Sad News

Nothing really to criticize here, just upsetting to see a great player in any sport get removed from the game before it was time.

A call to arms from Kariya as he bows out, as well, flatly decrying the state of discipline for head shots in the NHL. And rightfully so - - this is coming from a man who had 20% brain function last year do to (mostly) unnecessary and flagrant hits. 20% brain function.

Get it together, Bettman, et al.

A Guy With Interests in Ethanol Shamelessly Defends Ethanol

It's like people aren't even trying anymore. You used to have to do a quick google search to find out which pocket your columnist was in - - now it's right there at the end of the article:

Christjansen is president of the Indiana Ethanol Producers Association.

Ok. Let's hear what Mr. Christjansen has to say about his paycheck.

Imagine if today we had a viable alternative to gasoline; an affordable, proven and domestic fuel that cleaned our air while creating American jobs.

Someone invented a more affordable hydropowered engine? Are we using, like, liquid oxygen now? Or did someone invent that fictional engine from Atlas Shrugged that generates power from the static electricity in the air? Is air the fuel? Sweet! The future is now!

Imagine next that Congress, while doing the bidding of friends in Big Oil, conspired to kill that fuel in order to maintain the status quo and our failed energy policy that guarantees big profits for oil companies.

Bastards!

This is the reality that ethanol faces. With so many rumors and untruths, it is crucial to get the facts straight.

GASP! I DID NOT SEE THAT COMING!

Ethanol is the only viable domestic alternative to gasoline,

Let me stop you right there. I know you're about to go on and talk about how much corn we have and how we can produce ethanol cheaply and all that jazz. A few points first.

1) We have plenty of other fuel options. Many of them are "viable." I know you will make the case that ethanol is the most affordable, and you will be wrong. More on that in a second.

2) Why do we have so much extra corn in the first place? Perhaps it's because we're telling and paying people to needlessly grow it. As this NYT article points out, by subsidizing the cost of corn, the aforementioned in-the-pocket-of-Big-Oil Congress has artificially inflated the demand for corn, driving supply up to the point that the US is the #1 supplier of corn TO THE ENTIRE WORLD (40% of the total production comes from the US). Which is not a bad thing considering how many starving people there are in China/India/whichever country your Mom used to admonish you for not clearing your plate. Bottom line, we're producing more corn than the market demands, buying it at artificially inflated prices, and essentially giving it away to the rest of the world.

3) We're not even giving it away to the rest of the world anymore. From the same article above, 40% of American corn must go to ethanol production, per legislation in 2005 and 2007. So how exactly is Congress protecting the status quo by killing the corn subsidy? Seems like they're doing the opposite of that.

Christjansen goes on to talk about Indiana's corn production and its role in all of this. Skip ahead, skip ahead.

Ethanol accounts for nearly 10 percent of our fuel supply in a country that uses approximately 400 million gallons of gasoline per day. With the cost of oil over $100 a barrel, ethanol costs Big Oil more than $120 million per day in lost sales. Since it is more inexpensive than gasoline, ethanol helps to bring down the price of fuel at the pump for consumers. According to one Iowa State University study, ethanol reduced wholesale gasoline prices by $1.37 per gallon in 2010 in the Midwestern region.

This is mularky. Are you honestly trying to tell me that a mere 10% of the oil supply, was enough to bring down the whole sale cost of gas by over a dollar. If the average price of gas was $2.726 at that time, you're telling me that ethanol, which accounts for 10% of the overall market, brought down prices by almost 50%?! You, and the corn-choked state that put out that study, are lying.

Also, according to the Renewable Fuels Association, the US can presently produce 7 billion gallons of ethanol a year, or a little more than 1.9 million gallons per day. So, America's corn farmers would not be nearly as impacted by this change as Christjansen posits. Unless we were importing ethanol from other countries to which we had shipped corn for ethanol production, and we're not.

The sudden halt in ethanol production, accounting for additional imports, increased transportation costs, and lack of additional oil refining capacity, could cause gasoline prices to rise by as much as 92 percent, according to the same Iowa State study -- which at today's prices could mean gas eclipsing a staggering $7 per gallon.

Again, I call shenanigans. Sure, the price of gas could rise over $7 a gallon, and it could do that for any number of catastrophic and unforseen reasons (tornados in Missouri drove prices up across the Midwest for almost all of June, for instace). But, this is, again, ridiculous. The vast majority of Americans do not use gasoline with ethanol in it.

