What Have We Done?

I saw "The Social Network" a couple of days ago and I
was flabbergasted, appalled, so Goddam upset that poor
Maggie, my friend and companion, raised her hand at the
post-movie dinner to fend off my terrible tantrum. What
have we done? What has happened to our struggles against
heartlessness, against sexism, racism and careless
invective......where is the poetry of life in that mean-spirited
amoral generation of jerks. And that aint just a facncy turn of phrase,
poetry requires stopping and thinking......requires, as Wordsworth
tells us, "emotion stuided in tranquility"---- not a collection of
greedy, blowhard smart kids using their considerable intellect
to savage one another. Nothing wrong with the writing, nothing
wrong with the direction, the acting (it might gather in a bunch
of Oscars).....but it has been put to the service of
dehumanized brats who would use the remarkable new digital
treasures to blow apart every value we've so carefully looked
after since the Sixties. Nothing wrong with Facebook, by the
way. Nothing except it's ugly authors. Just take the treatment
of women----these guys are the American Taliban. Diminished,
used, even prostituted.....the women in the film all (except for a
brief Erica moment) are abused, chattelled and dismissed.
The rapid-fire dialogue skims the surface without wit or insight.
All right, I'm 80, and I don't "get it". But I can't leave it
alone.......Harvard, for God's sake....have we lost our best
University? My mother smelled this coming....she sent me
to Antioch. Does anyone care?


Ol Val