Mike Milik’s review of “A Thousand Acres” (Iowa State Daily, Tuesday, Sept. 23) is to movie critiquing what the dumbing-down of basically all curricula and grade inflation is to most American colleges and universities since at least the 1980s.

What can be asked of both (his critique and the condition of American higher education) is this: Is it any wonder people of his ilk still expect — and actually find desirable — the spoonfeeding of Pablum?

This is followed by the nappy, lapping up by some daddy-and-mommy-type of the drool spilling out the commissures (of either the lips or the brains), ‘cuz it certainly ain’t absorbed.

Instead of self-employing an iota of imagination or some resemblance of (any) substance and depth — or, Allah forbid, simply having read the book before publishing about a portrayal of it — this critique of his certainly bespeaks of a person who has neither actually lived an agrarian life, let alone grown up and struggled.

Nor does Milik seem as one who gets up every morning to strive to feed the world or know or experience a rural reality.

Nor does he realize the marked (and, what should be, stunning) diminishing, discounting and dismissal of isolated farmers nearly everywhere in the world. These are people who happen to be little girls, big girls and women who, nevertheless, actually DO 75 percent of that agricultural work worldwide.

The critic, while disparaging the film’s lines altogether, forgot to point out one of its truest, “I was a ninny. I was a simpleton.” And then he did not bother to describe the character’s application of that line and in what context — like “the thought process.”

Blue Maas

Secretary

Graduate college