Saturday, March 31, 2007

The Begining

Here again.

My name is, as perhaps you guess, Genial Goethe. Not the Goethe of the past, a distant relative whom you have perhaps been acquainted with, certainly not him. Rather a new character, a new form of dissent meant to either resound eternally or echo once and vanish.

So we begin.

What has happened to college today? What is actually being learned, what is being taught in these strange purgatory between childhood and the world as it really is. We come away from this place only with the knowledge that it is all meaningless. Over four years we learn to drink and obsess, nothing more. I saw this trend almost too late, saw myself be slowly consumed, slowly boiled like the ill-fated frog, by my own desires and proficiencies.

When a student leaves home they lose there old value system. It is not a sudden thing, not a gruesome amputation; it a a gradual, scarcely noticeable trend that directs the student slowly and surely away from everything that once held meaning. This guiding hand leads students through both academia and hedonism, through petty -ism's and powerless causes, through alcohol, always through alcohol, into a new nihilism - an American nihilism.

What is this nihilism you ask? Isn't it obvious? Ask yourself, what direction does a graduating senior have when they leave the gates of academia. What purpose is left? Good grades have been achieved - or they haven't. Grades are done now, excepting for the few individuals who remain in the academic world, the American nihilism will find them surely enough, just a few years later. No, those who are thrust into the world with a degree and a tassel are the one bought face to face with the true shape of this nihilism, the shape of which may be discerned through a simple commandment, one which inexorably pushed the establishment of this nation:

"Write when you find work!"

But alas, work for what? A modern student might ask.