Sitting in a coffee shop on campus with a few minutes to kill before class. Standing up to refill my cup, I see something . . . absolutely ridiculous. I don't know if you have heard of G4 TV but it's some cable channel focused on young adults. They are showing some game shop-type series with two chicks dressed up to look like a New Yorker's caricature of a trashy teenage girl: daisy dukes, midriff t-shirts, and pigtails.
This is America now. It's 11:45 on a Monday, I'm at one of our so-called "elite" institutions and the flat-screen on the wall is showing two anoxeric whores playing Marble in the Oatmeal, where they mock fight each other in a kiddy pool of porridge.
Originally I wanted this blog to be a way for me to remember and make sense of my deployment to Afghanistan. I've been afraid to write in it for the last five months and I don't know why. Maybe it has something to do with the steaming, messy pile of shit that is American culture. How can you justify what our eighteen and nineteen year-olds are going through when this is what we do with the opportunities?
There is nothing of value is what we create under the logic of profit maximization. I may want to watch some girls flailing around in oatmeal (actually, I really don't but when I was sixteen I might have) but does that justify a channel dedicated to hedonism? Is it right just because they can make a few bucks on advertising?
We are lost.
