Book Review: Strapped by Tamara Draut

NOTE: I wrote this quite a while ago, as you can probably tell, but never finished it. Now I have. However, I didn't actually, if you want to be technical, have the book when I finished it. Nor did I actually read the whole book. But I did skim it. And get the general idea of it.

Now that the AcaDeca season is over, I'm reading. A lot. I went to the library yesterday and grabbed Strapped: Why America's 20- and 30-Somethings Can't Get Ahead by Tamara Draut. From rifling through it by the bookshelf, I expected it to be inane and whiny. I was right. The book is laughable in its misunderstanding of the world at times, and the book suffers from several endemic flaws.

While the book appears copiously researched and supported, with 28 pages of endnotes, many of Draut's more controversial points are supported not by statistics or scientific studies, but with anecdotes. Stories about people like "Wanda" and "Anna" and "Ed" make up a large portion of the book, without any way to verify their narratives or ask for clarifying details. Of course, she never uses examples of youth that are doing well. (note that I began to reconsider this after I wrote part of it. But I think it's still a good point, partially because I'm too lazy to rework it.)

What's worse is her apparent yearning for someone or something to blame every problem she perceives on. When pondering why so many youth are stuck in credit card debt, she doesn't think about, say, the actions of said youth in respect to their credit cards. No. She blames Congress, the Supreme Court, and credit card companies. For as we all know, in the early 1980s, Congress deregulated credit cards, and that, of course, forced thousands of youth to get credit cards and max them out. And the Supreme Court made a decision that basically let credit card companies charge whatever interest they wanted. Heaven forbid! And those evil, nasty, greedy credit card corporations. We all know they just prey on the youth of America and force them into debt peonage. Exactly what happened. Nothing to do with adolescents looking at the massive availability of credit and going overboard.

But her least obvious fallacy is also her most pernicious. In her final chapter, offering a wide range of "solutions" to these problems (like mandatory paid maternity leave), she states:

It is often said...that todays younger generation suffers from a sense of entitlement....The truth is that the overwhelming majority of young adults suffers from something quite the opposite....they expect too little from our society.

Yet by reading the book, it's clear that she is, indeed, afflicted by a sense of entitlement. Aside from the fact that most of the government programs she proposes, would, in fact, be entitlements, she seems to think that she and these youth do deserve certain perks. Language like "is this too much to ask" (possibly in the book) belies a fundamental sense of entitlement, an assumption that life owes us something.

I'm just glad I don't owe her the $11.16 the book costs on Amazon.

How did people ever take Caesar seriously?

I've been learning a little bit of Latin recently, and I've found out some interesting things about pronunciation. The most interesting thing is that the letter v is pronounced w--the opposite of German. This leads to an interesting pronunciation of Julius Caesar's famous statement "veni, vidi, vici." This would be pronounced "wenny, widdy, wikky." That sounds utterly absurd. How did anyone ever take him seriously?

I don't understand why textbooks that teach Latin insist on using the classical pronunciation. Not only is it harder and more complicated than Ecclesiastical or Vulgar Latin, it completely ignores the fact that languages evolve over time--even dead ones. I don't pronounce things the same way Shakespeare did, and I certainly don't speak the same way as Chaucer. Why should we pronounce our Latin the same way Julius Caesar did?

Legalized Telemarketing

Today I got a phone call from my friendly neighborhood Marines recruiter. We spent a good 10 minutes talking, and because I have no backbone, I was unable to tell him to get off the line. I finally told him I'd think about it and call back. What really bugs me about this is not so much that the military is advertising itself, but that it's advertising itself in a way that is illegal for private businesses. My home phone number happens to be on the national Do Not Call registry, so normal telemarketers are forbidden from calling it. But military telemarketers? They're just fine. I even forbade Red Mountain from sharing my phone number with the military, and they still called me. If anything, the military should have MORE restrictions on its advertising. But they have an apparent free reign to call and harass youth to join the military.

Okay, rant's over. Though if Andrew remembers, he once predicted that I would end up in the Marines. That just gives me another reason to reject them.

