The Sheila Variations

The Books: "The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn"

Next book in my Daily Book Excerpt:

The next book on my culture bookshelf is:

The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, by Diane Ravitch.

This book made me so angry I had a hard time finishing it. Diane Ravitch, a historian of education, worked in the US Dept. of Education under the first George Bush, and then was appointed to the National Assessment Governing Board by Clinton. This is not a book with a particular political axe to grind, but oh - there are many many axes here to grind. Mainly against special interest groups, minority groups, and the religious right (all of them working together - huh? This book describes a looking glass world) ... who insist that school text books and nationalized tests are edited so that the language is inoffensive.

Of course what is offensive to you might not be offensive to me, and vice versa - so text book publishers have just found it simpler to leave out anything that might cause them problems.

And so ... things are out of control now. Language is in a deadlock, as more and more things are seen as potentially offensive. Not even just plain old-fashioned offensive, but POTENTIALLY offensive. Questions on national tests shouldn't mention "mountains", for instance ... because some kids don't live near mountains, and that might be potentially upsetting for them to learn this fact. I am not exaggerating. That is one of her actual examples.

Ravitch, as she began her work in the Clinton administration, began to realize the extent to which there was a problem - and decided to research it more. What she uncovered is a WORLD of self-censorship ... The ridiculousness of some of these censored texts are enough to make you want to cry. The lunatics are running the asylum. We are letting the MOST sensitive on the planet, a small percentage, control the rest of us. If ONE person, one reaaallllly sensitive person, could be offended ... could be offended ... then the text book has to be modified. Hence: languages in text books are, first of all, dull. Dumbed down, flattened out, homogenized.

Anyway, I was absolutely enraged by this book.

I highly recommend it. It's very important. I saw Ravitch on The Daily Show, and she said something like: "This is something that is going on without the consent of the parents ... Nobody even knows how much censorship is going on ... I felt it was really important to shine a light on this."

In this weird world of oh-so-easily-offended people - the religious right and the politically-correct left merge. There is no difference. They are the Language Police.

It's a travesty. This is a very important book.

This excerpt has to do with Ravitch's first encounter with Riverside Publishing (a big text book publisher). Ravitch was part of a team to evaluate a proposed voluntary test, and they had met with Riverside to hear about their selection process of reading materials for the national test.

I wanted to interject screaming comments throughout that excerpt - it makes me so nuts. But I am grateful to Ravitch, for reporting a story that was pretty much invisible - and yet affects millions. I hope hope hope that this kind of censorship, and dread of "controversy" is an educational "phase", one that will pass eventually. Also -uhm - rock and roll is controversial??? On what planet? People, I hate to break it to you, but we live in the United States. We do not live in Iran. Rock and roll is not controversial, and if you think it is?? Maybe you need to be home schooling your kids or living on a deserted island where you won't have any contact with such an UPSETTING world.

Breathe ... breathe ...

I have never before read a book where I actually shouted at the pages.

EXCERPT FROM The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn, by Diane Ravitch.

As I tried to understand the reasoning of the reviewers, I remembered that in 1998 the president of Riverside Publishing had met with our committee to explain how reading passages for the voluntary national test would be selected. We expressed our hope that the test would be of high quality, that it would be more than just a basic skills test. We wanted the publisher to include passages based on good literature. We thought that children should read something worthwhile when they took the test, not just banal selections. We asked whether his company would choose some readings drawn from myths and fables and other classic literature. He said they would try, but we had to bear in mind that "everything written before 1970 was either gender biased or racially biased." He said this very casually, as though he was uttering a truth too weall known to need explanation or defense. This belief provided the backdrop for the document that he gave us that day, titled "Bias and Sensitivity Concerns in Testing."

When I first read this document, I was astonished by the list of topics that the test publishers considered out-of-bounds, and I filed it away. Two years later, in 2000, when I saw the results of the bias and sensitivity review, I retrieved this document and found that it held the key to the reviewers' assumptions. "Bias and Sensitivity Concerns in Testing" explained how the concept of bias had been redefined. It contained rules for self-censorship that most Americans, I believe, would find deeply disturbing.

