Despair, failure, criticism

UCA is an ugly place now. It's become impersonal and congested. The track is now a parking lot. The hyper center is unusable owing to the excess enrollment. The library is always full. The town of Conway has become bloated with failed dreamers, middle class peons full of contempt. I can't participate in UCA anymore. The dream has been beaten to death. The indulgences have been saturated, and then taken one step further. If things weren't working I would just double the effort. Now the futility of that effort is plain before me.


My failure is the failure to deepen and expand my mental reserves of energy. I suspect my failure is chronic, widespread, and conditioned. The desire to succeed has not been overriding. My personal discipline faltered and my intellectual integrity was routed by petty desire. I am not alone. The burden of intellectual reflectivity invariably leads to this despair.

The price of a socially proscribed, authorized and guaranteed existence is the cost of all vital energy. This fact is embedded in the social unconscious but neurotic fear prevents conscious recognition. And yet despite this denial all those students who never question still suffer. All those students who are content to graze prefabricated ideals must be given a sign. The problem is acute: what must be done when they inevitably become drained of élan vital? All those students having been raised on television and hamburgers must submit their own idealism to be ground into sausage for the bourgeoisie. A spectacle is needed to substitute for the collective denial of flourishing.

UCA constantly organizes the spectacle. The spectacle is a proxy for the energy no individual can ascertain. It is designed to suggest a collective surplus at the heart of the educational enterprise. This event is portrayed as being so ecstatic that it occasionally erupts into choreographed and ritualized violence. To an intellectual, pacifist and ultimate Frisbee aficionado the effort compares only with the SUV for sheer hubris.
The enterprise of patriarchal sports is at once both an affirmation of the subjugation of the feminine and the defeat of the other who is efficient, less brutal and more constrained by common sense.

The spectacle is implicitly racists insofar as the sport gives rise to a broad system of financial subsidy and reproductive opportunity. The physical demands of labor and the overwhelming severity of modern war have eliminated the need for a physically robust phenotype. Only the spectacle of mainstream sports gives occasion to justify the perpetuation and sustainment of this type of human. Plato's republic is mirrored at the level of the high school and college game. Moral: selective breeding is encouraged; humans are products of the systems they inhabit.

I came to college with middle class values, middle class ideals. Somewhere along the way I began to yearn for the American dream. Now that dream is over. Effigies have been burned. My energy is gone. My heart is broken. I am weary. I want to perish. Who has done this to me? Answer: academia.