Graduation Speech

By popular demand (This is not as I actually gave it; I cut and added several things at the last minute):
Fellow students, as we stand here on the cusp of the completion of our journey here at Red Mountain High School, we look back on the years on which the sun is setting. We see the trials and joys, the devastations and excitements. We look forward to the glorious dawn which will rise on our new lives. We are the future. And we remember that this is not an ending, but a beginning. This is the first day of the rest of our lives. We must remember to hold on to our dreams, to stay strong in our hopes of a bright future. Class of 2008, we made it!

Now that I’ve gotten through the mandatory clichés, we can get on with what I actually want to say. Oscar Wilde once noted that “In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it.” This is truly a sad day. Many of us are at this very moment getting what we want. It seems great—we’re finally free of the shackles of high school education. But after the buzz wears off, in a week or so, we get the question “now what?” It sinks in that it’s over, and we need to find something else to do with our lives.

Humanity is progression; without a goal, something to work toward, it seems pointless and absurd. Sure, relaxing and having fun is enjoyable for a little while. But eventually you fall into a malaise with no goal, no purpose, nothing to do. You realize that not only is the journey half the fun, it’s all the fun. Unfortunately, many of us simply ignore this epiphany and go back to watching American Idol.
I myself realized this just recently. I was on the Red Mountain Academic Decathlon team, and I had a goal. I was going to break the state record. Dedicating much of my life to the necessary study and practice, I did. After the awards ceremony, I was able to bask in the glory for maybe 30 minutes. Then I realized that I had nothing to do anymore. I realized that I needed a new goal. I understood that a life must have purpose; like a piece of music, it must be performed with an end in mind.

So do something. Fill the void left in your life after high school. Have a goal, a purpose, a reason to live. This doesn’t have to be something huge, nor does it have to be permanent. Don’t feel like you have to know exactly what you’re doing with your life right now. Feel free to search for what you really want to do, looking for a purpose. Indeed, searching for a purpose could morph into a purpose itself. But a life without any purpose is, quite honestly, no life at all.

The reason we celebrate graduation is that every one of us has reached the completion of a goal, and with the completion of that goal, we pass a milestone. It’s up to us to choose to keep moving.

Finally, I’d like to thank a few people, starting with all the teachers I never met, who taught all the people I never knew, for obvious reasons. I’d like to thank the people who offered to write my speech for me. You know who you are, Andrew and Will. I’d also like to thank the one who actually did write my speech for me. Oh, and all the standard people—parents, friends, teachers who I actually had, etc. Thank you too. Lastly, I’m sorry, Taylor Kerby, about the fauxhawk.

Lastly, I’d like to thank you all for sitting through my speech.

Another interesting find in my basement

Going through the collection of records that, for some reason, ended up in my room, I found this (sorry about the picture quality):


David Rose and his Orchestra play The Stripper and other Fun Songs for the Family. Mmhmm.

I've wanted to listen to this for a while, but now that I've recently hooked my record player up again, I brought it out and gave it a spin. The title track sounds like the soundtrack to some burlesque show, as the cover seems to indicate. The rest of the record is more bland big-band music from an era when the big band was going out of fashion. Blah.

The title still makes me like this record, though.

My Mother, Apostate?

In a thread over at By Common Consent, I came across this castigation of the play Jesus Christ Superstar by the First Presidency:

We feel it is our responsibility to warn our people against the present-day wave of musical performances which are aimed at the destruction of sacred principles which form the very foundation upon which we stand. One of these is the rock opera, ‘Jesus Christ Superstar.’ We consider this musical a profane and sacrilegious attack upon true Christianity. It strips Jesus Christ of His divine attributes.

Its prevailing theme presents the falsehood that our Lord—and this is quoting from a statement of one of the characters—is “just a man just the same as anyone I know,” and picturing Him absolutely as consorting, as all other men, with women of questionable repute.

To the dismay of those who worship Him as the Savior of mankind, as the divine Son of God, He and His apostles are portrayed in earthly roles living below Christian standards. We encourage members of the Church and good men everywhere to oppose this kind of entertainment.

This is a little odd because my mother happens to have a copy of the score to said musical in the basement. Granted, it's there along with Saturday's Warrior and others from that genre of ultra-mormon 70s-era music, but it's there. I wonder if she just never heard about the statement. Then again, maybe she just ignored it...