[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Achievetrons

[Bill Totten]

by Lewis H Lapham

Harper's Magazine (March 2009)

Few men are so disinterested as to prefer to live in discomfort under a
government which they hold to be right, rather than in comfort under one
which they hold to be wrong.
--- C V Wedgwood

President Barack Obama's Christmas shopping for cabinet officers in
December of last year prompted the national news media to rejoice in the
glad tiding that his campaign slogan, "Change you can believe in", was
just and only that, a slogan. Instead of showing himself partial to
"closet radicals" who might pose some sort of deep downfield threat to
the status quo, Obama was choosing wisely from the high-end, happy few,
dispensing with "the romantic and failed notion" that individuals never
before seen on the White House lawn could provide the "maturity" needed
"in a time of war and economic crisis". David Brooks assured his readers
in the New York Times that the incoming apparat, its members "twice as
smart as the poor reporters who have to cover them", embodied "the best
of the Washington insiders". "Achievetrons ... who got double 800s on
their SATs", said Brooks, taking pains to list the schools from which
they had received diplomas (Columbia, Harvard, Wellesley, Harvard Law,
Stanford, Yale Law, Princeton, et cetera) attesting to the worth of
their wise counsel. Karl Rove, former advance man for President George
W. Bush, informed the Wall Street Journal that Tim Geithner (Dartmouth,
Johns Hopkins) as secretary of the Treasury and Larry Summers (MIT,
Harvard) as director of the National Economic Council were "solid
picks", both investments rated "reassuring" and "market-oriented". Max
Boot, contributor to Commentary and visiting fellow at the Council on
Foreign Relations, advised the wandering spirits in the blogosphere that
"only churlish partisans of both the left and the right" could quarrel
with the naming of Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale Law) as secretary of
state and Robert Gates (Georgetown) as secretary of defense,
appointments that "could just as easily have come from a President McCain".

The mood was not as festive in the workshops of the romantic Left, but
even the churls who thought the appointees insufficiently progressive in
their views of the American future took comfort in the remembrance of
their candidate saying somewhere in a post-election speech, "Understand
where the vision, for change comes from. First and foremost, it comes
from me." David Corn, the Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones, told
the Washington Post that although the hotheads among his acquaintance
were "disappointed, irritated or fit to be tied", they held fast to the
belief that Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) would set the agenda,
reprogram the operatives complicit in the stupidity and cynicism of the
Bush and Clinton administrations; pragmatism was the watchword, and the
dawning of a bright new day was guaranteed by the installation of what
Brooks proclaimed a "valedictocracy", post-partisan and non-ideological,
its shoes shined, its hair combed, its ambition neatly pressed.

The recommendation deserves to be ranked with the ones until recently in
vogue at the Palm Beach Country Club among the members acquainted with
the achievetron Bernie Madoff. For the past sixty years the deputies
assigned to engineer the domestic and foreign policies of governments
newly arriving in Washington have come outfitted with similar
qualifications - first-class schools, state-of-the-art networking,
apprenticeship in a legislative body or a think tank - and for sixty
years they have managed to weaken rather than strengthen the American
democracy, ending their terms of office as objects of ridicule if not
under threat of criminal arrest.

The Harvard wunderkinds (aka "the best and the brightest") who followed
President John F Kennedy into the White House in 1961 hung around the
map tables long enough to point the country in the direction of the
Vietnam War. Henry Kissinger, another Harvard prodigy, imparted to
American statecraft the modus operandi of a Mafia cartel. The Reagan
Administration imported its book of revelation from the University of
Chicago's School of Economics ("privatization" the watchword,
"unfettered free market" the Christian name for Zeus) and by so doing
set in motion what lately has come to be seen as a long-running Ponzi
scheme. Take into account the Ivy League's contributions to the Bush
Administration - Attorney General John Ashcroft (Yale), Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld (Princeton), director of Homeland Security
Michael Chertoff (Harvard) - and I can imagine a doctoral thesis
commissioned by the Kennedy School of Government and meant to determine
which of the country's leading institutions of higher learning over the
past fifty years has done the most damage to the health and happiness of
the American people.

