My students will miss the Great Books culture when it's over. I'm sure of that; they'll be wrong to, but the ignorance of their children will stun them after they take a hatchet to the common core ideas of Lionel and Jacques.
But all one has to do is look at the students, only ten years my junior, to see a future when rock music is thought equal to Beethoven, science fiction equal to Shakespeare, while movies and television are what pass for great literature.
Such is the way of progress: there is no progress without regress, without trial and error, without millions dying for it and no progress if we keep going with this common core of Western books that refuses to include any writers east of Athens and Petersburg.
I look at my students, I see the coming terrible crisis, and I feel the only teacher in America who welcomes it. I don't just welcome it, I relish it. This Western-centric core deserves to die and it is precisely the populism of these students that will kill it: the long hair, the lack of hygiene, the long discursions on The Beatles and Who, the drugs, the willingness to be intoxicated in class, the resolute refusal to self-improve, the desire to see authoritarianism in every standard, this is the generation of nihilism the world desperately needs. It is a generation that will destroy the West for all time and endow the rest of the world a chance to become the elite class from which they're eternally excluded.
I teach the way I think any great teacher would: what else can I do? It is neither my job nor my ability to start the revolution for which I long, yet it will come, the readiness is all.
In a mere ten years I see the difference between my peers' quality and my students: my peers all seemed slum raised Jews or Jews' friends and neighbors, terrified of poverty, terrified of debt, terrified of return to the conditions of their parents, committed to achievement, committed to social mobility, committed to self-improvement and Bildung and Wissenschaft, seizing what was always theirs by right as whites, and their character was formidable enough to stretch to zenith any country shrewd enough to assimilate them. Today's students, Jew and gentile alike, are products of their parents GI bill and the suburbs, inevitably middle class at least, unaware of poverty's terrors, indolent, spoiled and rebellious yet completely unaware of that against which they rebel. What can this be but a trajectory that will continue my entire lifetime and long else besides?
Whispers are afoot that students are planning protests for something they've termed 'Gym Crow.' Columbia is building the gym that displaces... how many? A hundred? A thousand? Morningside Heights becomes yet another neighborhood to displace the indigenous of New York to margins so that whites can live unimpeded: the irony being that no whites will want to move in. Why distance yourself one mile from the urban element when you can put forty miles between you? Construction continues apace for neighborhoods nobody wants. Manhattan will eventually become a ghost city: a fourth house for the superclass: its skyscrapers occupied merely by corporations, Chinese food, black box theaters, highways and urban renewal projects that remain pristine because nobody lives in them.
Meanwhile the students: I know I should treat them as individuals, each with their own soul and journey, but who can look at these hundreds against hundreds and not see two undifferentiated masses. At least the pro-war demonstrators are open about their narcissism, the anti-war demonstrators clothe their carnal desire and quest for fame in a performance of care that shifts no attention to any but themselves. The anti-Vietnam demonstrations put not a single eye upon Vietnam, only upon the demonstrators. It ought go without saying that not a single one would show up to protest were there no danger of the draft. These great revolutionaries are the same spoiled American generation as any other: akin perhaps to the post-Napoleon romantics of Germany and England but with worse music and poetry. All the romantics did was provoke the reactionaries of 1848, all this generation will do is provoke Repub... need I really say it?
It will be a turbulent few years, but I simply can't imagine the edifice of civilization crumbling from the rocks of these gag revolutionaries. It can't crumble from them, it can simply atrophy as they lazily dismantle what their parents built, careless brick by brick until the edifice unintentionally falls in their dotage. Say what you will about Stalin and Lenin, they were committed to their praxis. These revolutionaries are the epitome of the white shelter, and after college they will return home to it: secure as or more than their parents that their cup in life runneth over.
Nevertheless, I fall somewhere between amused and delighted when one of the few students who deigns to notice me on the quads tells me that my kind is obsolete, that they will dispense with me, that I am r 'the establishment', proverbially called 'the man' to to be overthrown. Sadly, if they overthrow me it won't be until spring, when the gold-barred prison that is university grows uninterruptedly passionate from a schoolyear's momentum.
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