Concept of writing on a higher level at Rolling Stone

Well, those writers at RS who aren't old hippies, are the generation taught by the old hippies thirty years ago, or are the generation taught by the generation taught by the old hippies ten years ago.

Their powers of observation, their ability to categorize and detect similarities and distinctions, their ability to draw inferences and analogize, have all been destroyed, partly by bad education, and the rest through lack of education.

You should talk to them as I do, on a large-scale basis, every day. I play an online game that is played mostly by 18- to 30-year-olds, and we have an open chat channel occupied at any time by over a hundred people. Only the loudmouths speak up (and I do so occasionally), and they are rude and nasty and mean much of the time. Their idea of what should pass for "clever" or "deep" or even "funny" (which often requires cleverness, depth, and humor) would make you cry. For example, last week someone decided that making fun of another person's penis was so hilarious that he gave himself permission to repeat the same six-word jeer a few hundred times over the next two hours. The jeer was neither funny nor clever, but that it kept appearing in chat every five to thirty seconds sufficed to make a number of people laugh, reinforcing the jeerer's urge to do it again.

These kids learn so little and are exposed to so little learning or wisdom in school that their main educators now are afternoon TV programs like the Suite Life, Hannah Montana, Sunny with a Chance, Fast Times at Ridgemont High. They won't even watch re-runs of mildly cleverer shows like Fresh Prince and heaven forbid they might actually watch something actually intelligent and entertaining. They don't read, they never watch documentaries or history, and they have no access to old movies (and sneer at the idea of watching documentaries or reading), so their horizons are so straitened they have never seen anything past the ends of their own noses. Thus they grow up thinking they're the center of the universe, that everything is measurable by their own standards. Doing a certain thing isn't rude if it doesn't offend me; I would feel good if the government took your income from you so I'll vote for the guy who wants to take it from you. A war against the Taliban is stupid because the Taliban doesn't make me wear a veil. Saving my drowning dog over the stranger makes sense to me because the dog is within my horizons and the stranger may as well not exist.

I can tell from your monologues that you really have never met these human beings. Or perhaps you meet them but you really don't live where they are, and the extent of their narrowness and their willful blindness to anything beyond arm's reach is just unimaginable unless you've seen them expose themselves and their ignorance on a daily basis.