The Riverside guidelines are a mixture of sensible general reminders about the unacceptability of bias, as well as detailed lists of words and topics that must be avoided on tests. "Bias", it declares, is anything in a test item that might cause any student to be distracted or upset. Bias is the presence of something in a test item that would result in different performance "for two individuals of the same ability but from different subgroups." So, for example, a test question that is upsetting to a member of group A (for instance, a girl) would prevent her from doing as well as someone who was from a different group (for instance, a boy). Bias, says the publisher, can cause inaccurate scores and measurement errors. It seems to be a settled principle that tests should not contain anything that is so upsetting to certain students that they cannot demonstrate what they know and can do. Presumably a very graphic description of violence, for example, would be so disturbing to some students that they would not be able to answer test questions. Presumably students would be upset by a test question that contained language that demeaned their race, gender, or religion. Riverside says that its tests "are designed to avoid language, symbols, gestures, words, phrases, or examples that are generally regarded as sexist, racist, otherwise offensive, inappropriate, or negative towards any group." In addition, tests should not contain any subject matter that anyone might consider "controversial or emotionally charged." Such things would distract test takers and prevent them from showing their true ability. It would be unfair, certainly, and the goal of a bias and sensitivity review is supposed to be fairness.

But then look at where the logic of fairness leads...

In addition to the list of banned controversial topics, there is an exhaustive description of "negative" and "sensitive" material that cannot appear on a test. Negative material includes (but is not limited to) parents quarreling, children mistreating each other, children acting disobediently toward their parents, and children showing disrespect for authority. Sensitive material includes paganism, satanism, parapsychology, magic, ghosts, extraterrestrials, Halloween, witches, or anything that might conjure up such subjects, even in the context of fantasy. Anything related to Halloween, such as pumpkins and masks, must be avoided. Gambling must be avoided, as must references to nudity, pregnancy, or giving birth, whether to animals or people. "Controversial" styles of music like rap and rock and roll are out.

But that is not all. Religious and political issues must be avoided. Reading passages must not contain even an "incidental reference" to anyone's religion. There must not be any mention of birthdays or religious holidays (including Thanksgiving), because some children do not have birthday parties and do not share the same religion. In any material about Native Americans, care must be exercised to steer clear of religious traditions.

There must be no reference in any test passage to evolution or the origins of the universe. Writers must avoid any mention of fossils or dinosaurs. Their very existence suggests the banned topic of evolution. However, it is acceptable to refer to "animals of long ago" if there is no mention of how old they are and no suggestion that the existence of these animals implies evolution...

The bias guidelines require that test questions "model healthful personal habits." Any references to smoking, drinking, or junk food must be eliminated. Writers must be cautious when depicting someone drinking coffee or tea and must take care not to mention even aspirin. Children must never be shown doing dangerous things, "no matter how good the moral of the story is."

The test passages must avoid beliefs, attitudes, or values that are not embraced by just about everybody. Fables are a particular concern, because they often conclude on a cynical note or have "a pragmatic moral" that someone may find offensive. Particularly taboo, the guidelines warn, is anything that suggests secular humanism, situation ethics, or New Age religion.

The people who select reading passages for tests are directed to seek out "uplifting topics". Anything depressing, disgusting, or scary should be eliminated.

Many topics are prohibited because testing experts agree that any less than ideal context will be so upsetting to some children that they will not be able to do their best on a test. But would children really be distracted if they read a story in which someone was fired or unemployed? Would they be disoriented if they read a story in which someone was seriously ill or parents were divorced? No educational research literature supports these prohibitions. There are no studies that show that children were unable to finish a test or do their best because they were asked to read a story in which the characters were rich or poor. Farewell then to Great Expectations, Little Lord Fauntleroy, and "The Little Match Girl", with their unacceptable images of wealth and poverty.

The prohibitions are there not because of research findings, but because the topics upset some adults, who assume that they will upset children in the same way. Some adults sincerely believe that children will project themselves into everything they read and that they will be deeply disturbed to read that someone else is taller than they, or that other children had a birthday party or live in a big house when perhaps they are not similarly privileged. It is hard to imagine that a fourth-grade student would be paralyzed by dread by reading a story that included descriptions of mice. Clearly forbidden by such a prohibition is any excerpt from books like EB White's Stuart Little or Robert Lawson's Ben and Me, not to mention stories of Mickey Mouse and Mighty Mouse, and other fictional mice beloved by generations of children.

Most of the prohibitions are a direct response to long-standing complaints from the religious right. Many of the banned topics are intended to avert the controversy that might erupt if the test referred to evolution or witchcraft or religion. Spokesmen for the religious right consider any description of behavior they do not like as an endowment of that behavior. They reject depictions of magic, witchcraft, and the supernatural; they don't want education materials to show people engaging in bad behavior, like children disobeying their parents. They have gone to court in several jurisdictions to protest against "secular humanism", "situation ethics", and "New Age" religion, because such ideas conflict with the moral code that is fixed in the Bible.

