| | Here's a great article that sums up all of the shit that has been going on my hometown. Some of the highlights:
"Cheating, bomb making, death threats--Saratoga High School brews a potent mix of fear and privilege."
"Nearly one-third of Saratoga's students have 4.0 grade averages. Almost the same proportion take AP honors classes. The average SAT at the high school is almost 1250. And it is ranked as the top public school in the state."
"'I don't feel anywhere near as much competition here," said Philip Sung, who started at MIT last fall.'"
"the stress he suffered at Saratoga, and the subsequent finding Jesus, has an almost recovering-addict flavor to it, like a former convict... as if he had undergone unbearable pain on a wrong path. The path of competing at Saratoga High"
"when you scratch the surface of Saratoga, all you get is more surface."
"Not only have I been frustrated by this lack of a soul, but it's been just about the most nerve-wracking article I can remember working on. I found myself wilting in the face of all of this temperate beauty, wealth and surface niceness. In my career as a journalist, I have covered gunfire, revolutions. I have had death threats phoned and faxed to me, and faced lawsuits from scary people who you are not allowed to lose to. But nothing has been as daunting as facing suburban Saratogans and all of their beautiful, perfect, nice coldness. I began to doubt my own style, honed in some of the world's roughest places, as soon as I drove down Saratoga Avenue. This place is like kryptonite.
I have worked for years in the former Soviet Union, in a violent, post-totalitarian landscape where people speak another language, and I have never had such difficulty in gaining access to people's mouths--or when I did, to their hearts--as I have in trying to get to know Saratogans again. In part this is because I believe people here have far less heart to reveal, only ambition and results; it is more a case of nothing to articulate than a case of people being inarticulate. It's as if there isn't an inner world, a "deep underlying current," to expose."
"As I pulled out of the parking lot in my Corolla, through a forest of SUVs, all I could think of was getting out of this place and back to Russia--violent, bloody, wonderfully imperfect Russia.
Saratoga is a beautiful privileged place, and it makes you feel, if you don't love it and become a part of it, that something is wrong with you. It's a debilitating feeling, a special venom, that paralyzed me within a day of arriving. Because the only place you can go from Saratoga is down."
Welcome to my hometown... Comments Please! Read the article at http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/02.19.04/saratoga-0408.html |
| | Posted 2/23/2004 10:48 PM - 9 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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