I've just completed an incredibly interesting study in contrasts. Last week, I read a book called The Notebook Girls, which if you haven't heard of it, isn't a book so much as a diary. Four girls from Manhattan, attending the creme de la creme of Manhattan public schools kept this diary from the period from the second semester of their freshman year to the second half of their junior year. I guess it's a true account of these girls lives, including lots and lots of pot-smoking and drinking, sex and copious use of the word cock, and the trials and tribulations of being friends with boys who act wonky. Every other sentence is something about needing to smoke, or a reference to smoking every day during the school year, or which boy they'll hook up with next. (Complete with arrow instead of the word up.) This book was an exercise in shallowness. I can't believe I finished it. I guess I hoped that something would come out of it, but save for a few entries about the legacy of 9/11 as a student in New York, and a few on Judaism and religion, it really is all about losing your virginity and smoking tons of pot. I can't say that I expected more from this book, because I didn't know what to think, but the fact that one of the girl's mother is Katha Pollitt left me with very mixed feelings towards Pollitt. That may be unfair, but that she encouraged her daughter to publish this crap is sad.
By contrast, I just finished the Frontline documentary, "Country Boys", and it was incredible. There is no better argument for the idea that there is two different Americas than partaking of these two things one right after the other. "Country Boys" follows two boys from Appalachia, and their trials and tribulations on the way to graduating from an alternative high school. Both of their lives are rough, and by the end, I found myself rooting for both of these boys to make it. This wasn't shallow; it was about two boys trying to overcome horrible early lives to make something of themselves. At the beginning, it was hard to believe that anyone could start life in such a hole, but I'm more from the sheltered Manhattan-style existence than the Appalachia world these boys are from. But I liked them better, these boys who some days didn't make it to school, and one of whom smoked like a chimney at the age of 15. I liked them because they were real. When Cody said something that I considered so prejudiced it was sad, I wasn't upset. I wasn't upset because it wasn't hateful, and it wasn't coming from a place of education. It was purely happenstance that he grew up where he did, and learned the way he did. (The part on evolution shocked the pants off of me too, and made me sad. But it is what it is.)
In the special features on the DVD, Cody is interviewed, and he expresses some incredibly intelligent and sophisticated ideas. He's grown up a bit, he's matured, he's been exposed to more. I felt like I was watching him grow up into someone to be respected, to be admired. I absolutely did NOT feel that way about the four girls in NY, even though there was nothing prejudicial about the book; one of the girls even has a relationship with another girl. But their jaded sophistication is ugly to me, and I'm not sure why, because like I said, I'm more from their world than the "Country Boys" world. I'm sure it has something to do with the gratuitous drug use, which sickens me.
But I can't figure out what I want to say about this, other than the contrast is sad. The kids with all the opportunity squander it on drugs and sex, and the kids with none work steadily and hard to improve their lives. Maybe I'm just disgusted with myself.