Styling

As I wrote those words in February of 2008, I had just finished listening to a commercial for high-style telephones on TV. It made fun of the unfortunate fools whose telephone styling was "soooo yesterday;' as a pretty girl put it in the advertisement. It had never before occurred to me that among various inescapable worries like cancer, homelessness, unemployment, blindness, aging, poverty, crippling accidents and the like, there might actually be people so shallow the look of their telephone was an item of concern. Try to picture the "A"' student who came up with that idea, and pray for his contemptible soul.

--John Taylor Gatto, "Weapons Of Mass Instruction", p. 64