Two final points:

Hoosier families are tired of high gas prices and pinching pennies while their monthly budgets are being controlled by the whims of shahs and dictators in the Middle East and oil companies reap billions.

Gas prices are already high. How is ethanol going to help this in the future if any ethanol fuel source must be mixed with actual gasoline?

And it must be mixed with gasoline to combat the lie that people like Christjansen will tell you:

[Ethanol] cleaned our air.

Nope, it did the opposite. Ethanol produces almost twice as much smog-inducing carbon monoxide as gasoline. So...it distorts domestic markets, pollutes our air, (potentially) ruins our farmland by driving us towards the less-sustainable one-crop landscape we're currently seeing in the Midwest, and does absolutely nothing to help bring down the price of gasoline, which is as much controlled by Mideast supply decisions as it is by domestic oil commodities speculators.

But if you ask the dude who needs ethanol to sign his paychecks, this shit is like butta.

A BCS Conference Commissioner Weighs In

Listen, you little pea-brained shit. You wanna pay college atheltes? Fine! Just make the numbers work and I'd be glad to. Do you know how much money it would take to give each athlete from a high-profile sport a salary each month for simple things like groceries and clothes and to relieve him/her of the feeling s/he had to steal or cheat the system simply to get by? Yeah, I don't know either. I pay people to shop for me, so I have very little idea of the market value of basic foodstuffs. A dozen eggs is like $20 right? $50? Either way, we're talking about a lot of money.

And where do you think that money will come from? Huh, chump? That's right - - my wallet. You're just gonna rob my kids of their allowances and their goose down duvet inserts so that some back-up running back future millionaire at Colorado State can buy pork rinds?

It can't happen. I wish it could. There's just not enough money. I'm sorry, there isn't. I don't know where it's all gone. But we just can't make the numbers work.

Fair and Balanced

That's what we are here at SI. Fair. And balanced.

And always ready for someone to stick it to someone we've already roasted. We're that, too.

Mo Diplomas, No Problems.

It is all too infrequent that an author's hypocrisy is a matter of public record, so this was an opportunity I had to seize.

"College athletes shouldn't be paid" by Douglas M. Gottlieb.

At first blush, this doesn't seem to be all that ridiculous. A man with an insider's perspective can give us some great insider knowledge about what's going on in the inner-workings of the NCAA, where record profits just seem to disappear. So this post on ESPN's Insider page might be worth reading. (If you can't tell, I despise the over-use of the term insider at ESPN).

While there is a sudden clamoring for universities to pay their players, I feel otherwise based on my time as a student athlete and even after I left campus.

Hold up there, sparky! Which campus are you talking about? I thought I remembered that you went to a few different schools.

Oklahoma State welcomed me after my issues at Notre Dame. I don't think OSU would have accepted me from junior college, if not for my athletic prowess.

OK, so that's Notre Dame, then JuCo, then OK State? Man Notre Dame is kind of a storied program, you were starting as a freshman, and your team showed some promise. Why did you leave?

Oh! Now I remember! You were accused of stealing your roommate's credit cards and charging $900 to them! And then you were expelled.

Why would you do such a thing? Was money hard to come by while you were a student athlete? Why would you play if you weren't getting any benefits?

While college players are not paid directly, they receive a tremendous amount of benefits that aid them during, and after, their time on campus.

Oh.

It starts with "comped" campus visits in high school and continues with tutoring, preferred class registration, choice housing arrangements and, of course, the ability to walk away with a degree and without an ounce of debt to your name.

Sure, that's a lot of benefits. I guess that paid for food and clothes, too? No? How about trips to the movies or drinks or Tamagachis or bandaids or a mattress pad or ANYTHING YOU NEED TO BUY WITH ANY FORM OF CURRENCY?!

Oh, you get none of that? Makes sense that somebody (anybody) might steal credit cards or sell jerseys and memorabilia to get a tradeable commodity for the purchase of other goods. In fact, that could probably be easily predicted by the entire compendium of human existence.

I am not claiming that athletes don't get a bunch of benefits, but when the March Madness alone brings in $613 million in revenue, you could give a kid some gas money (for the car that a booster bought him, of course).

While we're on the topic, what other sorts of benefits do college athletes get?

When you play big-time basketball or football, people want to hire you. You are a known commodity and, like the colleges, businesses too would like to profit from your presence -- and compensate you in kind.

