Young, unemployed, forced to rock

From The New York Times’ piece on the young college grads waiting out high unemployment:

Likewise, Amy Klein, who graduated from Harvard in 2007 with a degree in English literature, couldn’t find a job in publishing. At one point, she had applied for an editorial-assistant job at Gourmet magazine. Less than two weeks later, Condé Nast shut down that 68- year-old magazine. “So much for that job application,” said Ms. Klein, now 26.

One night she bumped into a friend, who asked her to join a punk rock band, Titus Andronicus, as a guitarist. Once, that might have been considered professional suicide. But weighed against a dreary day job, music suddenly held considerable appeal. So last spring, she sublet her room in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn and toured the country in an old Chevy minivan.

Has anyone even collected good statistics on just how many college grads, with nowhere left to turn, have been forced to join Titus Andronicus? Anecdotal reports indicate more young people are joining the band Titus Andronicus than at any point in history.

But will Obama propose any remedy? And even if he does, will it even have any impact? This is the state of our political discourse. We’re witnessing the Titus Andronicus-ification of the unemployed, yet we fail to act.

(I’m not sure why I find this bit of reporting so amusing. FWIW, A More Perfect Union is a good song.)