Paul Campos notes a recent focus group where someone said that Trump reminded him of Walter White in Breaking Bad or Tony Soprano and they find that a positive.
In our school - like most others - students are required to take English every year, math through at least Algebra II, two years of science and two years of history, and the third year of a language. Almost every student takes more science and history than that in four years.
Then they go to college.
In college, they increasingly use the experience as a commodity. Their degree is - somewhat understandably - a commodity to be leveraged to a better paying career. College is expensive, so I get that. However, that often means that the Humanities are hollowed out. Everyone is taking business/finance classes or STEM classes, because that's where the money is.
The result, though, is the guy like Jonathan, who thinks that Walter White is doing things for anyone other than himself. At least Jonathan understands that White is the anti-hero, that he does bad things. However, the Greek tragedy of Breaking Bad is that Walter is incredibly selfish. He may start cooking meth because he has cancer and wants a nest-egg for his family after he dies, but after the cancer goes into remission, he still cooks. As he says in the end, "I did it for me."
The romance of the outlaw hero is so much bullshit. Dillinger was a psychopathic killer, not a tribune of the people. Walter White did terrible things because he liked the power. Same goes for Trump.
When people stop training their minds in the way that the Humanities train them, they wind up blinkered with a shallower understanding of the world we live in. Trump could not survive in a country that still understood critical thinking skills. (Then again, he IS cratering with those with college degrees.)
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