Sure. If you can read and write. Say, you know where gobs of college athletes come from? Areas of destitution where roughly 50% of students graduate from high school and those who do graduate will, on average, perform at an 8th grade level.

But let's say you come from the inner city, you get into college on the back of astounding athletic ability and you stick it out for four years. Gottlieb is right that you'll have a degree that you more than likely wouldn't have attained otherwise (assuming of course that your ticket to college didn't itself pull you out of all those valuable classes and the degree you're now holding wasn't actually just a token of time served but an actual, meaningful symbol of your earned academic prowess over your time at the university).

But then he keeps going...

We so massively undervalue a college degree -- which can lead to increased earning potential in the professional world -- and overestimate the value of a couple of hundred dollars per month while in college, which may end up getting taxed anyway.

First, college degrees are dropping in value, because, compared to 50 years ago, a much much higher percentage of Americans are graduating from college. Many think that we may be at the peak of a higher education bubble.

And again, the same fatal flaw as before: Your degree, regardless of its value, is a deferred benefit. That doesn't get you shit in the here and now. And, though there are plenty of loans available, that means you're not leaving debt free as Gottlieb and others so often claim.

But it all comes to a head for me with this point:

The payoff is in the end, after school, much like the future doctors, scientists and businessmen and women with whom you attend school. College is about sacrificing, learning and growing as a person. The reward for all students is the memories and experiences gained in the short term and benefiting from them in the long run.

Yeah, college seems like a real sacrifice for most students. What with the partying and the indiscriminate sex and the long hours of sleeping and the nothing-that-resembles-the-working-world. I would HATE to do college for the rest of my life. Talk about a drag!

And in what fucking way is the (imagined) illiterate-but-monstrous back-up defensive tackle from rural Mississippi on a Big XII football team the same as an aspiring brain surgeon from Westchester, NY?! Are you out of your goddamned mind, Gottlieb?!

Sure, there will be a payoff if you're one of the elite athletes in college athletics. But if you're not - - or worse, if you were an elite athlete who rode that into college and you get injured - - you better unlace your cleats and grab hold of your ankles, because when the NCAA is done milking you for every penny, the rest of your Eat Shit And Choke Life is going to make you remember where you came from.

Unless of course you take the easy way out and steal credit cards.

A Nagging Issue

This has bothered me for a long time and I finally did something about it at work today. Every year we seem to be floored by the newest "highest grossing movie ever." Simultaneously, the price of a movie ticket (and the price of everything else) keeps going up. This is not a coincidence.

I'm sure that others have assembled lists of the highest-grossing movies of all time that have been adjusted for inflation, but most of the ones I've seen have only adjusted for inflation based on movie ticket prices, which I don't think tells the whole story. Regardless, the rankings we always hear reported are undoubtedly in nominal dollars. To wit, from Wikipedia:


(Sorry the table is messed up, Blogger and I don't agree on formatting sometimes)

Top 50 Movies by Gross Nominal Box Office

1 Avatar $2,783,165,628 (2009)
2 Titanic $1,843,201,268 (1997)
3 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King $1,119,110,941 (2003)
4 Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest $1,066,179,725 (2006)
5 Toy Story 3 $1,063,165,731 (2010)
6 Alice in Wonderland $1,024,299,801 (2010)
7 The Dark Knight $1,001,921,825 (2008)
8 Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone $974,733,550 (2001)
9 Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End $963,420,425 (2007)
10 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 $954,501,070 (2010)
11 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix $938,212,738 (2007)
12 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince $933,959,197 (2009)
13 The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers $925,282,504 (2002)
14 Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace $924,317,558 (1999)
15 Shrek 2 $919,838,758 (2004)
16 Jurassic Park $914,691,118 (1993)
17 Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides $907,423,683 (2011)
18 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire $895,921,036 (2005)
19 Spider-Man 3 $890,871,626 (2007)
20 Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs $886,686,817 (2009)
21 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets $878,643,482 (2002)
22 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring $870,761,744 (2001)
23 Finding Nemo $867,893,978 (2003)
24 Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith $848,754,768 (2005)
25 Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen $836,297,228 (2009)
26 Inception $823,576,195 (2010)
27 Spider-Man $821,708,551 (2002)
28 Independence Day $817,400,891 (1996)
29 Shrek the Third $798,958,162 (2007)
30 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban $795,634,070 (2004)
31 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial $792,910,554 (1982)
32 Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull $786,636,033 (2008)
33 The Lion King $783,841,776 (1994)
34 Spider-Man 2 $783,766,341 (2004)
35 Star Wars $775,398,007 (1977)
36 2012 $769,304,749 (2009)
37 The Da Vinci Code $758,239,851 (2006)
38 Shrek Forever After $752,600,867 (2010)
39 The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe $745,011,272 (2005)
40 The Matrix Reloaded $742,128,461 (2003)
41 Up $731,342,744 (2009)
42 The Twilight Saga: New Moon $709,711,008 (2009)
43 Transformers $709,709,780 (2007)
44 The Twilight Saga: Eclipse $698,491,347 (2010)
45 Forrest Gump $677,387,716 (1994)
46 The Sixth Sense $672,806,292 (1999)
47 Ice Age: The Meltdown $655,388,158 (2006)
48 Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl $654,264,015 (2003)
49 Star Wars Episode II: Attack of the Clones $649,398,328 (2002)
50 Kung Fu Panda $631,744,560 (2008)

