Sunday, April 07, 2019

Varsity blues for the limousine liberals

You rarely see begging like this from Rod Dreher in "The joy of schadenfreude":
Please, please, please read the whole thing. You have to treat yourself. The friend who sent me the link said that he and his wife were taking turns reading parts of it aloud to each other. It’s that good.
He's referring to this article by Caitlin Flanagan in the Atlantic called "They had it coming" which is a great double-meaning title referring to the evident guilt of parents who cheated to get their kids into elite colleges and their overweening sense of entitlement:
Every parent assumed that whatever alchemy of good genes and good credit had gotten his child a spot at the prep school was the same one that would land him a spot at a hyper-selective college. It was true that a quarter of the class went to the Ivy League, and another quarter to places such as Stanford, MIT, and Amherst. But that still left half the class, and I was the one who had to tell their parents that they were going to have to be flexible. Before each meeting, I prepared a list of good colleges that the kid had a strong chance of getting into, but these parents didn’t want colleges their kids had a strong chance of getting into; they wanted colleges their kids didn’t have a chance in hell of getting into. A successful first meeting often consisted of walking them back from the crack pipe of Harvard to the Adderall crash of Middlebury and then scheduling a follow-up meeting to douse them with the bong water of Denison.
And, as the article reveals, anything but ASU.  This paragraph sums up the mindset:
These parents—many of them avowed Trump haters—are furious that what once belonged to them has been taken away, and they are driven mad with the need to reclaim it for their children. The changed admissions landscape at the elite colleges is the aspect of American life that doesn’t feel right to them; it’s the lost thing, the arcadia that disappeared so slowly they didn’t even realize it was happening until it was gone. They can’t believe it—they truly can’t believe it—when they realize that even the colleges they had assumed would be their child’s back-up, emergency plan probably won’t accept them. They pay thousands and thousands of dollars for untimed testing and private counselors; they scour lists of board members at colleges, looking for any possible connections; they pay for enhancing summer programs that only underscore their children’s privilege. And—as poor whites did in the years leading up to 2016—they complain about it endlessly. At every parent coffee, silent auction, dinner party, Clippers game, book club, and wine tasting, someone is bitching about admissions. And some of these parents, it turns out, haven’t just been bitching; some of them decided to go MAGA.
That's what makes this scandal so delicious.  The self-righteous types who make sartorial choices inspired by Hillary Clinton and now (probably) donate to Elizabeth "The system is rigged!" Warren are the ones doing the rigging.

2 comments:

Roger Bournival said...

God damn - imagine having to sit through Clippers games; that's punishment enough...

Anonymous said...

Meanwhile, the American Country Music Awards show on CBS just plunged 20% in the ratings, while sinking to its all-time low in Adults 18-49.

Clearly, most of the country is fed up with entitled conservative celebrities always shoving their righty culture politics down viewers’ throats in what’s supposed to be an entertainment show.