Late-night bitterness

I'm about ready to puke with cold dread after stumbling across this book review on Salon. The book, Daniel Brooks' Trapped, bitterly stares down yet another way in which the 21st century's first wave of twenty- and thirtysomethings are being royally screwed out of another intangible privilege their middle-class parents had. The opportunity to pursue creative careers, work for the public good, or devote time and energy to political activism is trumped in so many situations by "selling out" merely to make ends meet.

The book looks mostly at Ivy grads' having to, say, take a corporate gig after trying to make it as a journalist or at a nonprofit in order to be able to afford a metro DC-area home -- boo effing hoo, right? What's more compelling, at least based on the review, is Brooks' detailing of how post-'60s conservative backlash effected ridiculous tuitions at historically cheap or free public Ivies, drove up costs at genuine Ivies astronomically, and boosted the ranks of millionaires and billionaires with tax cuts for those already reeking with wealth. According to Brooks, forty years ago, teachers, journalists, and social justice types were able to send their kids to prestigious universities without difficulty, live off of the fee for a single article for a month, or raise hell marching on Washington. Their contemporary analogues--that is, my friends and me and our ilk--are barely scraping by with nothing to show for it but exhaustion from overwork, guilt and self-loathing for making the appalling decision to choose to survive within the system than to starve outside it, and that ready-to-vomit feeling when we contemplate where we went wrong with our good grades and supportive parents and the notion, obviously idiotic now, that we could become whatever we wanted when we grew up.

The end of the review points out two groups at even worse disadvantage, veterans and illegal immigrants, who run risks far more dire (cessation of government benefits and firing or deportation) for giving the government well-deserved shit about the policies that affect them. I know I'm way more fortunate than some people and could be doing a lot more than I have been. I should be more optimistic, more defiant, but I already know that the fields I want to work in (creative journalism, music academia, arts administration) are going to be hell to break into, let alone live off of even in the childless, thrift-store-furnished future I see for myself. And some wonk Yalie adding to the dishearteningly long list of books telling me how utterly fucked I am financially and career-wise doesn't necessarily make it so. It's just such a letdown that after slogging through the muck of four years at Michigan, these are the prospects that lay before me and my fellow would-be creative warriors. Best? Maybe. Leaders? Fat fucking chance.

I can't help thinking, what a fucking lovely ideological cap to the day I applied for my first credit card -- in order to buy the computer I'm hoping to be able to use in conjunction with writing articles and designing programs.