The average year of release from this list is 2004. The median year? 2006. So, in other words, if we look at box office lists in nominal terms, without accounting for rising costs due to the natural forces of inflation, the vast majority of the most (financially) successful movies have been made in the last decade.

But instinctively, you know this is wrong. You know that some of the most successful (read: financially and otherwise) movies were made decades ago; many of which will never be surpassed in importance. You also know that costs have gone up in the last decade since the release of the first installment in the LOTR series (#22 above) and even more so since E.T. came out in 1982 (#31). So isn't it much more impressive that these movies are able to make it as high up on the list when they're climbing uphill against the forces of economics?

Yes. It is.

So I compiled a new list, adjusted for inflation (based on the Consumer Price Index) so that everything is according to 2005 USD. However, some very successful but older movies were obviously trounced so hard by recent nominal dollars that they didn't make the Top 50 above and simply rearranging that list won't give us an objective ranking.

To account for this, I turned back to my head researcher (read: Wikipedia) and looked at the highest-grossing movie for each individual year, adjusted those to $2005 as well, and merged them into the list. I realize this isn't perfect as it doesn't account for years in which two movies were very financially successful, but there's only so much of the day to burn through at work. Apologies.


Top 50 Movies by Gross Real (2005 USD) Box Office

1 Gone with the Wind $4,599,729,414 (1939)
2 Bambi $2,760,032,508 (1942)
3 Avatar $2,520,298,495 (2009)
4 Titanic $2,169,748,403 (1997)
5 Star Wars $2,067,728,019 (1977)
6 The Exorcist $1,604,478,032 (1973)
7 Jaws $1,445,938,556 (1975)
8 The Sound of Music $1,436,818,705 (1965)
9 E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial $1,435,132,224 (1982)
10 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King $1,185,247,766 (2003)
11 Jurassic Park $1,165,508,560 (1993)
12 The Empire Strikes Back $1,143,775,371 (1980)
13 One Hundred and One Dalmatians $1,142,826,967 (1961)
14 Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace $1,060,362,003 (1999)
15 Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone $1,049,017,551 (2001)
16 Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest $1,030,922,186 (2006)
17 The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers $1,000,413,563 (2002)
18 Grease $985,735,418 (1978)
19 The Jungle Book $980,674,664 (1967)
20 Independence Day $979,862,013 (1996)
21 The Lion King $978,090,562 (1994)
22 Pinocchio $968,438,701 (1940)
23 The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring $956,986,201 (2001)
24 Toy Story 3 $955,482,817 (2010)
25 Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets $949,987,547 (2002)
26 Shrek 2 $949,854,149 (2004)
27 Shrek the Third $940,504,016 (2007)
28 The Godfather $930,396,397 (1972)
29 Alice in Wonderland $920,553,429 (2010)
30 The Dark Knight $919,363,025 (2008)
31 Finding Nemo $919,184,472 (2003)
32 Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End $904,280,482 (2007)
33 Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire $895,921,036 (2005)
34 Spider-Man $888,429,615 (2002)
35 Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix $880,620,178 (2007)
36 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 1 $857,824,274 (2010)
37 Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith $848,754,768 (2005)
38 Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince $845,747,711 (2009)
39 Forrest Gump $845,255,448 (1994)
40 Spider-Man 3 $836,185,119 (2007)
41 Return of the Jedi $823,693,095 (1983)
42 Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban $821,596,520 (2004)
43 Spider-Man 2 $809,341,533 (2004)
44 Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides $804,810,362 (2011)
45 Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs $802,940,158 (2009)
46 The Matrix Reloaded $785,986,508 (2003)
47 The Sixth Sense $771,832,387 (1999)
48 Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen $757,309,814 (2009)
49 The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe $745,011,272 (2005)
50 Raiders of the Lost Ark $742,874,597 (1981)

