What the F%^& happened to National Geographic?

Remember when George Bailey thought this magazine was the Cat's Meow? How it filled him with dreams of seeing the world... would that happen today to a young kid growing up in Wappengers Falls (check out the Capra film It's A Wonderful Life, if you have never lived through an event called Christmas in America)?
Hell no, the F-ing kid would end up a graphic designer, because all we get from National Geographic anymore is Graphics, as if there is nothing left to explore in the world without some robot or animated creature doing it for us.. what the F happened to you guys?
I used to work across the street from the Nat Geo foundation, and I should have realized back then what was going on. Somehow they have lost their principals.Instead of being a scholarly organization, contributing to depth, they have joined the jingoistic idiots society, contributed to the shortening of our attention span, and reveal less and less about the world if it can't be summed up in a graphic that a 5 year old would understand.. what happened to you guys? When I read it now, I resign myself to more idiocy about the latest in aerospace technology or the fight against Al Queda, the same shit they are chasing The History Channel down the tubes to do (Discovery, you're OK, somehow you never pretended to be much else,and your stuff is somehow pretty honest still), conspiracy theory bull shit and all the rest, when back int he day the thing was an extension of the Field Museum of Chicago or Natural History in New York, filled with anthropology and History and cool Archeology.. those of us who dream Indiana Jones style weren't disappointed.. now it's some combo of Tron and Air & Space. Maybe it's being stuck in DC.. like Smithsonian, they think everything has to have mass appeal, it has to be glitzy and some sad compromise that will never offend a Mormon in the Utah Valley, even if it tastes like white bread to anyone with a brain. America wants articles about cute kittens playing with Gorillas.. well hell, serve it up.. we'll find a way to make it pseudo scientific... the concerned housewives who have CNN in the background want to hear more about some pseudo scientific news topic.. here it is on a Yellow Platter, wrapped in 'you'll sound smart at dinner' conventional wisdom.
For a while you guys were loosing me because you were so stuck on global warming,and I ain't denying it, but it got old, and after a while, it felt like you were insulting my intelligence by telling the same story about guys on a glacier taking measurements again and again.. I got friends who do this work, quit making it exotic for the people in Sheboygan when there are still truly exotic things happening in the world. You are getting scooped by Discovery Magazine, where the intelligent but nomenclature illiterate can still go to actually learn about science, so how out some geography for a change, or how bout showing me a beautiful world it actually still takes balls to get to, not some place regurgitated from '1001 Places To Go Before Your Yuppie Boss Fires You'.. And I am not even taking on here what the heck happened to the weird conspiracy theory End of Mayan Calendar garbage that their TV channel put's out on more than occasionally.
I feel like this all started with Ballard, or maybe the board of directors got stuck in some Georgetown or Tacoma Park Chatterbox where they just like to hear how smart they are, but this isn't what the magazine was originally about. I feel like ever since they covered Titanic and Ballard (and incidentally swallowed a huge cover story, not that I am complaining about secretly recovering nuclear material) or maybe it was the Hologram Issue when I was a kid, somehow they fell for whiz bang when the resigned themselves to the fact that the world is getting smaller, but the world keeps changing,and in it's recesses as well there are some pretty cool things still growing in the cracks, that aren't endangered..maybe I am selling them short, maybe I don't know what it's like to be in their editorial meetings, but I feel like it must be like working for Lucas Films with the Chinese plush toy manufacturer on speed dial.. this was a Society, not a network.. get did of Nat Geo Travel and Kids, and all the stupid idiots who grew up obsessed with watch commercials trying to figure out how to spend their inherited millions, and are reliving the latest micro event on Everest, and show me the world again.. please.. so I have someplace to dream about going from Wappinger Falls again. Get some reporters with balls, like from Vice Magazine or that guy who danced all over the world, (Where the Hell is Matt? At least it was beautiful!) and get back to what made us dream, not just stroking our national pride in some mad chase of the latest editorial trend.. for God's sake, you guys were part of our national dignity, our intellectual purview of the world, and I feel like it just washed down the Mayan Calendar drain..

'Second' City may be Ambitious...

Chicago, you are mediocre.... sure you're friendly,... gracelessly, but that's how so many people describe their first wife... for all your pretend edge, we can see right through to the fact that you compromised because you were pretty sure you couldn't make it anywhere else.. we can see that you have ambition but really no taste, that you like big and bold but are only comfortable with commoditized.. you wouldn't know good for real if it hit you like a winter wave from your crappy little fresh water pond which connects you to the happening trading empires of Sheboygan and Michigan City, oh joy, the cosmopolitan fervor of it all, like a modern Venice no doubt..
Your river running the wrong way is somehow a perfect symbol of what's happening to progress here..
Your cowed white men, shorn and shiny, shunned out of displaying even the slightest hint on sexual imagination or savagery in such an oddly feminine city, eager just to pretend to be everything a Disney shaped female imagination would want.

All your bleach blonds (Polish Chic, or Dump Truck Chic, as I keep thinking that they would do anything they can to not let you figure out their dad made his cash running dump trucks in the burbs somewhere) with their prized matter of fact-ness, the practicality that led them to this flat tomb of derivative and borrowed culture they so value (smells like fear, but sold as 'sensibility'), their accessibility a sad byproduct of the subconscious self loathing that goes with a life of compromise, and your old school tough guys, hanging their hat on the clubby-ness of presumed old school suffering Upton Sinclair style, while the union hall rocks fat full of no show cash, the defibrillators ready to try to keep another one on your rolls a few days longer, while the rest of your 'hip young crowd' tries to rebel without noise while still cherishing this sad basis as an origin. And lest ye forget your banal suburbanites, so proud of their flight from the south side or whatever pseudo urbanity they confuse with a sweltering Calcutta, or step up to the big burbs from someplace even more logical and less romantic (if possible, but beware it exists all through the Midwest!) but so eager to show not a lick of pretension (never thought you would miss it until now) as the bore you with banter born of an empty soul.. the Ned Reyerson of our Groundhogs Day in the Windy City...