i'd always suspected it, but it wasn't clear until this morning when rick santorum said that the president was "what a snob!" in wanting everyone to go to college. my dad wanted all his kids to go to college, but that was because he was such a snob. it's not like he sacrificed everything in order to start a good career instead of pursuing a baseball career. no, he got my mom pregnant when she was 16 so he could be a snob and not play baseball semi-professionally and instead make enough money to pay for his kids to go to snobby college and be brainwashed by liberal college snobby professors. snob!
well, julie joined the army because she wanted to see the world; jess got an athletic scholarship; jack dabbled in guitar and drugs, quit the drugs, became a devout christian and remains a phenomenal guitar player to these ears, which actually means something, believe it or not (you may or may not recall that i happen to be a regular snobby mcsnobbington when it comes to music); al walked on his college football team and got a full ride the next year. so far so good, right?
then there's me, snobert e. litist jr., off to new york city to study music and such, the son of the son of a farmer, who didn't own the land they farmed because lemuel marlow was tighter than a snare drum. (see, dad married up when he married mom; her family spread the wealth insofar as iowa farmland could be considered wealth.)
what's... cute, for lack of a better word, is that dad would've agreed that not evertybody should go to college, because not everyone can get into college. he would've noted that college is a merit-based concern, that, indeed, those not going to college fulfill valuable roles in the non-academic sphere as well as in it. but i don't think that's what our friend rick meant. i think he meant that people who go to college are liberal drones sent there to be inculcated by liberal teachers so that they accept things without question. except for when the college sort of teaches them to question everything. so now i'm confused.
dad also would've noted how european rick's notion of higher education is, that those that don't get in get sent to trade schools to learn screendoor repair and mouth breathing. so now i'm confused.
i guess that the only thing i can be sure about is that my dad was a european elitist snob with no money until he had money to send his kids to college and was only happy when we were? as long as we were snobs about it all? yet taught us that education was a privilege, even if we couldn't spell it, which meant we needed to be...snobs about it?
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I'd like to think our dads knew each other, because they had everything in common, except my dad was pretty terrible at sports.
(a) I am not half the man your father was.
(b) I'm watching this singing show tonight. We're at about one for five so far on basic listenability, and the judges appear to have spent the year wrecking their brains in a crackhouse. Steve Tyler singing the anthem at the AFC playoffs, and he's still showing his men-who-look-like-old-lesbians face as a judge of music talent. Amazing.
(c) Rick Santorum is a monster, sleaze in a sweater-vest, a televangelist without the charisma.
(d) Was there something about movies on the other night?
Yep. Used to be that college was considered "the American Dream"and one of those things your parents were thrilled to do for you, Although then after you went and had different tastes in things they called you snobby and sometimes they were right. And sometimes it was just different, and they wondered whether alienating you from their values was good. And they decided it was, and in our middle age we all got along. But the desire to send your kids to a place where they could learn not to be coal miners or factory workers, but to aspire to something else, that was not "snobbery."
Rick's just pointing out that he, too, went to college (albeit shitty ones) and learned just about nuttin'. Never worked as a lawyer, despite the law school, never questioned anything told to him by a priest if his mom told him not to. Dear God I hate that man.
I love you guys.
All of you.
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