"Shattered Glass"

I saw the film Shattered Glass at 2:20 yesterday afternoon and wept with anger as I returned to my car.

Now, I can attend an afternoon screening because I work part-time. That is not the way I want things to be but more on the film.

The Shattered of the title is Stephen Glass, who at age 24 was an assistant editor of The New Republic, where the average age of the editorial staff was 24. Glass indulged in creative writing rather than reportage and was found out by Forbes online when an enterprising writer/researcher there did the obvious: he researched a software company, Jukt Micronics, that Glass made up.

When I was in my senior year of college (1968-69) and was looking, along with my classmates, especially from the journalism department, for that important first job, we knew that we would have to start at small town weeklies or in low level public relations' jobs, like writing press releases for colleges. One of my classmates had the cheek to apply to the wire services and was told to return to her home town -- well, to her home province, she was from Toronto and that is too big a city to start in -- and work for a year and then come back.

Maybe it is internships, but these kids seem to start at the top. I cried because in my forties, before I realized I needed a divorce, I returned to school in order to return to the world of work and earn my own living. Since I had journalism experience and finished a master's degree in what is essentially literary history, I thought I could walk into a book publishing job. What a fool I was!

I applied for an internship which puts me in the Six Degrees of Separation thing with Glass and was told, "Dear, you're not 23."

In the movie, Hayden Christensen as Glass excuses himself by saying boys from his sort of family in his sort of Chicago suburb are expected to be more. Massachusetts readers may remember a similiar situation from politics:Gubernatorial candidate John Lakian who faked his resume then said, "everyone gives 110%." Others might remember the movie "wag the dog" when the character presented by (in her case, it is not acted by) Anne Heche, about to be caught in a lie, pleads strong medication and that reminds us of erstwhile NYTimes fabricator Jayson Blair who pleaded mental problems.

So, we put babies in positions of responsibility after a short life time of having mom and dad write checks for them and allow them to flatter their way into places they should not be and sit back and allow them to cover their lies with excuses, while we ignore experience, maturity and skill.