Test publishers have found that the best way to avoid controversy is to eliminate anything that might cause controversy. As the bias guidelines of Riverside Publishing show, quite a large number of topics are avoided (ie: censored) because fear of complaints by the religious right. But the bias guidelines try to mollify not only conservatives, but also feminists, and advocates for multiculturalism, the handicapped, and the aged. The publishers want everything to be happy, or at least not to be unhappy. Whereas the right gets topic control, the left gets control of language and images. To see how this works, we must consider what the test publisher describes as three types of fairness: representational fairness, language usage, and stereotyping.

The Books: "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference" (Malcolm Gladwell)

Next book in my Daily Book Excerpt:

Next book in my culture bookshelf:

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference , by Malcolm Gladwell.

I loved this book. Of course I did. That's why it's in my bookshelf. No unloved books here. Gladwell, an absolutely marveolous writer (and thinker - I have to add that ... he attempts to re-thinks things ... in a way very few cultural writers do) looks at the phenomenon known as "the tipping point".

The "tipping point" (according to the back of the book) is: "that magic moment when an idea, trend, or social behavior crosses a threshold, tips, and spreads like wildfire. Just as a single sick person can start an epidemic of the flu, so too can a small but precisely targeted push cause a fashion trend, the popularity of a new product, or a drop in the crime rate."

In other words: a couple of hipster kids down in the East Village start wearing Hush Puppies that they find in second-hand bins in vintage stores. A season later, the runways in Milan are filled with strutting Hush Puppy wearing supermodels. Anyone remember that?? Gladwell notices the trend, and also looks into WHY. How do ideas spread, how do they "tip", how do they go from one tiny corner of the populace ... to everywhere?

He comes up with some really cool answers. He's not just looking at fashion trends. Other things: like crime waves. The Internet and email. Sesame Street. He uses Paul Revere's ride as an example of what he calls "the law of connectors". Every tipping point needs to have one human being, one special human being, who acts as a "connector". (Actually, he says that every epidemic needs to have three people to make it "tip": Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen. You'll have to read the book to hear about the other two! But we'll touch on Connectors here.)

With all the great stuff in this book, the whole "connector" thing is what I really took away from it. It fascinated me.

I'm posting two excerpts from it - but they are both connected (pun pun pun).

One excerpt describes the "connector" phenomenon, and who such people are. The second is Gladwell's supremely original and very exciting analysis of Paul Revere's famous ride. Paul Revere: the ultimate connector.

My own take on this, and I've thought about it lots: The social impulse of Connectors is not cynical or manipulative. They are not "players". This is essential to understand. Genius party hosts are not just Martha Stewart wannabes. People who can throw a genuinely awesome party of 100 of their closest friends are usually Connectors. Connectors genuinely love people, and genuinely love introducing their friends to each other. They love blending their different social circles. Introducing their church friends to their work friends to their childhood friends is not anxiety-provoking to a Connector. Some people like to keep all their different circles separate, but to Connectors, such a feeling of connectedness is the air they breathe. Also: a Connector is not compartmentalized. A Connector isn't one person with his church group, another person with his work friends, and another with the guy who gives him his coffee every day. He does not have radical personality changes when he moves from group to group. You know those people who resist mixing groups? Who won't let the girlfriend meet his softball buddies, who would NEVER invite a co-worker to a party of his childhood friends. But Connectors loooove to mix.

My friend Mitchell, who I mention here pretty much every day, is a Connector. The story that Malcolm Gladwell told about his friend Jacob in the excerpt above is very similar to the same story I could tell about Mitchell. Mitchell is at the top of a pyramid. Not just because of my love for him but because he has been instrumental in bringing all kinds of cool people into my life, who I then have gone off to have separate great friendships with. NOTHING makes Mitchell happier than to watch two of his friends form their own friendship, independent of him. To someone who is not a Connector, that would be terrifying, and that person would be very jealous. If Mitchell were not a Connector, he would be anxious that Alex and I (his friend first) now talk on the phone independently of him, and carry on a friendship completely separate from him. It's not that we leave him out, it's just that she and I have become friends now too ... we need to talk to each other, and we don't need to wait for Mitchell to bring us together again. Mitchell thinks it's AWESOME that we have become friends, and says stuff like, "I just knew you guys would hit it off. I knew it!"

