So, Willard Was An English Major

You really have hand to the wingnut conservatives. It seems like every time they come up with a certain mantra they can relentlessly repeat in the media in an attempt to thwart popular dissent in any given area, reality almost always seems to rear its ugly head and makes a mockery out of their words. Not that this cows them in any way, mind you. It's just that after it happens often enough you would think that even the movement's dimwitted followers would finally catch on that they are being conned.

As everyone knows, for the past year or so student loan debt and the inability of most recent college graduates to find good jobs has become a very prominent issue in the national conversation. The conservatives have tried to counter the public's growing concern that young adults are being systemically crippled financially before they even have a chance to get started in life by doing what they do so well: blaming the victim. One of the ways this is being done is to chide college students for studying "worthless" degrees like music, art, history, political science, communications, philosophy and English. Supposedly, it is the students' fault for being so daft as to enter a field of study for which there will be few jobs waiting for them when they graduate.

It's exactly the kind of line that sells really well with the selfish old fuckers who make up the majority of Republican Party's base--just another version of the "these kids today got no respect" bullshit that selfish old fuckers have been peddling ever since modern medicine advanced to the point where it allowed enough selfish younger people to live to become selfish old fuckers and affect the outcome of elections. It is, of course, absolute crap. Notwithstanding the fact that there IS value in studying for knowledge's sake rather than to earn a buck later, prior to 2008 the economy never had any trouble absorbing all of those art and liberal arts majors once they graduated. It was the economic crisis created by the greedy elite scumbags who run Wall Street and corporate America, not the students' choice of majors, that created this crisis.

So lo and behold, along comes the most unlikely poster child to prove that the conservative line blaming the students for choosing unprofitable majors is complete bullshit: former Massachusetts Governor and Wall Street titan Willard Mitt Romney himself. On Friday, at a speech at Otterbein University in Ohio, Romney not only admitted he was an English major, but advised English majors that their best option was to go to graduate school. So much for the ridiculous conservative notion that you can't make any money after studying in the liberal arts.

What Romney's example really shows, of course, is that it hardly matters WHAT you choose to study just so long as you are born with silver spoon shoved up your ass into a well connected family. Romney's success on Wall Street and in politics has nothing whatsoever to do with his college major and everything to do with the fact that his father was Chairman of the old American Motors Corporation, Governor of Michigan and a presidential cabinet secretary. In that regard, he is no different from President George Bush the Lesser, who may have been a business major, but actually was a "C" student, a draft dodger, a drunk, a coke head and an all around fuck up who kept getting second chances in life because of the family he was born into.

Nevertheless, I am fairly certain that this latest example of blatant hypocrisy won't slow down the conservative propaganda machine one damn bit. As long as there are plenty of selfish old fuckers out there who are happy to have someone tell them that they should not at all feel guilty about how young adults today are getting boned by a system that is now hopelessly broken, the bullshit will just keep piling up until one day it engulfs us all.


Bonus: They want more