Academia’s like Egypt

     Lately, I've been thinking about the passage of time. As I grow older, events seem more absurd, and our reactions to them seem more bizarre than they once did.
     This morning, a NYT movie critic tells a story by screenwriter Ben Hecht about a conversation he had with David O. Selznick in 1951:

     It was … the first year there was live coast-to-coast television, and the year the House Un-American Activities Committee resumed its Hollywood witch hunt. That was the climate in which Hecht and Selznick talked and walked as the great producer insisted the movies were over, and that Hollywood was nothing but a ghost town.
     “Hollywood’s like Egypt,” Hecht quoted Selznick as saying. “Full of crumbled pyramids. It’ll never come back. It’ll just keep on crumbling until finally the wind blows the last studio prop across the sands.” For Selznick only 10 out of … 10,000 movies were good. “There might have been good movies if there had been no movie industry,” he added. “Hollywood might have become the center of a new human expression if it hadn’t been grabbed by a little group of bookkeepers and turned into a junk industry.” More than a half-century later the industry baddies that Selznick pinpointed are now usually called marketers, and junk continues to be made, along with some great films….

     Selznick was right, but he was wrong, too. It wasn’t ten; it was more like a hundred. And, somehow, good movies would continue to be made, despite all that works against that.
     I feel somewhat like Selznick did, but I want to see the good things, too. I want to see them now. I know they’re "there," in that hazy future.
     At a recent meeting of my School—twenty or so faculty and their dean—someone noted that I was oddly silent. I guess people expected me to say dark things, but I was in no mood. I've been caught up in trying to take the long view, and to get it right.
     Anybody can throw darts at the present. Seeing what's good and promising is the hard thing.
     Not that things aren’t dark, especially in the California community college system. The crushing realities of our state’s budget disaster are only starting to be felt. Going to college and teaching at college will be different—harder, less joyful—five, ten years from now. In Washington, the money people and their paid jackasses are doing everything they can to save that massive shift of public money into private hands called “for profit colleges” (propped up by government-backed loans with spectacular default rates). And the average freshman can’t read, can’t write, and won’t do homework.
     It looks pretty bad, but we—the big “we”—have been through much worse. I know that. And you never know quite how things will turn out.
     Academia sure does look like Egypt. It is like Egypt. I can show you the ruins and the tattered studio props.
     I’m looking forward to seeing the way that I’m wrong about that—something that we prisoners of the present haven’t any right to, evidently.

Trainwreck in Orange County, 1927