QUOTE OF THE DAY – AT 9:02 A.M. ET:  From Victor Davis Hanson, at RealClearPolitics, about the growth of a new generation of sophists who ply their trade between New York and Washington.  (I'd include Boston in that.)  As usual, Hanson nails it:

There is also a new generation of young, sophistic bloggers who offer their wisdom from the New York-Washington corridor. They are usually graduates of America's elite colleges and navigate in an upscale urban landscape. One, the Washington Post's 26-year-old Ezra Klein, recently scoffed to his readers that a bothersome U.S. Constitution was "100 years old" and had "no binding power on anything."

Perhaps Mr. Klein might examinine whether the First Amendment has any binding power on protecting his right to publish.  Hmm.  I hear Mr. Klein reconsidering.

One constant here is equating wisdom with a certificate of graduation from a prestigious school. If, in the fashion of the sophist Protagoras, one writes that record cold proves record heat, or that record borrowing and printing money will create jobs and sustained economic growth, or that a 223-year-old Constitution is 100 years old and largely irrelevant, then credibility can be claimed only in the title or the credentials -- but not the logic -- of the writer.

America is huge and diverse, but the world of our credentialed experts is quite small, warped and monotonous -- circumscribed largely by the prestigious university and an office in the incestuous Washington-New York corridor. There are plenty of prizes, honors and degrees among our policy setters and experts, but very little experience in running a business in Oklahoma, raising a large family in Kansas, or working on an assembly line in Michigan, a military base in Texas, a boat in Alaska or a ranch in Idaho.

In classical sophistic fashion, rhetoric is never far from personal profit. Multimillionaire Al Gore convinced the governments of the Western world that they were facing a global-warming Armageddon, then hired out his services to address the hysteria that he helped create.

COMMENT:  One serious threat to this country is that the painstream media is now loaded with members of this "credentialed" class.  At one time you didn't even need a college degree to work for a newspaper.  Now the "leading" news organizations require it, and they prefer the "names," the Ivies and their equivalent.  Notice the improvement.

So how much enthusiasm do you think there is, in journalism or government, to really challenge the credentialed society and its implications?  Not much.  I recall some years ago the head of one of Hollywood's leading talent agencies boasting that half his interns were from Ivy League schools.  I wondered at the time how this related to anything of importance.

Abraham Lincoln had one year of schooling.  Ronald Reagan went to a tiny college in Illinois.  I certainly don't wish to demean any university, and I respect fine education (to the extent that it exists in many places).  In my own immediate household we have five so-called "prestige" degrees.  We've seen the good and the not so good.  But we as a society must get past this idea that going to a particular school makes you a better, wiser or more talented person.  It does not.  Believe me, some of the dreariest, most untalented people I met in Hollywood had "Ivy League" next to their names.

There's an old saying in show business that there isn't a single Juilliard graduate who wouldn't give everything to be able to write one Irving Berlin song.   Irving Berlin had virtually no education, and couldn't even read music.

And we recall the famous story of a meeting between Lyndon Johnson, who'd just become vice president, and Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn.  Johnson had just attended his first Kennedy administration cabinet meeting, and he told Rayburn – this is an approximate quote – "Sam, you should've seen it.  There were three people from Harvard, two from MIT, and a couple from Yale..."  Rayburn stopped LBJ, thought for a moment, and replied, "Lyndon, I wish just one of them had run for sheriff."

Indeed. 

January 6, 2011