The Swill Of Corporate Swine

When I was in my final years of high school, I came to realize that I hated corporate culture.

There were current songs on the radio that I liked, a few current movies, and even a few TV shows, but more and more, I began to smell garbage -- a reeking stew of cynicism, laziness, and contempt for the audience. More and more of it seemed the flakings of a small heart, of a smaller head, and all designed to scoff at human feeling, to diminish human thought.

Because I hated what I saw and hated myself for wasting time with it, I became drawn without intention to works of the past. I listened to symphonies on CBC radio, watched old films on late-night television, read books and plays, poems and essays by writers no longer central in the public eye. All of this was purely by accident: I would encounter something that grabbed my attention, and this, in turn, would lead me down obscure pathways to other music, other stories, forgotten by many people but alive in ways that current offerings were not. What motivated me was neither a backwards-pacing need for some non-existent "golden age," nor a fake nostalgia for something I had never known, but a thirst and hunger for meaning. I wanted to be taught, challenged, and above all, kept honest.

The lesson, here, is that no one forced me to choke down the gruel of corporate commerce. No one forced me to wallow in the puddles of the Zeitgeist. I was free to look for meaning on my own terms, and if this meaning lay in works of the past, then I was free to love them no matter how many centuries had kept us apart.

I claimed this heritage. Anyone can.