One of those stories that involves all the various levels of civilizational rot we're currently experiencing

Portland, Oregon's public-school system has shut down a "hip-hop-themed" charter school. 

Well, let's hope so.  How did such a garbage project ever get as far as it did?

From a physical-structure standpoint, the school was woefully unready to accomodate students.

It has already blown through two federal grants, and is characterized as being in "financial shambles."

Of course, among the levels on which this is disgusting and outrageous, there is the squandering of yet more of our tax dollars.

Right now, however, I'd like to zero in on the cutlural implications of the school's name and its area of focus.  It is called REAL Prep, and it was to be a school that was big on teaching the recording arts.

This  crud about "keeping it real" has plagued our lexicon for some time.  It's a flimsy excuse for societal deterioration in inner cities, plain and simple.  And that's the whole basis behind hip-hop and has been going back to the spoken word performance art of Gil-Scott Heron.  That, in turn, has its roots in the larger countecultural impulse which has now poisoned out society so thoroughly.  The idea is that "You establishment muckety-mucks are so caught up in the artifice of your institutional constructs and rigid modes of behavior and dress that you can't even see what is going down on the street."  What dog vomit.  What has been going down on the street for the last fifty years has been exploitative sex, instant neurological gratification of all sorts, and no sense of self-respect, loyalty to anyone or anything, and the destruction of basic civilizational building blocks such as language.

And this business of society puking all over itself to "understand the youth" and "give them a forum for self-expression" goes back as far as my junior-high days, when in the poetry portions of my English classes the teachers would incorporate discussions of folk-rock lyrics on "relevant social issues."

And let's hold off on teaching the kiddies how to equalize bass and treble and balance 24 tracks and place microphones around a studio and the like until they can pass a damn test indicating they know when the Civil War happened, how many elements there are in the periodic table, and who John Milton was.

It's really, really late in the day.