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Be Cool, You Fool!

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If You’re in College, and You’re Uncool, You’re Nowhere

If You’re in College, and You’re Uncool, You’re Nowhere

When I work Sundays the last five or six weeks of tax season, I always break my workday in two. The high-rise where my accounting firm is located does not run air-conditioning on Sundays, with the result that the oxygen level gets pretty well depleted. So I usually take a four-to-six mile walk around the UCLA area, eat lunch in the UCLA student union, and shop at the UCLA bookstore, returning to work around one in the afternoon.

The Ackerman Union has several chain restaurant outlets and a number of TV monitors that are kept tuned to mtvU, where the programming seems (on Sundays anyhow) to be all music videos.

If these music videos have a message, it is: If you’re not cool, you’re nothing—the Twenty Teens’ equivalent of the Beatles’ Nowhere Man. Everyone in a rock music video is always dressed in the just-right casual style, like the group shown above. Nowhere is seen anything as forbidden as a book, an older person, or a work of classical music. (is it because these are all associated with Schoolwork?)

In the world of music videos, all that matters is looking right and making all the cool moves to impress one’s peers. The peer group is everything, to the exclusion of all else. It almost verges on the tribal.

Can It Get Worse?

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Yesterday’s Villains Can’t Hold a Candle to Today’s

Yesterday’s Villains Can’t Hold a Candle to Today’s

My first presidential election was in November 1968. Not coincidentally, that was the election that put Richard M. Nixon into his first term in the White House. Did I vote for Nixon? No, my ballot went to the Rev. Otto Schlumpf for President (write-in) and Dick Gregory for Vice President. Now, I can’t even find Schlumpf on the Internet, let alone Wikipedia. On the plus side, I now begin to appreciate some of Nixon’s accomplishments in office.

My political life has been bedeviled with Republicans from the very start. Could things get any worse? The answer is (as usual), yes! After I told all my friends that I would move to Canada is Ronald Reagan got elected President, he got in and stayed for two terms. What do I think of Reagan now? He has improved somewhat in my books; though I still think he was a very flawed President.

Could things get any worse? Yes, indeedy, after eight years of Clinton, we got the worst of them all—at least so far—George W. Bush. At the moment, I still can’t think of anything good to say about this man. Will I ever? I doubt it.

Could things get any worse? I’m afraid so. In 2016, we elect another President, and I have no idea at the present moment wither America’s vast psychoses will lead us. Will it be some Tea Party hack like Rand Paul or Ted Cruz? Or will we get another Obama-like respite until the next lunatic leader? (It seems that the lunatics get worse every ten or twenty years.)

The American voter is certainly no smarter than he or she was in 2000, 1980, 1960, or just about whenever. What troubles me most is that television has not only led to the dumbing-down of the American voter, but it has made all of us more susceptible to distorted electioneering tactics employed by big corporations and their political hirelings.

What is the likelihood that American voters will view attempts to influence their vote via TV with increasing skepticism? Not too good, I’m afraid.

If Books and Reading Are Important to You …

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... Then You Belong Here!

… Then You Belong Here!

After dinner, most people repair to their television sets and begin the process of becoming one with their couches or La-Z-Boys while a host of pundits, would-be stars and celebrities, and announcers with expensive hair-dos fill the hours of their lives with … noise. Just noise. Nothing much else but noise.

What I do after dinner is sit in my library and read. And you can track all the books I read by visiting my website at Goodreads.Com. There you can obtain my own personal review of every book I read. Right now, I am reading two short Fyodor Dostoevski novels, Poor Folk and A Little Hero. When I am finished, you can see the review.

Generally, I read between eight and twelve books a month, depending mostly on their length, The whole first half of January was taken up with Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, which was worth the trouble at any length.

There is an excellent New York Times article on Goodreads.Com, which you can bring up by clicking here.

Some people say that the reading of books as an activity is dying. No, I do not think so. I think that people who don’t read are finding a way to kill off their brains. Every hour in front of a TV set kills off several hundred brain cells. Every hour reading a good book stimulates your brain cells and—most especially—your imagination.