See the generosity there? Connectors are the definition of generosity.

Speaking of generosity, let's go on to excerpt # 2 which is the description of Paul Revere, the Connector:

On the afternoon of April 18, 1775, a young boy who worked at a livery stable in Boston overheard one British army officer say to another something about "hell to pay tomorrow." The stable boy ran with the news to Boston's North End, to the home of a silversmith named Paul Revere. Revere listened gravely; this was not the first rumor to come his way that day. Earlier, he had been told of an unusual numer of British officers gathered on Boston's Long Wharf, talking in low tones. British crewmen had been spotted scurrying about in the boats tethered beneath the HMS Somerset and the HMS Boyne in Boston Harbor. Several other sailors were seen on shore that morning, running what appeared to be last-minute errands. As the afternoon wore on, Revere and his close friend Joseph Warren became more and more convinced that the British were about to make the major move that had been long rumored -- to march to the town of Lexington, northwest of Boston, to arrest the colonial leaders John Hancock and Samuel Adams, and then on to the town of Concord to seize the stores of guns and ammunition that some of the local colonial militia had stored there.

What happened next has become part of historical legend, a tale told to every American schoolschild. At ten o'clock that night, Warren and Revere met. They decided they had to warn the communities surrounding Boston that the British were on their way, so that the local militia could be roused to meet them. Revere was spirited across Boston Harbor to the ferry landing at Charlestown. He jumped on a horse and began his "midnight ride" to Lexington. In two hours, he covered thirteen miles. In every town he passed through along the way -- Charlestown, Medford, North Cambridge, Menotomy -- he knocked on doors and spread the word, telling local colonial leaders of the oncoming British, and telling them to spread the word to others. Church bells started ringing. Drums started beating. The news spread like a virus as those informed by Paul Revere sent out riders of their own, until alarms were going off throughout the entire region. The word was in Lincoln, Massachusetts, by one a.m., in Sudbury by three, in Andover, forty miles northwest of Boston, by five a.m., and by nine in the morning had reached as far west as Ashby, near Worcester. When the British finally began their march toward Lexington on the morning of the nineteenth, their foray into the countryside was met -- to their utter astonishment -- with organized and fierce resistance. In Concord that day, the British were confronted and soundly beaten by the colonial militia, and from that exchange came the war known as the American Revolution.

Paul Revere's ride is perhaps the most famous historical example of a word-of-mouth epidemic. A piece of extraordinary news traveled a long distance in a very short time, mobilizing an entire region to arms. Not all word-of-mouth epidemics are this sensation, of course. But it is safe to say that word of mouth is -- even in this age of mass communications and multimillion-dollar advertising campaigns -- still the most important form of human communication. Think, for a moment, about the last expensive restaurant you went to, the last expensive piece of clothing you bought, and the last movie you saw. In how many of those cases was your decision about where to spend your money heavily influenced by the recommendation of a friend? There are plenty of advertising executives who think that precisely because of the sheer ubiquity of marketing efforts these days, word-of-mouth appeals have become the only kind of persuasion that most of us respond to anymore.

But for all that, word of mouth remains very mysterious. People pass on all kinds of information to each other all the time. But it's only in the rare instance that such an exchange ignites a word-of-mouth epidemic. There is a small restaurant in my neighborhood that I love and that I've been telling my friends about for six months. But it's still half empty. My endorsement clearly isn't enough to start a word-of-mouth epidemic, yet there are restaurants that to my mind aren't any better than the one in my neighborhood that open and within a matter of weeks are turning customers away. Why is it that some ideas and trends and messages "tip" and others don't?

In the case of Paul Revere's ride, the answer to this seems easy. Revere was carrying a sensational piece of news: the British were coming. But if you look closely at the events of that evening, that explanation doesn't solve the riddle either. At the same time that Revere began his ride north and west of Boston, a fellow revolutionary -- a tanner by the name of William Dawes -- set out on the same urgent errand, working his way to Lexington via the towns west of Boston. He was carrying the identical message, through just as many towns over just as many miles as Paul Revere. But Dawes's ride didn't set the countryside afire. The local militia leaders weren't altered. In fact, so few men from one of the main towns he rode through -- Waltham -- fought the following day that some subsequent historians concluded that it must have been a strongly pro-British community. It wasn't. The people of Waltham just didn't find out the British were coming until it was too late. If it were only the news itself that mattered in a word-of-mouth epidemic, Dawes would now be as famous as Paul Revere. He isn't. So why did Revere succeed where Dawes failed?