Average release year for this list backs up a decade to 1993. Median release is 2002. Though this is still far to the modern side of the movie-making timeline, that weighting is understandable due to the relatively recent invention of the Summer Blockbuster and the latest binge on high-budget (broad-base, large-profit) comic book films, let alone new ways of raising even more revenue, namely IMAX theaters and 3-D and digital projection premiums. Again, I suspect this average year would creep back into the past even further if I were to incorporate more than just the highest-earning film from any given year (though it is also possible that the new revenue streams I just mentioned would account for this and even things out).

Things that I like about this new list:
-It certainly gives you a better idea of cinematic quality in addition to financial success. Of the Top 10 films in the inflation-adjusted list, only Bambi wasn't nominated for Best Picture. Only 4 of the Nominal Top 10 were nominated (due in part to the utter domination of the Harry Potter series). The extent to which the Academy actually determines cinematic quality will be left un-debated at this time.

-It knocked Transformers down dozens of needed pegs.

-Raiders of the Lost Ark sneaks on.

-I, at least, get a better understanding of the societal impact of some of these movies. I have never thought Gone With the Wind was as good as everyone else thought, but you can begin to tell how important a movie it was for its time. The average income in the US in 1939 was less than $20,000, a gallon of gas cost 10 cents, and GWtW pulled in almost $4.6 billion?! I find this so astounding that I doubt the numbers on Wikipedia, but to the best of my knowledge, those are box office receipts and not all-time revenue.

-The Godfather also makes it on. How its usual absence hasn't provoked another baptism scene is beyond me.

-This is also a good reminder about monetary value, generally. Too often, political discourse fails to point out the impact of inflation as it pertains to everything from the debt and deficit to public sector salaries to the price of a gallon of gas. I think this is an intuitive way to realize the impact of changing conditions when making comparisons across time.

Things that I don't like about this list:
-Transformers is still on the list.


I'm sure there are many more interesting observations that can be pulled out of here, but I don't have the time to analyze now. I might check back on it later. In the meantime, perhaps creating two lists of some of the more successful movies of all time will result in some much-needed search traffic and welcome analysis from others.

American Exceptionalism

There is no such thing as American Exceptionalism, at least not right now. I'll probably never win a Republican nomination for anything now, but it had to be said. For the last few years, demagogues and political agitators on the right have been repeating the chorus that America and Americans are great simply because of where they are from. It's this line of thinking that has fucked our country, and while there may be short term fixes, nothing has been done to stop the underlying decline of American society.

In the early nineteenth century many of the elements of the nascent American society were vastly different from the rest of the world. And America was better. The United States liberated itself from the colonial system before anyone else; as South America, Africa, and most of Asia were struggling under European domination, the United States was growing, fueled by innovations that the rest of the world was unable to pursue.

As steam power and the seeds of industrialization were taking root in the United States, the rest of the world was struggling to emerge from chaos. Europe was consistently embroiled in continent-wide warfare and revolution, South and Central America were struggling for independence, and Africa and Asia were still being stripped of their resources and ravaged by European colonizers. As progress was stagnate in the rest of the world, America alone drove forward, taming a continent, harvesting its resources, and reinvesting those resources to propel further development. By the start of the twentieth century, the United States had essentially established hegemony over the Western Hemisphere, and was poised to overtake and dominate Western Europe.

Of course things were not perfect, and travesties like slavery continue to be a blight on American history. But seemingly all of America's flaws were met by people pushing for progress and improvements, not only for themselves, but for others. Abolitionist and suffrage movements worked to undo two of the most heinous forms of discrimination the US has ever seen. Frederick Douglass, Abraham Lincoln, and Susan B. Anthony have all been immortalized for the work they did to give others a better life.

