Americans the Incapable

How my Best friends American College experience was the first thing that taught me the Americans are half-assed intellectuals at most

My best friend in high school was largely the exact opposite of me, and I always kind of thought that I kept him around back then just because I needed something to remind me of what I actually always liked, which was reading and history, even though I felt I could not personally pursue those things in an American academic setting, due to how much I always - to put it simply - despised high school, and especially middle school teachers.

 I was that odd child with no place in the conformist world that is the horrifically empty American country: I loved to read and to write, but I did not like to wear polo shirts, or play football, or even to discuss football, and so I was condemned as a hater of God and man, and made to be a social outcast. As a result of my anger over this, I essentially failed everything.

 My best buddy was essentially the same, except that he somehow managed to avoid ruining his grades. He was an outcast in high sschool with good grades. He also did not like sports.
He was a different sort of outcast entirely; but I quite enjoyed him, mostly because he was one of the smartest individuals I had ever had chance to meet in an otherwise vapid and utterly clueless American town. When he got into college, I imagined he would become an even bigger, and better, intellectual, than he already was. It never occurred to me in a million years that college could possibly send him in another direction. I thought the threat of conformity was just coming to an end, when high school did. I always worried about him, because he would often let peoples comments get the best of him (on the rare occasion he was exposed to others in HS) and I really believed he would be safe in college. When he left to go off to it, I wasn't,  or at least I don't recall being, the slightest bit worried. I thought he'd come home a far more gifted intellectual; and I couldn't wait for what he would teach me (as in high school he had often taught me a lot he would learn in his various AP classes, etc).

I was horrifically mistaken. The Americans never cease to ruin things for people, and what they did to my friend in college was nothing short of mortifying. For it was essentially as though everything they couldn't do to him in high school, with their dumb fucking jock game, they somehow managed to make up for once he was at college. He returned to me the literal first winter after leaving a completely changed person: his hair was cut , he was lifting weights,wearing polo shirts that said "American Eagle" on them, discussing football and canoeing, and his favorite band had ceased to be the Misfits, and had suddenly become Phish. He, in other words, had become an ultra conformist. The Americans got him. They hooked him. They set off an atom bomb just like they did in Hiroshima, except this one was in my boys head.

Meanwhile, of course, I was left to watch and wonder for many years: What, exactly, had happened here? How did they manage to do it? Well, though at first it didn't make the slightest bit of sense to my young self, I quickly came to understand it once the years had passed and I looked at it in retrospect: Of course the Americans destroyed him as an intellectual, and turned him into a jock, when he want to college, in a way that they couldn't do when he wa smerely in high school. After all, he actually had to go and live on a great big campus once he was at college, and since he went to a sort of small and contained college, the conformity level of it all must have been absolutely deranged (and from stories he told me, where the senior frats made him strip and hazed him, it indeed was).

 He himself, you see, was ,I think, traumatized by the entire event (he started drugging and drinking more than ever, and nearly committed suicide in his 5th year) but he also didn't really know how to feel about it, I don't think, just like I didn't, because...well, if he wanted to become a bigger intellectual, and trust me he was really such a good one before he went, isn't this the exact place he had to go?

So one would think that it was indeed the exact place he had to go. Until of course one turns around, years later, and realizes that Europeans, who actually are posh intellectuals and who have done infinitely more philosophizing than the hayseed Americans (who cannot do much of anything besides import foreign people to create technology for them in California) do not engage even slightly with "sleep over campus culture" when it comes time to go to college, in one of their majestic European cities.

 They just commute there, perhaps on an evil thing called a bicycle, and maybe, if they have money, or their parents do, they live somewhere near the university building in an apartment that is probably filled more iwth regular citizens, rather than insane collegiates whom one has to seek to be accepted by, and kiss the toes of ,etcetera. No one in Europe waltzes around forcing you to strip down and get hazed your freshman year. No one plays those pathetic American campus drinking games where one must drink six 40 ounces of booze in two hours or John the Football Slave will knock you out. No one gets a chance to rape the ass of naive 18 year old girls who just moved to campus, and then of course no Vice President Biden has to cry about it (which has in fact occurred here).

When I discovered this all of course, about the Europeans, after witnessing my friend descend from being a confident intellectual into someone who now does little more than try, obsessively, to keep polo shirts clean and make sure his arms are big, and who seems deeply ashamed about his entire intellectual high school past (because in America being able to read means you are, in short, a dick sucking faggot) I was aghast with shock and awe.

The reason why ought be obvious: I realized instantly that, had my best pal been in Europe, he never would have been ferociously wiped down with this weird campus cult thing that he came home iwth that first winter, and then ever afterwards. Had he been in Europe, where people can actually think straight, and where universities began, he probably would have kept on going more or less just as he had been in high school: In other words, he would have delved even further into intellectualism, he probably would have stayed a little socially awkward (and it would have been for the better), and he also wouldn't have ever become so obsessed with this wretched polo shirt wearing football bullshit.  Alas, he was in the Country of the Hayseeds and the Southern Football Baptists, and so in order to pursue an education he had to high tail it , first, out of our entire state, leaving all he knew behind, and secondly, he had to go live on this obnoxious campus where, because he was so awkward and shy etc, he was broken almost instantly by vicious sons of bitches who made him feel so badly about himself that he came back not just a different person, but also, quite frankly, a broken person who was never again the same.

For the honest truth is that the kid I knew who left all those years ago at 18 to go to the dirty American college campus, that kid was an intellectual who I never saw again. The kid who came back returned with a mask on his face, and it was glued on with super glue, maybe even bolt or sewn right into his flesh. He never got it off. And sadly, it pretty much seems he still can't...

So that is my story of how I came to learn that the Americans are only half-assed intellectuals. For, you see,if they were full intellectuals, they would know, just like Europeans know, that sleep over campus culture is full of shit, and not good for studies.

But alas, the Americans like to rape one another and play football and they must, oh god they must, play those drinking games. And so on it goes...