The answer is that the success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts. Revere's news tipped and Dawes's didn't because of the differences between the two men. This is the Law of the Few, which I briefly outlined in the previous chapter. But there I only gave examples of the kinds of people -- highly promiscuous, sexually predatory -- who are critical to epidemics of sexually transmitted disease. This chapter is about the people critical to social epidemics and what makes someone like Paul Revere different from someone like William Dawes. These kinds of people are all around us. Yet we often fail to give them proper credit for the role they play in our lives. I call them Connectors, Mavens, and Salesmen.

Here is the explanation for why Paul Revere's midnight ride started a word-of-mouth epidemic and Willaim Dawes's ride did not. Paul Revere was a Connector. He was, for example, gregarious and intensely social. He was a fisherman and a hunter, a cardplayer and a theatre-lover, a frequenter of pubs and a successful businessman. He was active in the local Masonic Lodge and was a member of several select social clubs. He was also a doer, a man blessed -- as David Hackett Fischer recounts in his brilliant book Paul Revere's Ride -- with "an uncanny genius for being at the center of events." Fischer writes:

When Boston imported its first streetlights in 1774, Paul Revere was asked to serve on the committee that made the arrangement. When the Boston market required regulation, Paul Revere was appointed its clerk. After the Revolution, in a time of epidemics, he was chosen health officer of Boston, and coroner of Suffolk County. When a major fire ravaged the old wooden town, he helped found the Massachusetts Mutual Fire Insurance Company, and his name was first to appear on its charter of incorporation. As poverty became a growing problem in the new republic, he called the meeting that organized the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanic Association, and was elected its first president. When the community of Boston was shattered by the most sensational murder trial of his generation, Paul Revere was chosen foreman of the jury.

...After the Boston Tea Party, in 1773, when the anger of the American colonists against their British rulers began to spill over, dozens of committees and congresses of angry colonists sprang up around New England. They had no formal organization or established means of community. But Paul Revere quickly emerged as a link between all those far-flung revolutionary dots. He would routinely ride down to Philadelphia or New York or up to New Hampshire, carrying messages from one group to another. Within Boston as well, he played a special role. There were, in the revolutionary years, seven groups of "Whigs" (revolutionaries) in Boston, comprising some 255 men. Most of the men -- over 80 percent -- belonged to just one group. No one was a member of all seven. Only two men were members of as many as five of the groups: Paul Revere was one of those two.

It is not surprising, then, that when the British army began its secret campaign in 1774 to root out and destroy the stores of arms and ammunition held by the fledgling revolutionary movement, Revere became a kind of unofficial clearing house for the anti-British forces. He knew everybody. He was the logical one to go to if you were a stable boy on the afternoon of April 18th, 1775, and overheard two British officers talking about how there would be hell to pay on the following afternoon. Nor is it surprising that when Revere set out for Lexington that night, he would have known just how to spread the news as far and wide as possible. When he saw people on the roads, he was so naturally and irrepressibly social he would have stopped and told them. When he came upon a town, he would have known exactly whose door to knock on, who the local militia leader was, who the key players in town were. He had met most of them before. And they knew and respected him as well.

But William Dawes? Fischer finds it inconceivable that Dawes could have ridden all seventeen miles to Lexington and not spoken to anyone along the way. But he clearly had none of the social gifts of Revere, because there is almost no record of anyone who remembers him that night. "Along Paul Revere's northern route, the town leaders and company captains instantly triggered the alarm," Fischer writes. "On the southerly circuit of William Dawes, this did not happen until later. In at least one town it did not happen at all. Dawes did not awaken the town fathers or militia commanders in the towns of Roxbury, Brookline, Watertown or Waltham."

Why? Because Roxbury, Brookline, Watertown and Waltham were not Boston. And Dawes was in all likelihood a man with a normal social circle, which means that -- like most of us -- once he left his hometown he probably wouldn't have known whose door to knock on. Only one small community along Dawes's ride appeared to get the message, a few farmers in a neighborhood called Waltham Farms. But alerting just those few houses wasn't enough to tip the alarm.

Word-of-mouth epidemics are the work of Connectors. William Dawes was just an ordinary man.

Here's the excerpt.

1st excerpt from The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference , by Malcolm Gladwell.

