America being run from the faculty lounge

Victor Davis Hanson is a rare academic with his feet planted in the real world:

We are being run by former academics or career politicians and bureaucrats who rely on academic wisdom — note the response to the Gulf slick, the Iranian bomb, or the rising deficits. Obama’s key 500 appointees, like himself, have little experience in commerce, business, law, medicine, or the military, but lots of experience in the academic revolving door.

When I would go to department meetings, get coffee, or see faculty at receptions, I could never quite understand the aberrant mental processes. There was never a connection between our salaries and the source of wealth generated to pay them. Taxes could be limitless, because a Michelle’s proverbial “they” had far too much money anyway, and so spent their lucre on needless things like jet skis and SUVs. Better for the university to have it and spread it around wisely.

Foreigners were usually smarter than Americans, mostly because they took the train and were without a Ram pickup in their garages. Fright surrounded things like flipping back the circuit breaker or unplugging the sewer line under the house; more mysterious were the grubby folk who didn’t eat arugula and were called in to conjure up a fix to these bothersome distractions.

Ambiguity in speech, not clarity was preferred; the ability to adduce ten different points of view was always considered superior to deciding on one. Tantrums, the occasional obscenity, the knife-in-the-back memo always assumed a sort of rule that such rascality never earned a punch in the face; the art was to be as cruel as possible without resort to violence. Yet when gut-check time came to vote openly yes or no and take the consequences, most voted present by skipping out or abstaining.

The white male Midwestern student without money or connections was to be pitied and ignored as a loser as much as was the discriminated black student of the 1940s and 1950s. The more constructed identities the better — I remember the female, gay, half-black administrator achieving a rare “threefer” and soaring through the state university system cursus honorum.

The perverse was always preferred to the logical: so a Mao was better than a Churchill, Lincoln was faulted for not possessing 1999-era academic sensitivity, and FDR not WWII saved the economy from further depression. Versailles explains Hitler rather than his own insane hatreds. The Soviet and Chinese nightmares were problematic and based on misunderstandings of Marx rather than natural conclusions from him. The real fear after 9/11 is backlash, not more terrorism. The non-Christian nihilist Timothy McVeigh or the Columbine Satanists are proof of widespread Christian terrorism; the last 50 aborted Islamic terrorist plots are aberrations.

If you wonder how our present administration’s attitudes toward business, commerce, taxes, finance, race, national security and foreign policy now play out, just drop by a local faculty lounge for a few minutes and listen up — America in 2010 will suddenly make sense, and perhaps scare the hell out of you all at once.