurt themselves with. Cash, rather than self-fulfillment, is the modern version of the university. It's all that god damn Nixon/Reagan moral majority militant religious conservativism absolute skullfuckery - that's where it started, and it has precipitated down to its current state.
And it's racial too. Ho fucking boy is it racial. Think of the makeup of your modern university. Most of the black people make up the fucking athletic scholarships. Is it any wonder that more and more employers are requiring college degrees, when minorities make up such a small percentage of the modern university? Jesus Christ, if you said yes, you're fucking stupid.
That article alone, with solid research and a great deal of interview time, is worth twenty, maybe thirty pages, and could be a very fine stand-alone piece. But then I sort of saw that the college issue was simply part of a larger issue: the death of the countercultural movement in general. Modern culture has stagnated. It began with the brainwashing of the Reagan administration after the irrelevance of the Carter administration, and then in the Clinton years the country was so prosperous that it was never on our minds, and we faded into a media-driven, lactating stupor. And now, in the age of lies, torture, and murder, when it's needed the most, it's gone. Vanished. No more. Evanesced into thin fucking air.
The university situation is just one of the problems. It's probably the largest, which is why I thought of it first. There's also the influence of the media. In the earliest days of the counterculture (the fifties), there was Edward R Murrow, who took on government bullshit face-to-face, and defeated it. Ruined it. Absofuckinglutely destroyed it, and got a media award named after him. Then there was Cronkite, a man who never lied. And Woodward and Bernstein. Woodward's still trying, but he's getting lost in the woodwork (one Celebrity Jeopardy appearance not withstanding). The media was a truth-seeking missile, a bullet in the heart of government corruption. Even the six-o'clock news was quality journalism (even if a fucking puppet did the weather around here).
But now the media is just as fucked as the schools. Just like them, driven by money starting in the 80s. The rise of Entertainment. Entertainment Tonight. Entertainment Weekly. Entertainment Bullshit. Media conglamerates started popping up in the Reagan economies (there's that name again - god damn it!) and began to buy the news. To change it. The dollar. The dollar. The fucking dollar. Even in our newspaper. With the rise of the dollar, so too the rise of sensationalism. Anything to get the viewer. Anything to get the ratings. Anything to get the dollar. News declined. Sensationalism sprouted like a thousand-thorned wilting rose, a shadow of what it once was. Africanized killer bees. What the fuck was that shit about? And now the media has descended to the very bottom of its barrel. Reality television. The E! channel. Britney Fucking Spears, every day on my god damn television. Where once people got outraged at their politicians, got passionate at their idealism, now they're outraged at Lindsay Lohan, passionate about Britney Spears. Is it any wonder that MTV sprouted in 1981, the same year Reagan took the Oath - good fucking god, there he is again!) The media's priorities changed, rearranged, and quashed all honor and ideal in this vast, ugly enterprise that has replaced the journalistic world.
I'm thinking the decline of music, too. (Jesus, you can tell where I got stoned - right there towards the top of that last paragraph. You can see it.) The fall of some political music, like the hippy protest songs and neo-folk of the sixties. The media marketization of other brands - punk, metal, rap (in the case of Rage Against the Machine, the combination of all three) - that also had significant political influence in the American counterculture. MTV. MTfuckingV. And all the ugliness it's borne. Modern pop radio, repetetive nonsense. Mind-rending. It's encouraged the national conformity more than anything else, really. Dress like a rapper. Dress like a pop star. Listen to this music or be an outcast, and nobody likes outcasts. Rolling Stone, what has become of you?
I have a three-page outline of the college angle. There's no way the article could be published as a whole; not a chance in hell. It would have to be spread out, a series of three or four (I could probably write an entire article on Reagan's influence in the downfall of American culture), and I don't know what kind of publication would commit to something so long and risky from someone so young. And I can't wait until I'm, say, 26 to write it, because almost the entire collegiate angle would be wiped out by sheer evolution. And I plan to be out of college before 22, after all the film classes, and probably move out West to California to seek my fortune in the hills. Gold, I tells ya! So the whole thing will probably be worthless; in all likelihood (which is still a slim fucking pickle), if I get any at all published it would be the collegiate piece, because it's an angle that hasn't really ever been taken, and because it would be much more effective coming from a college-age kid (whose been there - no offense, Garrett).
I just needed a place to vent the idea, and maybe someone here will pick up on the idea. Also, because people on this site tend to know people, and there have to be plenty of publishing connections out there. In the olden days, you could pitch the idea to Rolling Stone, and they'd be plenty open to those kinds of freelance pieces, but now they're not even in fucking San Francisco anymore, but New York - the capitalist pig capital of the world - and have completely eradicated all their old policies in favor of the same media/celebrity drivel that's attributed to the very concept I'd be indicting. Dr Thompson used to look over these types of ideas, but he's dead. So even though I haven't written a single lick of this fucking beast, I think the idea is certainly worth pitching, and would be mighty thankful if someone out there knew someone and passed on the idea (if not the blog itself - I give permission). I have a strong feeling that shit like this is going to finance by living while I try desperately to get into the filmmaking business, and ideas like this, if done properly, could provide mucho dinero to put me through. But, if anything, the blog was worth just venting and putting this idea into some kind of concrete existence, rather than simply being jumbled around in my head.
Jesus Christ, that 8th paragraph got me so fucking stoned.
VIEW 5 of 5 COMMENTS
archaneus:
I know exactly what you mean. I have had many similar thoughts recently just haven't been able to organize them all into the cohesive mass you just did. I sit in my Gen. Ed. classes about useless bullshit like Holistics(doesn't even deserve to be taught as it's all speculative fiction) and wonder why in the hell I'm even in college. I came to participate in the free flow of ideas. I wanted to hear about new ideas and meet people with contrary dispositions similar to my own. Most of all I wanted to participate in intellectual discourse. While these things do exist in very limited pockets, that's just the problem, it should be what college is all about, not something you have to scrounge for. College has become exactly what you describe, a sit down, shut up kind of experience. Whenever you question the validity of the instructor's statements you just get ignored. I'm glad that someone else sees this besides myself and I'm really glad that it was someone who can articulate the idea so well.
burmilla:
you are right.