Suppose that you made a list of the forty people whom you would call your circle of friends (not including family and co-workers) and in each case worked backward until you could identify the person who is ultimately responsible for setting in motion the series of connections that led to that friendship. My oldest friend Bruce, for example, I met in first grade, so I'm the responsible party. That's easy. I met my friend Nigel because he lived down the hall in college from my friend Tom, whom I met because in freshman year he invited me to play touch football. Tom is responsible for Nigel. Once you've made all the connections, the strange thing is that you will find the same names coming up again and again.

I have a friend named Amy, whom I met when her friend Katie brought her to a restaurant where I was having dinner one night. I know Kate because she is the best friend of my friend Larissa, whom I know because I was told to look her up by a mutual friend of both of ours -- Mike A. -- whom I know because he went to school with another friend of mine -- Mike H. -- who used to work at a political weekly with my friend Jacob. No Jacob, no Amy. Similarly, I met my friend Sarah S. at my birthday party a year ago, because she was there with a writer named David who was there at the invitation of his agent, Tina, whom I met through my friend Leslie, whom I know because her sister, Nina, is a friend of my friend Ann's, whom I met through my old roommate Maura, who was my roommate because she worked with a writer named Sarah L., who was a college friend of my friend Jacob's. No Jacob, no Sarah S.

In fact, when I go down my list of forty friends, thirty of them, in one way or another, lead back to Jacob. My social circle is, in reality, not a circle. It is a pyramid. And at the top of the pyramid is a single person -- Jacob -- who is responsible for an overwhelming majority of the relationships that constitute my life. Not only is my social circle not a circle, but it's not 'mine' either. It belongs to Jacob. It's more like a club that he invited me to join.

These people who link us up with the world, who bridge Omaha and Sharon, who introduce us to our social circles -- these people on whom we rely more heavily than we realize -- are Connectors, people with a special gift for bringing the world together.

The Books: "Dot.Con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era" ( John Cassidy)

Next book in my Daily Book Excerpt:

Next book in my culture bookshelf is:

Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era , by John Cassidy.

The title pretty much says it all. This is the story of the speculative bubble of the 1990s, the insanity of the Internet IPOs (anyone member Web Van? I mean ... what??), the craziness of the prices these stocks sold for, the feeding frenzy on Wall Street, the "irrational exuberance", the complicity of the media (or the gullibility - who knows what to call it - maybe it's just plain old-fashioned greed - they jumped on the bandwagon too) and then the eventual crash. It also details the history of the Internet itself, which I found unbelievably fascinating. Like ... how the hell this whole thing BEGAN. I lived through the Internet-IPO-Craziness first hand, and this book captures the unreal atmosphere perfectly.

The following excerpt describes the IPO of Priceline.com.

EXCERPT FROM Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and Money in the Internet Era, by John Cassidy.

Already, it is hard to fathom that just a couple of years ago many intelligent Americans believed that the marriage of computers and communications networks had ushered in permanent peace and prosperity. Depending on which Wall Street or Silicon Valley guru you listened to, the Internet was the most revolutionary development since the electric dynamo, the printing press, or the wheel. The most striking manifestation of this thinking was the extraordinary prices that people were willing to pay to invest in Internet companies. In nearly every sector of the economy, entrepreneurs, many barely out of college, were rushing to establish online firms and issue stock on the Nasdaq, which was heading upward at a vertiginous rate. Names like Marc Andreessen, Jerry Yang, and Jeff Bezos were being uttered with awe.

In March 1999, Priceline.com, an Internet company that operated a site on the World Wide Web where people could name their price for airline tickets, was preparing to do an initial public offering (IPO). In order to introduce Priceline's executives to Wall Street analysts and fund managers, Morgan Stanley, the investment bank that was managing the IPO, rented a ballroom at the Metropolitan Club, at 1 East Sixtieth Street, a fitting location. The Metropolitan, which John Pierpont Morgan founded and Stanford White designed, is a lavish remnant of a previous gilded age. Four stories high, its white marble exterior is fronted by six Roman columns and an ornate cornice. After the guests had picked at their lunch, Richard S. Braddock, Priceline.com's chairman and chief executive, told them that his firm had the potential to revolutionize not just the travel business, but automobile sales and financial services, too. This was a grand claim from a start-up that had been in business for less than a year and employed fewer than two hundred people, but nobody in the room queried Braddock's presentation.

