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..

Cliche as Conversation in New America

I have observed, so as to stick with ' Grumpy Sociology' theme of this 'blog', that American's don't seem to speak to one another anymore with anything approaching original thought. They instead seem to have whole conversations that are almost exclusively regurgitations of Conventional Wisdom and Cliche's, the kind of stuff an active brain hears once, processes, but doesn't feel the need to ever say again. It might just be a drunk white guy thing to do, but it's also a drunk white girl thing to do, and a sober white guy thing to do, and a sober white girl thing to do, and a sober red neck thing to do, and a drunk red neck thing to do, and on and on...
Sometime in the 1970's I feel as if movies became pervasive enough that there was no hiding from the stereotypes it would observe, examine, and display, and the news media did the same thing. After a while, instead of endeavoring to be unique, the vast majority of people seemed to just give up, join one or another stereotype, and just parrot it's mantras all day long.. it went from being somehow complex prior to our overexposure, to just being this hollow parroting.. This might be a nostalgic view, that somehow there was more substance behind the cliche's a harder life for the NYC stock World War Two character or cop or stock pickup driving southern boy back in the day, when the world was less depicted, and a little less glossy and smooth; that it somehow had more texture, but was still driven by group dynamics, we just follow these hollow roles more than ever because the individual texture is gone, we don't know how to get it back, so now we are just mouthfuls of affirmation of that hollow role we picked out... almost daily in the contiguous 48 I feel like that is exactly what I see... 12 Angry Men fades to Dog Day Afternoon, which fades to Heat 2, which fades in turn to a crack on Friends or How I Met Your Mother about a headier past, by some nostalgic writer, and conversation devolves into some endless blather of group opinion affirmation as we wait for our wing dings to heat up in the national sports bar from hell.. and any deviation from this is an abdication, and leads to some endlessly rehashed sharing of more cliched and regurgitated opinions with nary a new fact or idea submitted or entertained.. and the status quo lives on, and we get to keep doing what we think we should be unabated, until the next round of wings arrives...