The American Dream - apparently it still requires work!!!

[Warning - *mild* rant ahead]

The NYTimes has this habit of publishing lame, hyper focused feature pieces about the various incredibly lame problems that affluent white people from the North East have to deal with.  This week is no different: a lovely 4-page article focusing on the inability of this one son of a relatively well off Boston family to find a job after graduating from a good school in 2008.  Heavens to Betsy, what a calamity!  What is the economy coming to?  Of course, maybe this is just one of those dumb but somehow moderately wealthy families who thought they had made it big in America and could afford to send their son off to college to pursue some useless degree.  I mean, the article sure makes it seem as though he were educated and perhaps even groomed to be getting an awesome job out of college - and to be honest, its not that hard: learn how to do something useful that not many other people know, like programming, or electronics. That's how our parents and grandparents made their humble fortunes, and quite honestly I would find it horribly distressing if America had sunk so far that someone with obviously useful trade skills were unable to find a job after over two years of searching.

Its amazingly telling of the bias and misdirection inherent in this article that such a crucial fact to determining the kid's ability to get a jobs, namely what he majored in, would be omitted until the third fucking page.  Way to go NYTimes - stroke the elite white liberal's limp, deflated ego-penis.  Maybe if you lie and tell them how big it is anyway the whole problem with the economy will go away?  Seriously - why else would you waste print space in what I consider an otherwise upstanding publication with a story Political Science major can't find a cushy corporate job?!?  Oh, apparently he also has a minor in history - big fucking deal!  Why didn't he stay in academia where his fucking training was?  I simply don't see how he, his parents, his grandparents, the journalist, or anyone reading the article could seriously run with this piece from start to finish and not see the horribly warped expectations.  Its honestly embarrassing - to the point where I'm tempted to go on a personal vendetta to bring as much public ridicule and shame to the Nicholson family for their utter failure to be good Americans.  These people are why America is weak and failing!  This is why China is pulling ahead of us!  Of course, I highly doubt the elite ruling class of the Boston-New York-DC suburban mega-sprawl will ever actually realize this fact - after all, China is still far behind us in terms of number of Political Science majors per-capita, and to families like the Nicholsons who manage to clear $175,000+ a year in income, said metric is obviously the only one that matters in determining a country's economic strength.

Seriously, its almost like the baby boomers are a bunch of completely unrealistic, impotent idiots.  How the fuck are they the ones with all the money and social power?

And NYTimes, if you have to go ahead and run a piece like this because somebody's daddy knows someone, don't title it "A New Generation, an Elusive American Dream".  Title it "some dumb schmuck of a kid who is apparently surprised that spending 4 years learning 'political science' didn't automatically get him a golden ticket to 75k+ out of college".  Of course, that's probably too long, so how about this: "The American Dream - apparently it still requires work".  Normally I don't get so worked up about this sort of thing, but sometimes living on the East Coast can drive me absolutely batty.  I had no idea until I came out here that rich white people could be so privileged, so entitled, so idiotic, and yet still be so glorified by community and culture of the area.  Its so shockingly insidious that after half a decade here I'm still surprised by what I see sometimes, and this article is absolutely no exception.

PS: If this offends any poli-sci students out there, go take a long hard look at yourselves and what you're doing that's useful with your lives, and then if you still feel offended go fuck yourselves.  The only respectable poli-sci, history, English, or otherwise "humanities" majors I've ever met were the ones who knew their degrees weren't going to be good for much more than wrapping around a brick and throwing at someone through a window.  And to be honest, those were coincidentally also the ones who managed to find shit to do after college.  I'm going to attribute it to their inherent goal-oriented, brick-throwing natures.