« The Biedrins Factor | Main | Predictions are Hard, Especially About the Future » The Best Years of My Life04 Apr 2008 04:02 pm Holly Yeager's article on John McCain's lousy oratorical skills is spot-on, but watching this sleep-inducing clip, I'm focusing on something else: "Memory often accords our high school years the distinction of being among the happiest of our lives." Does it? I thought people usually hated high school. Am I wrong? Comments (43)
I think we can safely say, without fear of being wrong, that Senator McCains' high school years were considerably happier then his years of sojourn in a North Vietnamese prison camp. 
Nerds hated high school. Which likely describes most of your readers (me included). But now, now, we rule internet land!
It's not that they are happier, it's that "memory accords" them as the happiest. Speaking as someone who's sore from playing softball yesterday, there's a lot to be said for youth. That "memory accords" sentence is perfectly awful, vice-principalian in its terribleness. Someone should be fired for that. I nominate John Yoo.
I certainly remember a lot of adults saying, when I was in high school, that I was in the "happiest years of my life."
I think more people hated middle school than high school. But yes, McCain is really quite a poor long-format speaker. He's not bad speaking extemporaneously.
That was another slip of the tongue like the one about Iran training al Qaeda. He meant, of course, "forgetfulness often accords our high school years the distinction of being among the happiest of our lives." Semi seriously, I think when most people talk about "memory" they don't mean accurately remembering things as the key feature of memory (for most people) is that it is unreliable. You are very smart, and I'm sure you have an excellent memory so you are just hopelessly out of touch. Maybe it's part of his appeal to old people as in "don't you get irritated with those gosh darned youngsters who can actually remember how miserable they were in high hchool and even the name of their high school?" Now deadly seriously, maybe the USA is divided into two groups of people -- the ones who were miserable in high school and grow up to be Democrats and the ones who enjoyed it and grew up into Republicans. I mean the left blogosphere hate directed at the Kewl Kids etc strongly suggests that your social set might have had an especially painful time in high school (comes with being interested in learning and therefore a nerd and therefore socially excluded). There is no doubt that a very effective Republican line is that Democrats are too brainy therefore elite therefore elitist and look down on you (not you personally). What do both Bushes, Reagan and McCain have in common ? Well one thing is that they don't seem to have studied much when they were in school (Bush Jr and McCain were extreme underachivers).
I always thought that the people who said that never went to college. Ahh college. Seemingly unlimited free time, debauchery and a (what seemed like) a life of the mind. So little responsibility, so much fun.
I'm betting McCain was neither a freak nor a geek.
Part of the explanation is that back in the day, many people tended to graduate from high school straight into a pretty tough job, at which they worked for 40-some years, and then died pretty soon after.
"sniff, sniff, I smell nerds....." damn high school.
I loved high school, even though I was easily one of the nerdier students. Go figure.
I guess I'll step up and say that I had a blast in high school. It was pretty exciting to be experiencing all sorts of new stuff at that time - some degree of independence/autonomy, girls, cars, money I could call my own, alcohol, etc. I had fun in college, too, but I sorta worked 40 hours a week while taking a full courseload so I didn't have nearly as much time to have fun as I did in high school. Plus the novelty of all the stuff mentioned above wore off, making me notice the responsibility that came with independence, the drama that came with the girls, parking and maintenance with my car, bills to go with the money, and any number of complications that occur when young people and alcohol mix. Now, at 24, I look back more fondly at my high school years than my college years. But overall I've always been content with life; it's treated me fairly well throughout.
yeah Khaled, I should say that I think the nerd hating school effect was high school-size, maybe high-school culture dependent. Smallish sports obsessed schools were brutal to my friends in college, and myself. It also probably depended on how bad you wanted to have meaningful sex (e.g with someone other than yourself). If two person sex was no big deal to you (which mercifully it isnt for everyone), then being amongst nerdlike male friends was no big deal. uggh why am I reliving that hell?
i hated middle school and the first few years of high school, but then around my junior year i began to nurse one hell of a drug addiction, and suddenly things were fun. of course, a few years later I found myself relegated to life as an NA member, and Ce'st la vie. But boy, those halcyon days of elementary school sure were something, weren't they?
The first couple of HS years sucked, while the last two were pretty good, especially compared to the following few years as a working commuter college student. Even as I lived it, I thought I had it pretty good, being a strange man in a strange land, at an international school in a Moslem culture. Much more engaging than the southern CA suburbs I spent most of my youth in.
"memory" equals, when you're really old and try to remember. At 26, it's more like plain old remembering.
High school was awesome: school was easy, not as much work, losing it...wait, what?
Oh, and I hated middle school. Like everyone else here, I was a nerd throughout, but I learned how to hide it halfway through high school.
Good Lord, I haven't heard McCain on the stump in a while. This is awful.
I guess everyone may not be as familiar with Stuff White People Like, but yes, apparently it's been observed that (nearly) everybody (white) was an unpopular nerd in high school: http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com/2008/03/06/83-bad-memories-of-high-school/
Nice tie.
I'm going to watch this every time I feel unconfident about Obama's chances.
And you're gonna pull that old football out of the way, just before Charlie Brown is about to kick it before he, err, kicks it. Aren't you Lucy. Oh, and by the way, Mr. McCain. My Dad was in the Armed Services also. Not in the Officers Club but the Enlisted man's. He got shot in the face defending this country and was awarded a silver and a bronze. But I never ever saw him or heard him use his military status to promote bankrupting the country through mis-guided tax cuts or continuing an illegal war. As a matter of fact, he was a union truck driver who helped his seven children through college on his family level wage. Something he could have never done behind your policies. So cut the crap about the war hero stuff. Real heroes rarely mention it. Thank you for your service.
What's up with the dude playing with himself?
