“The BIGGEST issue in America is what BIKINI I’m wearing tomorrow,” a gamine Florida Spring Breaker told Fox News’s Johnny Belisario, on the most challenging assignment of his career. Times were equally tough for some young hunk who said that the elevator was out in his vacation condo and that he had to walk up 43 flights of stairs. When Johnny pressed these tanned, fit creatures about news trivia, one of the girls acknowledged she was devastated that Chuck Norris had died (fair), and one of the bros said, “What’s Ayatollah?” (Also fair.)
This video made the rounds on Twitter. Reactions ranged from: good to see that the youths are out having sex and getting drunk in the sun instead of getting caught up in the doomscrolling news cycle, to: typical Americans, awash in privilege and oblivious to the murderous consequences of our imperial government’s decision-making. Both decent nodes of debate, but maybe the people spouting them don’t regularly see, like I do, Facebook reels of young people at outdoor malls who can’t name a country in Europe, think that Joe Biden is still the Vice President, and don’t know how to tell time on an analog clock. News flash: Most Americans are barely literate, and the kids like to party.
But don’t tell that to Thomas Chatterton Williams, The Atlantic staff writer, whose name became somewhat famous in 2020 among people who talk about how much they like to read. Williams authored the Harper’s “Letter On Open Justice And Debate,” claiming that the letter was necessary in an “intolerant climate” of “public shaming and ostracism,” but then got into public arguments with people who subsequently rejected the letter. Hohn hohn hohn, he was absolutely appalled at what he witnessed in Fox News clips while reading X over his coffee and pan au chocolat. Frankly, I’m shocked he stoops so low as to mingle with the hoi polloi, even just in the virtual world.
“A lot of the problems in the world right now can be explained by this video,” he tweeted. “For one thing, it’s a big reason why the US government is so unaccountable to public opinion. These are *college students.* A significant amount of the country is totally checked out and comfortable enough not to think it matters.”
I don’t know if Williams has ever been to college. That’s not true. I do know, because his Wikipedia page tells me he went to Georgetown and has a Master’s degree from New York University’s Cultural Reporting and Criticism program. But that isn’t the college we’re talking about here. This is the American public and/or private university, where the most potent bomb remains the Jaegerbomb. The spirit of Delta House still stains the floors. As the fun-loving cartoon President once said in the classic Simpsons episode where Homer goes back to college, “Lighten up Bitterman! That youngster will make a perfect addition to my cabinet! Secretary of partying down!”
But Williams, while not un-American — we don’t red-bait in my house — is still barely American in the Spring Break sense. He’s married to a French journalist and author, lives in Paris, and takes occasional breaks to teach at Bard College, where he’s a visiting professor. He is so far removed from ground-level American culture that he floats above us on a cloud of ideas. He tweeted out as much during the Charlie Kirk Memorial service in September, which could have looked like a ceremony from an alien planet to someone who hasn’t spent much time in Phoenix.
“I’ve spent half of my adult life living in one foreign country or another,” he wrote, “and I don’t think I’ve ever felt so estranged from the surrounding culture as I am from the aesthetics and sensibilities of this movement. Not even a criticism, I just feel more at home in Greece than in these images.”
In Greece? That bastion of intellectual activity? Unless Williams, like Indiana Jones, has a time-traveling device that allows him to visit Archimedes (who was actually from Sicily) or Plato in the Symposium, he can’t possibly be having profound intellectual experiences in Greece. My wife and I visited Greece for our 25th anniversary last summer. We had a great time, and, sure, we absorbed the art and architecture of antiquity, saw the Caryatids and the Minoan frescoes, and lived the life of the mind on guided museum tours. But we also soaked up the sun, rode speedboats around the coast, and pounded a shot of raki at every lunch.
Last summer, as I’m sure it will be this summer, Greece was full of partying college kids, many of them American, who didn’t give a rat’s butt about DOGE or whatever the outrage cycle was telling them to be mad about in 2025. The beaches of Crete, or Paxos, or Naxos, or Ios, or Santorini are a lot more like the beaches of Ibiza, or Panama City, Fort Lauderdale, or the Jersey Shore than anything that Thomas Chatterton Williams might possibly lecture you about at the Aspen Institute.
The kids on Fox News would have fit in fine in Greece, where everyone was partying. Because they, unlike certain people with intellectual pretensions (including, occasionally, myself), understand that not everything has to be about social justice and man’s search for meaning. And there are a lot more bikini wearers than there are “public intellectuals.” If you can manage it, life is supposed to be dumb and fun. This is why we fight.
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Neal Pollack, “the greatest living American writer,” is the author of 12 semi-bestselling books of fiction and nonfiction and is a three-time “Jeopardy!” champion.
