These Are The Days That Must Happen To You

I've always wanted to be the type of person who spontaneously quoted literature or poetry, but alas, I am an American. It's not that we don't really prize that as a cultural type, don't incentivize the effort involved; it's that our education system is designed, despite what a lot of Republicans will tell you, with an open disdain for any intellectual endeavor lacking a 1:1 applicable, monetizable skill. It's a thing you see in British culture, or at least written into British television and films. I'm sure in context they're trying to demonstrate that a character is a blowhard dipshit who bores everyone to death, but if that's the goal, it always backfires. Who wouldn't want to punctuate a situation/conversation with an Alfred, Lord Tennyson firebomb or something? But I understand state funding is not infinite and knowing some dope lines from "Ulysses" isn't going erect one highway bridge or code one single Apple App Store app.*

Learning for learning's sake is a thing though, a noble nothing in a society hardened into a so capitalist an idea of individuality that the unmarketable becomes the most glaringly individuated and cast into the narrowed-eyes gloaming of suspicion. It's not surprising that a social order that has no use for metaphor best measures a person's value by their literal value. A good idea, a worthwhile endeavor are retroactively justified by the fact of making someone rich. No one in this country has made a red cent on literature since Hal Holbrook had to give up his Mark Twain stage act on account of him dying. Meanwhile I have to pretend that Elon Musk is interesting because, inexplicably, he's worth a zillion dollars when in any other context, seeing that vacuous charisma void oozing toward you would be as welcome as a rectal thermometer.

Of course ideally you roll your money quote out at exactly the right time, but you have to know the people who have done that are probably sitting on it, chambered and ready to fire, at literally all times. That doesn't mean they're going to get it right, though. You can still eat it by flubbing your lines when you hit your mark and the light goes on. Neil Armstrong got all the way to the moon and fucked up his indefinite articles. Robert Oppenheimer, on the other hand, invented strategic-level death and man-made mass extinction, but dang, he sounded fucking dope when he did it. One in a million chance and he nailed it. What a savage.

Maybe that's the lesson, or even the loophole in an education in classics and literature: if you roll it out right after years and years at your STEM-ass job, eventually you rake in the cash selling emblazoned T-shirts. There's no money in art or artistry anymore, everyone knows that. All the real money is in the merch.

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*Don't worry, I don't think this counts as alliteration. At this point it's borderline epilepsy.