McCain is reading that boring speach off a teleprompter! (or so it looks like) I feel like the only way we can lose is if the "super"delegates alienate more than half of the party by picking the candidate most of us didn't vote for. Other than that, high school was nowhere near as good as college.
I remember my dad explicitly telling me that the people who said that high school was the best years of your life were wrong. He said that becoming an adult is actually pretty good. I'm inclined to agree. I was and remain a nerd, but my school was pretty accepting of nerds, so it wasn't like high school was horrible. Eh, there are always tradeoffs. As a kid you could be more carefree, but really, with maturity come a lot of plusses. More control over your own fate, for one thing, both in the sense that you have more control over the overall direction of your life as an adult and in the minute, day-to-day sense that there aren't adults telling you when you can get up to go to the bathroom, what to eat for dinner, how late you get to stay up, etc. Also there's just the general satisfaction of making long-term goals and actually seeing progress toward them instead of just dreaming about the future. Let's see... money, sex, travel, marriage, etc. I don't have any kids yet, but I'd like to at some point. Now, I'm pretty happy with my life, but it's not like there haven't been setbacks and disappointments. For some, the disappointments vastly outweigh the plusses, it's true. Everybody's different. But I have to say that if I spent my whole adulthood on a downhill slide, I'd be pretty pissed.
I have a rather odd nostalgia for my high school years, considering I was suicidally depressed most of the time. But I had the closest bunch of friends I've every had in my life, until I decided I hated them all not long after graduation, and in many ways the music of those years is closest to my heart (for example it's probably what I waste the most time youtube-ing), even though my brain tells me it's mostly a bunch of shit.
I hated junior high, but loved high school so much that I graduated twice. True story. In any event, attending high school in the 80s was . . . interesting. I vividly recall riding in the back of an open pick-up listening to Def Leopard sing Pour Some Sugar On Me. I played sports but my mom made me take piano lessons. Not sure where I come out on the jock/nerd continuum.
I think we can safely say, without fear of being wrong, that Senator McCains' high school years were considerably happier then his years of sojourn in a North Vietnamese prison camp. Of course you're right. But you still reminded me of the scene in "Top Secret" where Val Kilmer dreams he's back in high school and is then relieved to wake up and realize that he's only being tortured by a pair of East German sadists.
Keep the audience in mind, McCain's just pandering to the crowd, of course the joke's on him and most of those kids would never vote for him anyhow.
Wait -- is Matt asking whether there exists a subset of Americans for whom high school turns out to be the high point, both objectively and subjectively? Because it's obviously true and it's kind of a stupid question. To put it in terms MY can understand, it's a little bit like asking, "Is there really such a thing as a Los Angeles Clipper fan?"
"Memory often accords the LA Clippers to have been the best team of their era..."
School the happiest days of your life ... rubbish! For youthful zest, the happiest days of your life comes when you leave college, start earning a few bucks of your own, and are still young, probably single and unattached, no responsibilities to anyone but yourself.
It seems like two kinds of people look back fondly on high school: those who never had so much influence/fun/opportunity/etc. again and those who went on to build on good stuff from high school later in life. The second group includes those who go from being king/queen jock to frat/sorority royalty to stupid, cruel managers, of course, but it also includes some of the more successful theater geeks and other weirdos of the sort I hung around with. :) (I don't miss high school at all myself, but I can understand why some of the folks I know do.)
I wonder if fond memories of high school correlate with other factors. A predilection for comformity? Terrible taste in music (i.e. corporate, mainstream, Top 40)? A tendency to submit blindly to authority? Republican voting preferences? Granted, my 'data' on this is purely anecdotal, but virtually everyone I know personally fits this pattern. Anyone else notice this pattern? Or is it just me?
Mighty effective to have a backdrop of high school kids who are obviously bored out of their skulls. Wasn't Andrew Giuliani available?
Middle school was hell. High school was purgatory. College was wonderful--independence, fresh start, everything at a new and broader level (from the too-smart frog in the little pond to one of 2000 smart frogs in a big lake), the life of the mind aspect. Since then life's been pretty good. (Unlike Toby I did marry right out of college.) I'm 39, exactly the age for the revenge of the nerds economy. I did have to wrestle with this a year ago when my high school somehow tracked me down for the reunion--I had no idea it had been 20 years. To my amazement, there was a little temptation to go back and engage in some implicit "HA! My life turned out great. Jerks." But those things usually don't work out as you imagine, and I don't remember anyone's name.
For the sort of blue collar whites who didn't go to college and aren't voting for Obama, high school was probably the best years of their lives. These are guys who still wear varsity jackets in their thirties.
Childhood is great. Early puberty is disconcerting. Late puberty is simply awful. Rediscovering a certain measure of hormonal balance - that is, becoming an adult - is a definite relief. School has nothing to do with it, except co-incidence.
For all the latest crazy stories in public schools, check out http://detentionslip.org. It's one of the leading sources for breaking news in education.
"I wonder if fond memories of high school correlate with other factors. A predilection for comformity? Terrible taste in music (i.e. corporate, mainstream, Top 40)? A tendency to submit blindly to authority? Republican voting preferences?" One of these things is not like the other. If a young (or young-ish) person had a "predilection for conformity", he or she would share Democratic voting preferences. To be more precise, he or she would vote for Obama.
I was thinking about this the other day. Graduate school gets my vote.
Comments closed April 18, 2008. |
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Heads in the Sand
You are right on, at least as far as I'm concerned. High School was awful. With that said, I know for some people high school was the pinnacle - principally the jocks who were the bomb in high school but got left behind working in convenience stores when college didn't work out. If McCain's high school years were his happiest, he's lived through quite a long downhill stretch.
Posted by Jim | April 4, 2008 7:23 PM