It's conceivable that the Obama Administration will prove itself the
exception to the rule, but when the president says that his vision for
change "comes from me" he leaves open the question as to whether he
intends to generate it ex cathedra or ex nihilo. Neither method offers
much chance of success if what is wanted or required is a recasting of
the American democracy on a scale comparable to Franklin Roosevelt's New
Deal. Socioeconomic alterations of a magnitude sufficient to be
recognised as such tend to be collective enterprises, usually brought
about by powers of mind and forces of circumstance outside, not inside,
the circle of A-list opinion - the barbarians at the gates of
fifth-century Rome, the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation
personae non gratae at the Vatican, the authors of the American
Constitution far removed from the certain truths seated on velvet
cushions in eighteenth-century London. Ulysses S Grant, perhaps
Lincoln's most effective general, was virtually unknown to the War
Office in Washington before the bombardment of Fort Sumter; during the
Great Depression of the 1930s, FDR composed a "Brain Trust" of
individuals (some of them academics, others not, none of them rounded up
from the quorum of usual suspects) as willing as the president to "take
a method and try it; if it fails, admit it frankly, and try another".

The courses of undergraduate instruction at our prestigious colleges and
universities no longer encourage or reward the freedoms of mind likely
to disturb the country's social and political seating plan. During the
early years of the twentieth century, before America fell afoul of the
dream of empire, the students on the lawns of academe, most of them
inheritors of wealth and social position, already were assured of their
getting ahead in the world. They could afford to take chances, to read
or not to read the next day's letter from Virginia Woolf or Julius
Caesar, to mess up the protocols of political correctness, worship false
gods, maybe go to Paris to try their luck with absinthe, their hand and
eye at modern art or ancient decadence. If they strayed into the
wilderness of politics, they did so in the manner of both Theodore and
Franklin Roosevelt, with the enthusiasm of the amateur explorer.

The amateur spirit, which is also the democratic spirit, didn't survive
the rising of the American nation-state from the ashes of Dresden and
Hiroshima. The Cold War with the Russians brought with it the lesson
that even the most amiable and well-intentioned of republics can't
afford to leave home without a "meritocracy" so lacking in a
disrespectful turn of mind as to be fit for service not only at the
White House and the CIA but also with General Motors and the New York
Times. The doctrines of egalitarianism forbid the convenience of a
ruling elite present at birth. The product must be fabricated, not in
the same volume as the light trucks made in Detroit, or the cattle
fattened in the Omaha feed lots, but as a priority deemed equally
essential to the homeland security. After some trouble with the
realignment of the educational objective during the excitements of the
1960s, the universities accepted their mission as way stations on the
pilgrim road to enlightened selfishness. As opposed to the health and
happiness of the American people, what is of interest is the wealth of
the American corporation and the power of the American state, the
syllabus geared to the arts and sciences of career management - how to
brighten the test scores, assemble the resume, clear the luggage through
the checkpoints of the law and business schools. The high fees charged
by the brand-name institutions include surer access to the nomenklatura
that writes the nation's laws, operates its government, manages its
money, and controls its news media. The catalogue also offers electives
in the examined life, but the consolations of philosophy hold little
value for a novitiate encouraged to believe that its acceptance into a
company of the elect dispenses with the unwelcome news that there might
be more things in heaven and earth than those accounted for in Fortes
magazine's annual list of America's top 400 fortunes. Achievetrons learn
to work the system, not to change it, to punch up the PowerPoints for
Citigroup and Disney and figure the exchange rate between an awkward
truth and a user-friendly lie. Where is the percentage in overthrowing
the idols of the marketplace or the tribe? If you're not in, you're out,
and when was out the better place to be?