By the standards of the time, Priceline.com had impressive credentials. Jay S. Walker, the company's founder, was a Connecticut entrepreneur who had already made one fortune by peddling magazine subscriptions in credit card bills. Braddock was a former president of Citicorp, and Priceline.com's board of directions included Paul Allaire, a former chairman of Xerox Corporation, N.J. Nicholas Jr., a former president of Time Inc., and Marshall Loeb, a former managing editor of Fortune magazine. William Shatner, the actor who played Captain Kirk in Star Trek, had appeared in a series of popular radio ads for the firm. Morgan Stanley's star analyst, Mary Meeker, recently dubbed "Queen of the 'Net" by Barron's, the weekly investment newspaper, had helped coach the Priceline.com team for their presentation, and she was sitting in the back of the room as they spoke.

The word on Wall Street was that Priceline.com would follow the path of American Online, Yahoo!, and eBay to become an "Internet blue chip." The only question people in the investment community were asking was how much stock they would be able to lay their hands on. Underwriters reserved Internet IPOs for their most favored clients. Other investors had to wait until trading started on the open market before they could buy any stock. On the morning of March 30, 10 million shares of Priceline.com opened on the Nasdaq National Market under the symbol PCLN. They were issued at $16 each, but the price immediately jumped to $85. At the close of trading, the stock stood at $68; it had risen 425 percent on the day. Priceline.com was valued at almost $10 billion -- more than United Airlines, Continental Airlines, and Northwest Airlines combined. Walker's stake in the company was worth $4.3 billion.

Airlines like United and Continental own valuable terminals, landing slots, and well-known brand names -- not to mention their planes. Priceline.com owned some software, a couple of powerful computers, and an untested brand name. Despite this disparity, few on Wall Street were surprised by Priceline.com's IPO. Such events had become an everyday occurrence. The New York Times didn't think the story mentioned a merit on the first page of the next day's edition and instead relegated it to the business section. "It doesn't matter what these companies do or how they are priced," David Simons, an analyst at Digital Video Investments, told the paper. "Each new Internet IPO is nothing more than red meat to mad dogs." Penny Keo, a stock analyst at Renaissance Capital, saw things differently. "We like Priceline's business model," she said.

This was an interesting statement. Priceline.com started operating on April 5, 1998. By the end of the year it had sold slightly more than $35 million worth of airline tickets, which cost it $36.5 million. That sentence bears rereading. Here was a firm looking for investors that was selling goods for less than it had paid for them -- and as a result had made a trading loss of more than a million dollars. This loss did not include any of the money Priceline.com had spent developing its Web site and marketing itself to consumers. When these expenditures were accounted for, it had lost more than $54 million. Even that figure wasn't what accountaints consider the bottom line. In order to persuade the airlines to supply it with tickets., Priceline.com had given them stock options worth almost $60 million. Putting all these costs together, the company had lost more than $114 million in 1998.

How could a start-up retailer that was losing three dollars for every dollar it earned come to be valued, on its first day as a public company, at more than United Airlines, Continental Airlines, and Northwest Airlines put together? To answer that question we must investigate what the nineteenth-century British historian Charles Mackay called "the madness of crowds". Few investors, acting in isolation, would buy stock in a company like Priceline.com. To be willing to take such a risk, people needed to see others doing the same thing -- and see them making money doing it. This is exactly what happened. Investors who bought stock in early Internet companies like Netscape, Yahoo!, and Amazon.com made a lot of money -- at least for a while. None of these firms could boast much in the way of revenues when they went public, let alone profits, but that didn't seem to matter. Seeing what was happening, other people started to buy Internet stocks, and other types of stocks too, not because the underlying companies were good businesses with solid earnings prospects, but simply because stock prices were going up. As history has repeatedly demonstrated, this is the point when a rising market turns into a speculative bubble.

The Books: "Vamps and Tramps" (Camille Paglia)

Next book in my Daily Excerpt:

Next book on my culture bookshelf is:

Vamps & Tramps: New Essays , by Camille Paglia.

I think this might be my favorite of her books - even beating out Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson. It's another compilation of essays, another book with a wide wide lens. There are essays on Woody Allen, and essays on porn (Camille loves porn). Her essay called "Sontag, Bloody Sontag" is a classic to me. Honestly. Paglia once thought Sontag was great (as many people did). Not only great, but IMPORTANT, in terms of cultural commentary and critical abilities. This woman was a heavyweight. Paglia's essay is a bitch-slap about Sontag's graduating descent into irrelevance. It is an indictment of Sontag's kind of 1960s thinking, more and more out of touch. She could have been a leader. But she opted out of relevance. She and Sontag were in the same generation. Paglia is unforgiving towards the failures of the radicals in that generation. It's a GREAT little essay. Also ... uhm: "Sontag, Bloody Sontag"? hahaha Mitchell and I both read this book, and just laughed about that title.

