I never really watched Oprah. I usually find it a little dull. Yesterday however, I actually caught some of the show. I thought Kevin Johnson was going to be on (it turns out he will be on part two of the show today). He was a professional basketball player for the Phoenix Suns (who beat the Kings last night, by the way), and went to my high school several years before I was there. My father taught at the school, and I used to go to the basketball games there in my youth, so I remember him playing then. He is a nice guy, and basically a good person. With some of the proceeds from his career, he started the St. Hope Foundation. It is an organization that runs charter schools in the Sacramento area, focusing on a primarily black, and somewhat poor area known as Oak Park. St. Hope has taken over Sacramento High school in the last couple of years, and turned it into a charter school.
I think that he genuinely cares about students and wants to help them, though I think some of the ways that the organization has gone about this are flawed. I think it is sad that to make Sac High successful, they had to destroy the school as it was and create it in a totally new image. I don’t know where most of the kids from east Sacramento and downtown go to high-school now, but I doubt it is Sac High.
I still wanted to hear what he had to say, and may still try and catch him on the show today. That’s not what I came to talk about today.
Firstly, let me just say that Anderson Cooper wins the jack-off blowhard of the year award (held until recently by me. The link is to the Anderson Cooper fan club. I was going to join, but all my time is taken up by the jam shit in my ears club). What an asshole he is. Like the kind of person who gets beat up at the bar just for being a tool. “How does it make you feel when you see your school in this condition?” Hey Cooper, why don’t you go eat a bowl of dick? (I’m paraphrasing here, I didn’t actually write down what he said.)
Oprah herself is in the running for the award. I knew that she was influential, but I never realized how much of that influence was of her own design. she would read some quote from some supposed expert like, “schools across the country are worse in preparing students for college than they were ten years ago,” and then add at the end, to the camera “and that’s true!” How the fuck would you know? The problem is that her adding that it is true, and not even saying “I believe” or some such, is likely to actually convince the mindless masses that it is a fact. I’m not saying that this is or isn’t a fact in this case, but I am saying that either way the statement that it is is absurd.
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