Which isn't to say that Hillary Clinton hasn't read the letters of
Abraham Lincoln, or that Tim Geithner doesn't know how to analyze (in
three languages and five currencies) a Four Seasons hotel bill; that
Robert Gates isn't familiar with the theory of Admiral Alfred Thayer
Mahan, or that Larry Summers might make the mistake of turning to face
Jerusalem instead of Mecca when begging money from a Saudi prince. What
it does suggest is that President Obama's household staff, in accordance
with the protocols observed by "the best of the Washington insiders",
can be counted upon to place their own self-interest first and foremost
and to avoid fooling around with initiatives that threaten to leave a
stain on the rug. Clinton as senator from New York in 2002 voted for the
invasion of Iraq not because she knew or cared why America was embarking
on a mindless war but because what was wanted was a cheerful waving of
the pom-poms and the flag; Geithner as the president of the New York
Federal Reserve Bank in the winter of 2007 neglected to address the
impending trouble in the credit markets because to have done so would
have upset the Wall Street achievetrons folding and refolding sets of
imaginary numbers into paper hats and airplanes; Gates as deputy
director of the CIA in the 1980s painted his portrait of the evil Soviet
empire to match the one walking around in Ronald Reagan's head,
unwilling to believe that the Red Menace was mortal until the collapse
of the Berlin Wall in 1989 exposed his intelligence estimates as works
of science fiction; Summers in 1998 as President Bill Clinton's deputy
secretary of the Treasury served as one of the principal sponsors of our
current financial debacle, facilitating repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act
and joining with Secretary Robert Rubin (Harvard, Yale Law) and Federal
Reserve Bank Chairman Alan Greenspan (New York University) to force the
resignation of Brooksley Born, chair of the Commodities Futures Trading
Commission, who urged regulation of the markets in new derivatives. The
motion to block the large-scale accumulation of toxic debt ran counter
to the belief, then all the rage among the bankers at JPMorgan Chase and
Goldman Sachs as among the members of the Palm Beach Country Club, that
money, deftly cultivated by its cronies, grows on trees.

Obama, in his custom-tailored personae both as a United States senator
and as a presidential candidate, draped himself in the same
accommodating cloth - careful to avoid offending the people who count,
content to leave the management of the country's finances to the
discretion of the Wall Street banks, its Middle Eastern policy to the
judgment of the Israeli lobby, its public-health care under the
supervision of the insurance syndicates, its bankruptcy laws in the
hands of the credit-card companies, its military spending to the wisdom
of the Pentagon. During last year's election campaign he enjoyed the
advantage of an incoherent opponent, a faltering economy, and the
incumbent Bush Administration's record of failure and disgrace. His
efficient acquisition of money and votes proved him to be a capable
entrepreneur, his eloquence showed him to be a charismatic politician.
The greater achievement - the act of electing a black man to the White
House, not the image of the actor - is that of the American citizenry, a
collective enterprise drawing together the energies of the democratic
spirit contained in the belief that what is great about America is not
the greatness of its gross domestic product but the greatness of its
love of liberty.

Our leading voices of informed opinion like to say that America now
finds itself in a state of unprecedented crisis, the whole of our
political and economic enterprise trembling on the verge of extinction.
They call upon the president to be "bold", to throw the moneychangers
out of the temple, bail out the banks and the automobile industry,
disgorge from the Augean stable on Capitol Hill its dungheap of
cowardice and self-congratulation. I don't know anybody who questions
President Obama's willingness to perform the labors of Hercules, but
where does he find the lionskin and the club? The redistributions of the
society's rich and poor require the hiring of domestic help willing to
move the furniture. Achievetrons don't do floors and windows. As
individuals they make very good company, and at the tables down at
Mory's the magic of their singing no doubt casts its spell, but if they
have paid attention to their studies, they can be trusted to know, as
does the valedictocracy otherwise known as the national news media, that
it's a far, far better thing to live in comfort under a government they
hold to be wrong than in discomfort under a government they hold to be
right.
_____

Lewis H Lapham is the National Correspondent for Harper's Magazine and
the editor of Lapham's Quarterly.


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