Watch this, if you haven’t yet.

Ok, this is cool, I’ll admit. Jeff Daniels is great here. Sorkin weaves his usual tapestry of well-written dialogue. But the haughty dipshit-ism behind this rant is intense.

To lament the current generation while pining for the previousone is bullshit. Yeah, Generation X/Y sure look like non-caring dipshits that have ruined the country. Save for the fact that it’s the previous generation’s policymakers that have been responsible! I was 18 when the Glass-Steagall act was repealed. Yeah, that’s my fault; I didn’t even elect the guys who voted for that. Unions as we knew them were dismantled while I was learning how to walk. And the wage/production gap has grown since 1970, not 1990.

And don’t get me started on the historical selective memory this rant has. This rant wants to go on about morality, despite the fact that this “past” that’s trotted around like some golden age was also the same time as Pol Pot/Cambodia, segregation, Watergate, Vietnam, etc. And don’t forget those two huge fucking bombs we dropped on Japan.

This rant is borne from some deluded fantasy that things were better. In some ways, sure. But it’s treated as some black and white fact. Sure, the stats back up America’s decline, but to blame it on 20-year-olds is ludicrous. It’s not a copout or flawed reasoning, it’s completely fucking ignorant.

Never have I loved and hated a rant like this. I guess that’s a sign of Sorkin’s greatness as a writer. But he’s still a dipshit.

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