Holding onto hurts and social structures way past their use-by date – what’s the point? Who cares? I expect just about everyone has had even worse and more damaging exclusions had hurt after they left high school than before. But what’s written here seems to imply the opposite.

As for suspicion of the elite, the bright, the expert – that’s a quite separate issue in my mind, and based on decades of experts who turned out to be wrong. Some of those failures aren’t real ones – they’re situations in which the media puts forth some misbegotten version of some expert’s theory, which is what turned out to be wrong. But sometimes experts contradict each other, and sometimes they’re dead wrong. Sometimes, as in the eugenics movement and the ‘right-to-die’ movement, they’re threatening the very existence of non-experts. I’m not in the least surprised that people distrust experts or the elite. I myself double check the expertise of my doctor by looking up the characteristics of drugs she prescribes – and the expertise of a doctor is relatively easy to confirm compared to the expertise of some philosopher who says that whole categories of people shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce or even survive.

And now I must try to work and not spend too much time on a very promising local political story – our leader, the man in charge of our medical system, the one who’s been involved in an extremely bitter battle with various health-care unions, the self-made millionaire has gone to the US for heart surgery.

The political fallout should be fascinating. So far, one private (ie from a friend) comment was that the lack of privacy alone would ensure that she’d go elsewhere if she were rich and in a position to have so many people who would risk their jobs to get back at her by leaking all her private medical information.

Being black was a point in Obama’s favor. I think it was for most of us. The sticking point was his belief that the Kennedy School of Government is the fount of all wisdom.
When Bill Buckley said he’d rather see the country run by the first 300 names in a Cambridge telephone directory than by the faculty of Yale, he was not being a yahoo. He was expressing a rational preference based on experience. Well, it’s 40 years later, and here they come again, filled with legislative nostrums for everything they imagine ails us. They’re not even new. It’s as though instead of electing a congress and appointing a cabinet in 2008, we just reprised LBJ’s.
And when Jane talks about the country valuing ignorance–mind you at the same time Obama is complaining that the poor ignorant voters just weren’t paying enough attention to his wonderful ideas–I hear a long line of boneheaded liberals dating back to Adlai Stevenson, dumber than rocks and with Ivy League degrees, blaming the electorate for not being bright enough to appreciate them.

As for people being suspicious of education or intelligence, no doubt there are some. There always are, and 60 years of wrapping ticking bombs in Ivy League diplomas will have added to their numbers. But isn’t this the same Jane Haddam who was talking about the wonderful sales of educational CDs? And complaining that kids were going to college who didn’t have the intellectual wherewithal? No doubt they complain about distribution requirements. I did. You should have seen my Economics, Political Science and Sociology courses, let alone Ethics. And if I wanted to better appreciate books, the last place I’d go would be to the English Department.

The people I know who hire want to hire the brightest most knowledgeable people they can, and no one wants to work for a moron or an ignoramus. But most of us are a little wary by now of the fellow with the expensive suit, the prestigious degree and the plan approved by the experts.
The trick to being a successful snake oil salesman is to leave enough interval between the trips.

Let me point out that I’m a nerd, intelligent, interested in History, highly educated and read a lot. I never had Jane’s experience in High School – perhaps I was too unsociable to be a target.

But lets take some things I’ve come across recently.

1. A poster in RAM defended the US deficit on the grounds that in bad times you run deficits, in good times you run surpluses. I was taught the same thing in the 1950s but 50 years of observation has taught me that in good times the US Congress still runs deficits. The theory sounds good but the experiment shows that politicians lack the discipline to make it work.

I’m so tired of educated people who won’t learn from experience.

2. Some years ago, there was a prediction of a shortage of doctors in Australia. The government doubled the enrollment in medical schools. Now those new graduates are complaining that they lack confidence in their skills. The problem is that the only way to develop skills is to practice on real patients in hospitals and there are not enough senior doctors to properly mentor the new graduates. Surely, that could have been predicted. Doubling the number of students doesn’t double the number of senior doctors.

Yet the plan was produced by highly educated specialists.

3. The state governments here are producing plan after plan for public transport in Sydney based on what they think Sydney will need 50 years from now. One government produces a plan and the next government scraps the plan. OK, that’s politics but the real fallacy is experts in the civil service who think they can predict conditions 50 years ahead.

My parents were born around 1900. They certainly couldn’t have predicted the 1950s. I was an adult in the 1960s. I could not have predicted life in 2010.

I’m very tired of experts who try to plan 2 generations ahead.

In response to the blog entry about the “elitist class” with Ivy League educations vs. smart people with less formal education who make their livings by manual labor: I think that many voters want someone who seems like what we southerners call a “good ol’ boy” (or girl in some cases) as distinct from the redneck (who are angry and tend not to have personalities conducive to politics.) Good ol’ boys/girls are populists, in my opinion, who flaunt their similarity to “common, ordinary people,” whose wants and needs they share. George Wallace was a prime example of that. It has been written that he espoused racism and did the infamous stand in the school house door merely to get elected. Prior to his first campaign for governor, he allied himself with Big Jim Folsom, who, for all his faults, was sympathetic to civil rights issues. W and Reagan did the “good ol’ boy’ approach extremely well. And the lack of “good ol’ boy” persona was what defeated both Kerry and Dukakis, in my opinion. Kennedy had the common touch but he didn’t disclaim his education or attention to intellectual matters. Same with Clinton. Obama is in his own league, I think. He certainly appealed to voters from all economic and educational levels but there were those, I feel, who resented him because he as a “smart” black man. I want my elected officials to have as much education as possible and an objective attitude that allows him to see both sides of an issue and not just espouse a “people like you and me” bias toward issues that affect the whole country.