Here’a s provocative article at the Imaginative Conservative about Steve Jobs. It’s not so much about Jobs or Apple as it is about the Smug (which is similar to the Smog) that has been choking us for a few generations. For instance …… California … it was a place people moved to get more money and better weather, and where being the first one on the block to recycle, or get a fancy car, was more important than staying married and taking care of your kids, let alone showing common decency.
And
Jobs was, frankly, spoiled rotten. The family even let him “drop out” of church after their Lutheran pastor didn’t have a satisfactory answer when he asked the usual “if there is a God, how could He let x horrible thing happen”, [a] question kids who think they are bright often ask. This wasn’t a good time for religion, of course. Too many religious leaders were unwilling or unable to respond to newly questioning parishioners, or were themselves ideological nutcases. And too many parents were mostly going through the motions. Even many of those who still went to church would have been happy with a drive through mass. Small wonder so many of their children stopped bothering altogether.
And having just seen my son graduate from college – where the student speaker assured us all that the only things that distinguished us from apes were our jaws and our bipedialism (of course, apes don’t use the word “bipedalism”. They say, “standing on two feet”.) – still the article shows that things could be much worse, though this is common enough …
I taught for a year at the college he [Jobs] attended for a year. Red sorry, Reed College in Portland, Oregon is one of those places where students dress in black to show how depressing it is to be young and well-off; lots of Volvos in the parking lot when I was there. And the drug culture remained. By my second semester at Reed several students had overdosed on illegal drugs. When the President, a “good” leftie from Oberlin, decided to take the minimal action of proposing a faculty resolution decrying the self-destructive behavior, he was in for a surprise. At first I thought the principal opposition speaker was a bag lady. It turned out she was just some English professor in a poncho. She was nearly in tears as she argued that “we” could not hope to engage productively with students if we began with such a “superior attitude.” The resolution failed by an overwhelming margin.
And not only the article is worth reading in full, so is at least one of the comments …
