Chris Hedges’ book Empire of Illusion was lent to me by T.B. and I finished it on this last day of anno domini 2009. Hedges is not a happy man. In this book, subtitled “The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” Hedges records the demise of the American Empire and its crushing devolution into the celebrity culture, the hyping of know-nothingism, the rapacity of the corporate economy, and the sleaze of pornography. T.B. cautioned me against reading Hedges’ chapter on pornography, and the first few pages of it convinced me to take his advice. Hedges is in serious need of an increase in his Prozac dosage, but his record of the swift decline of our culture, while decidedly over-the-top, was entirely appropriate to my final reading for the end of a decade where humanity endured, but did not prevail.
Last Day
On a more positive note, I had been given, by E. as a Christmas present, the collection of essays What the Dog Saw by Malcolm Gladwell, one of my favorite writers. Last week David Brooks awarded Gladwell a Sidney, the annual David Brooks award for magazine essays. Gladwell is always fascinating and perhaps criticized as not a deep thinker, he is an out of the box thinker and never fails to provoke thought and amazement. Brooks wrote that some critics assault Gladwell as “being too interesting and not theoretical enough. This is absurd. Gladwell’s pieces in The New Yorker are always worth reading.” I read several of the pieces and indeed they are worth reading. How any writer can learn and convey so much from an essay on ketchup of all things is nothing short of astounding.
Brooks himself is always worth reading and he also reminded me of some websites I had visited before and have neglected and some he helped me discover. “Fortunately there are a few Web sites that provide daily links to the best that is thought and said. Arts and Letters Daily is the center of high-toned linkage on the Web. The Browser is a trans-Atlantic site with a superb eye for the interesting and the profound. Book Forum has a more academic feel, but it is also worth a daily read.”
The Arts and Letters Daily led me to a Kevin Carey article about college Pell grants http://www.democracyjournal.org/that_old_college_lie.html , which are so often wasted those colleges and their students, perhaps better called customers, who teach and seek higher education as some form of job training, and endeavor that generally ends in failure. Carey does regard the best of universities as truly worthwhile, however the costs are shameful. Graduate tuition and living expense at Princeton is more than $55,000 for a year. Carey says, “At the trend-setting high end of the market, higher education has become a luxury good, the educational equivalent of a Prada shoe. These are unusually nice shoes, of course, just as Harvard is an unusually good university. But in both cases consumers aren’t paying for quality alone–they’re also paying extra for scarcity and a prominent brand name, the primary value of which is to signal to the rest of the world that they’re rich and connected enough to pay the price.” Harvard is like Prada. I like that, it was worth reading.
Two Strikes 