Snooky’s Chariot

To the Editor:

There’s a legend according to which Socrates encountered a notorious Athenian hetaera while walking with his pupils outside the city. Mockingly, she suggested that with all his wisdom Socrates wouldn’t have been able to keep a single one of his students had she offered them a ride in her chariot. “That is because you are drugging them down, while I am trying to take them up,” said the philosopher.

For centuries, universities, the intellectual elite of the world, were performing this task — attempting to take us up, elevate our minds while maintaining a high-brow scorn for hetaeras of the world, who, by the way, were at least well-educated. Today, however, the mass media managed to bring us all down, Socrates and average Joes alike.

This morning on the radio I’ve heard that Snooky (Do I have to explain who she is? My point exactly.) was paid $32,000 for speaking at Rutgers University, more than a Nobel Laureate, the president of the United States, or anyone for that matter. In a monthly Alumni Review from my university, a cover story was about three graduates who were able to get on The Apprentice — yet another reality TV show where young people get to hero worship a billionaire — a personification of Arrogance.

I beg your pardon, Intellectual Elite, but are you even allowed to acknowledge the existence of the likes of Snooky? And since when did reality TV become a respectable entertainment for a person with a college degree, to say the least of becoming a cover story for a college press?

Another breaking news on the radio today was Angelina Jolie getting a new tattoo, while a crisis with Connecticut state budget got a short blip in the end and was cut short by some commercial.

It’s a shame that our news channels became disaster porn, hearsay, or “so-and-so twitted.” It is not acceptable for a respectable school to invite a glorified trash as a speaker; shouldn’t at least those, who entrusted with education of the young, have more discernment? And it is about time for everyone with a brain and any sense of decency to demand removal of these programs from prime time to where it belongs — cable channels of late night adult entertainment that no one admits watching. Otherwise we are all going down in Snooky’s chariot.

Melana Kay

31 Walnut Tree Hill Road, Sandy Hook                         April 7, 2011