Students

Thousands reported each year. But what is it to be “Missing,” or for that matter, “Young?”
The Young flooded The City May and June. They sought and usually obtained “Missing” status, or their own, particular variants of Missing style: rings in their navels, nether parts, and cheap tattoos; faded-to-rags funereal coats and black costumes of lived lives bought or stolen from thrift shops.
Arrogant street corner beg-beers. Clumsy bacchanals at dusk. Liberation-rush of “nuthin ta do.”

What’s Going on at UAardvark? (Solidarity Press, 2013) is in some respects within the tradition of satire on a political and social issue that goes back to Aristophanes, the Roman writings of Juvenal and Petronius, through Gulliver’s Travels to Catch-22. But Lawrence Wittner’s stinging critique of what is happening to the “Corpaversity” plunges the novel into farce.

Just what are we teaching young people, society at large,  in and out of school? Just what is it to be an American today, awash in consumer madness? The Last One with the Most Toys Wins bumper sticker,  or is it this little chant:  You’ll have to peel this i-thing Apple appendage from my cold dead mind, err, hand?

University Mental Hygiene Clinic. Peace soft prints. Water-colors.  Comfort plants. Celebrity and Fitness magazines. Difficult rising from the waiting-room chair: drunk, drunk. Tired.
The affable Shrink plump, welcoming.
Talk released words to chill, conditioned air.
“And what makes me me in my head?” I blurted. “I’ve seen things that, you know, I want them to be mine.”
“And if they’ll be yours?” asked The Shrink.