"I'm a Survivaball, I'm gonna make it"

October 31, 8:58 PMCUNY ExaminerDavid Brezler

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For nigh on a decade, education commentators, college advisers, professors, prospective employers, and their ilk have been lamenting with incremental fervor the stark unpreparedness of successive freshman generations for the didactic challenges presented in college. At present, even the reading and writing of cursive lettering is a waning tendency amongst our tremendously technologically biased teens and tweens, a fact to which the community of collaborative educators is still reacting. Penmanship, however, is far from being the pinnacle of the profoundly perplexing problem, the vast majority of professorial complaints relating to wide swaths of students demonstrating disappointingly diminished world views, incoherence during expository essays, and their largely lacking ability for broad-based lexical item recognition, something that a bit of research has recently connected to the immediately gratifying, but comparatively limiting ability to be both seen and heard in 140 characters or less.

As I’ve said in a previous article, the humor inherent in Mike Bonanno and Andy Bichlbaum calling themselves ‘Yes Men’ is likely lost given the state of vocabularic degradation endemic to our pre-, per-, and post-adolescent populations. Geographic localizability is likewise at an all time low, quite similar to the period in history when a Spanish King installed a bronze plaque in the midst of Madrid boldly proclaiming “Non plus ultra”, a statement now widely recognized as unenlightened. The hyper-spastic, super-sized, all-encompassing testing craze has forced a decade’s worth of compulsorily educated students to transform their previously creative spirits into a teaming horde whose sole assessable product is a prearranged, non-unique essay format with each semester’s reaping of earnest scribblings trending even closer to a style for which China is often derided. Terrifying as it may seem, it appears that the statistically reported dearth of critical thinking skill epidemic amongst school-aged students precludes them from comprehending the validity and breadth of skill sets required for the elaboration of such complex farces. In short, the blind faith in the fact that everything seen on a “reputable” news channel must be true is so inherent to the current thought processes of so many Americans, especially those of a certain age, that to make a hard switch within moments to the fact that a recent broadcast was all a hoax is tantamount to being fallacious. Moreover, the depiction of a straight line between Union Carbide’s (now Dow Chemical) catastrophic disaster and the potential for something hundreds of times worse given the staggering quantities of product stored in a facility in West Virginia is met with a great deal more incredulousness than the farcical talking head on a BBC TV news segment.

In sum, ‘The Yes Men’ and their conservation-minded, critical thinking, guerrilla tactic documentary film, as long as it’s taken seriously, shown widely in classrooms across the nation, and treated with the proper shrift, will likely fix more than just the ills brought on by Union Carbide, Halliburton, and the New Orleans Housing Authority. Shortly after Fix the World hit the Film Forum in Soho, Balloon Boy erupted onto the national news scene, Twitter, Facebook, and every available screen across the nation. It is a wake up call, a hearkening back to a late 80’s, early 90’s synth-pop band entitled ‘Pop Will Eat Itself’, though, in this case, the appropriate moniker would be Popular Culture Will Eat Itself.  Once that happens, where will we be?