With such a fast and dramatic rise to power, it's difficult not to assume some degree of American Exceptionalism so, starting with de Toqueville, that's what people did. They saw that America was different, recognizing the absence of extremism and divisiveness in American politics, that America had limited the role of religions in society, and that feudalism and aristocracies had been replaced by a society that permitted, and even encouraged, upward mobility. In looking at the United States, nineteenth century observers saw a haven for immigrants, a country that offered opportunities to people from all over the globe, integrated them into society, and benefited enormously from their contributions. Knowledge and education were admired and sought; without them, the United States would not have been at the forefront of innovation for such a long time. Edison, Bell, Einstein and the Wright Brothers are all products of this. In the nineteenth century, America was exceptional; not inherently so, but because its people did exceptional things.

This continued into the twentieth century, as America became the most dominant nation on the planet. Fascism, Communism, and Japanese Imperialism all fell to American innovation, manufacturing, and technology. Enormous strides were made in the fields of genetics and computer science. Nuclear power was developed and harnessed. Shit, over forty years ago we put Americans on the moon; no one else has even tried since.

Unfortunately, in recent years America has ceased to be exceptional, because Americans have stopped trying to be exceptional. Instead of trying to be great, people are now trying to star in Teen Mom. The attributes that first made the United States great are largely absent now.

While American politics are not nearly as radicalized as in some other countries, we're rapidly trending in that direction. Compromise and conversation are being replaced by a terrifying polarization, and moderate voices are being drowned out by greedy, attention-starved politicians and their shouts of incitement to ever-more-extreme political bases.

The Establishment Clause is slowly becoming a relic of the eighteenth century, as Christians are trying to integrate their dogma with the American government. More and more schools across the country are teaching Intelligent Design in science classes, at the expense of actual science. Freedoms are being inhibited because of a sentence in the book of Leviticus and the nebulous, borderline hilarious (and very recent) concept of the sanctity of marriage.

For really the first time in American history, an aristocracy has emerged, headed by corporations (they're people now!) and their enablers, who don't see their rampaging greed as a flaw. This aristocracy, from both sides of the aisle, is shaping the nation's agenda for its own benefit and entrenchment; wealth is being concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the middle class is disappearing, and the idea of upward mobility is being transformed from a dream to an impossibility.

Immigrants are no longer seen as a resource; as fences go up and nativism surges, new ideas are not given a chance to contribute anything of value. Hatred and fear of outsiders have sharply curbed the benefits we can derive from them; people all over the world still want to come to America, and we're turning them, and the progress they might bring, away.

While racism was never fully driven out of American culture, it seems to have experienced a revival in the last few years. For the first time in almost 250 years, the President of the United States is an African American; while this is unquestionably progress on the path to racial equality, the backsliding that has accompanied Obama's election is far from encouraging. No white President ever had to endure such a sizable minority of the country doubting that he was really American, or insinuating that he was secretly a Muslim (and who cares if he is?). All three branches of government have been complicit in the widespread discrimination against Muslims in the last ten years.

Those problems, this failing of American Exceptionalism, are almost entirely the result of decisions made by those who have already had their moment in the spotlight. The much greater problem, and the reason that America is, at best, decades away from recapturing any sort of exceptionalism, is the coming generations. Kids are fucking stupid, and at times is seems like that is encouraged. Vast portions of the country have embraced an anti-intellectual attitude; I cannot think of a worse way to decide who to vote for than "who would I rather have a beer with." Sarah Palin, who isn't even competent to be a student government president, and other politicians have ridden this wave of ignorance to political prominence and celebrity.

Fortunately in the case of Palin, but unfortunately in the case of millions of young people all over the country, most people are drawn much more towards the trappings of celebrity than having a prominent position in society based on achievement. People strive for fame as its own end, rather than the byproduct of an actual accomplishment. A century ago, the Wright Brothers became famous for inventing the airplane. Today, Paris Hilton is famous for having a rich grandfather and blowing some guy in night vision. We're doing things backwards; Neil deGrasse Tyson should be a household name, and Kim Kardashian shouldn't be. But NASA's budget is minuscule and shrinking, teachers everywhere are being laid off, and engineering jobs are being outsourced, not because foreign engineers are cheaper, but because they're smarter. America is falling behind so many countries, even some developing countries, in math and science. Coupled with drastic reductions in arts education, pretty soon we're not going to be good at anything.

As bleak as this looks, American Exceptionalism isn't dead, just dormant, and it can be revived. But that won't happen if people continue to see it as a birthright; America will only be exceptional again if people realize, like Americans 200 years ago did, that exceptionalism is something that needs to be earned. But who wants to do that while The Jersey Shore is on?