Kanye West does not care about Haiti

Remember back when Kanye West had balls? No fishsticks.

It used to be you could count on him to show up to an event and say some shit people were hoping he wouldn't have said. It may not have been anything other than claiming that MTV lost its credibility, for giving the award for video of the year to a genuinely brilliant video by Justice, rather than one of his expensive and yet conceptually retarded clips, but that's because Kanye West isn't the sharpest pencil in the box.

I realized this years ago, way before the Kanye hype cycle had even kicked into full gear, let alone before there were any signs of a backlash. I knew something was up when I heard the College Dropout, and he was all butthurt over having dropped out of college to pursue a career in the music business, as if graduating from college is such a big deal. I was graduating from college myself at the time, and the shit didn't make any sense to me. I wish I'd spent that five years amassing a huge collection of Internets pr0n. You know, something I could use in my adult life.

I'm not saying education isn't important, but higher education as it exists in the US is just part of a scam the TIs came up with to keep this country's wealth in the hands of the elite: They make it ridonkulously expensive to get a college degree, so that only people who have a shedload of money in the first place can get one, and of course you can't get a well-paying job, if you don't have a college degree, and so the cycle continues.

If the banks have any money left, you could get a loan, but good luck trying to pay that shit off. Barack Obama was paying his college loans off until he became president - and he's Barack Obama. Of course, he went to fancy schools like Columbia and Harvard Law. You could go to a shitty school no one's ever heard of and pay way less money, but with the job you'd get, it'd probably take you just as long to pay off your loans. So you're fucked either way. You'll never be able to amass a significant amount of wealth.

And that's not even taking into account racism. What if you borrow all of that money to go to school, but then you can't get a job, because you're black? That shit happens all the time. Studies have shown that a white guy who just got out of prison is more likely to get a job than a black guy with no criminal record. As recently as a few weeks ago, there was a story on the front page of the New York Times about how black guys with advanced degrees from good schools couldn't find a decent job. A subsequent story described the phenomenon of black applicants "whitening" their resumes, just so they could get turned down at the interview stage, rather than the initial inquiry.

If you're black, there's a pretty legitimate case to be made for not pursuing a higher education, not because there's no value in being well-educated, but because you could end up even more fucked than if you hadn't gone to college. There's a tacit agreement in this country that if you work hard and get an education you'll be able to make a decent living, and corporate America isn't holding up its end of the bargain. And obviously the government's not gonna do anything about it. Those guys from Freakonomics might want to look into that.

It could be that Kanye West was on to something, regardless of whether or not that was his thought process. He was probably just too dumb to graduate. I consulted the Google re: the school he dropped out of, and it didn't strike me as being particularly rigorous, academically. Granted, this was based on a cursory perusal of its website, but it wasn't a very slick-looking website. Then there was the fact that his mom was a professor there, so he could have attended for free, and the fact that he was already like 27 at the time, i.e. five years older than the typical college graduate. He could have been graduated from college.

To think how dangerous a guy like Kanye would be, if he had opinions about anything other than Beyonce videos. He has a team of teh ghey guys he travels with, to help him pick out his clothes (not even a joke, mind you), but what if he had someone who could provide him with a proper socialist perspective on current events? We caught a rare glimpse of what might be, going on five years ago (yikes!), at that telethon to benefit the victims of Hurricane Katrina. He and Mike Myers were supposed to encourage people to call in and make a pledge, but instead he decided to take it as an opportunity to tell the world that George Bush doesn't care about black people. Which of course isn't inaccurate, but imagine the spiel he could have come up with, if he'd spent years of his life sitting around in his underwear reading Infowars, like I have.

The organizers of this George Clooney telethon to benefit the victims of the earthquake down in Haiti aren't taking any such chances. They purposely didn't invite Kanye to perform, lest he pull some shit like the shit he pulled at the most recent VMAs (or any number of other events, for that matter), and they even went so far as to let word slip that they did. They must not have been concerned with how Kanye would respond. Normally, this is the time when Kanye would take to his blog or some shit and let loose on them for thinking he would do something to fuck up an event like this, but I know MTV is involved, and they probably had to check him, after what he did to Taylor Swift. Plus, what would he even say, if he did have the balls to say something?