We've also got book reviews in Vamps and Tramps, and the books reviewed range from a biography of Judy Garland to Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism. There are rambling long essays on Madonna.

But anyway. I highly recommend the book. The first "essay" is actually a short book, and it is called: "No Law in the Arena: A Pagan Theory of Sexuality", and I think it's masterful. In it, she takes on a couple of the different issues of our day, all having to do with sex: the increasingly fascistic atmosphere on college campuses in terms of how it handles rape, sexual harassment laws, prostitution, laws about pornography, gay rights ... It's sweeping, and angry - she thinks the entire world has gone mad, and prudistic ... letting prissy fascists like Catherine MacKinnon dictate to us what we should and should not like. Camille Paglia is on a crusade against sexual fascists like that beeyotch. Having gone to college during the 80s, and having experienced first-hand what I would call the "date-rape hysteria" on college campuses, I found Paglia's words about it SO empowering. SO invigorating. Nobody writes about this stuff like Paglia. Nobody. She's also such a nut. The cover of the book is her, in what looks like some kind of military uniform, with a knife attached to her belt. Like, she's literally taking on the world.

The excerpt I'm going to post today is from her essay "The Nursery-School Campus: The Corrupting of the Humanities in the US", which originally appeared in the Times Literary Supplemtn, in London, on May 22, 1992.

No shit, Camille. Interesting, too: everyone is now talking about the politically correct hiring practices of universities, and the lack of diversity on college campuses, in terms of politics. It's hip to talk about that. Well, Camille has been yammering on about this from way back when, when it was, quite frankly, NOT hip to talk about this stuff ... She is the lesbian kindred spirit of David Horowitz. She was saying the un-sayable, she was revealing the nasty little secret ... and she has, to this date, not been forgiven for it. Which is fine with her.

Also, only a deranged politically-correct mob who conduct all of their conversations in a stifled atmosphere of complete rhetorical agreement could classify Camille - a radical lesbian, a pop culture obsessive, a woman who considers "prostitutes" to be modern-day heroines and warriors - as a member of the far right. Nuts.

Her most recent book on analyzing poetry, Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems, is part of her own personal crusade against what has happened to humanities departments in this country. With that book, she wants to bring back good old-fashioned literary analysis, literary analysis that doesn't have a big CHIP on its shoulder.

EXCERPT FROM Vamps & Tramps: New Essays , by Camille Paglia.

The effect upon American universities of the student rebellions was fleeting. Genuine radicals did not go on to graduate school. If they did, they soon dropped out, or were later defeated by the faculty recruitment and promotion process, which rewards conformism and sycophancy. The universities were abandoned to the time-servers and mercenaries who now hold many of the senior positions there. Ideas had been relegated to the universities, but the universities belonged to the drudges.

There is a widespread notion that these people are dangerout leftists, "tenured radicals" in Roger Kimball's phrase, who have invaded the American establishment with subversive ideas. In fact, they are not radicals at all. Authentic leftism is nowhere to be seen in our major universities. The "multiculturalists" and the "politically correct" on the subjects of race, class, and gender actually represent a continuation of the genteel tradition of respectability and conformity. They have institutionalized American niceness, which seeks, above all, not to offend and must therefore pretend not to notice any differences or distinctions among people or cultures.

The politically correct professors, with their hostility to the "canon" of great European writesr and artists, have done serious damage to the quality of undergraduate education at the best American colleges and universities. Yet they are people without deep beliefs. Real radicals stand for something and risk something; these academics are very pampered fat cats who have never stood on principle at any point in their careers. Nothing has happened to them in their lives. They never went to war; they were never out of work or broke. They have no experience or knowledge of anything outside the university, least of all working-class life. Their politics are a trendy tissue of sentimental fantasy and unsupported verbal categories. Guilt over their own privilege has frozen their political discourse into a simplistic world melodrama of privilege versus deprivation.

Intellecutal debate in the humanities has also suffered because of the narrowness of training of those who emerged from the overdepartmentalized and overspecialized universities of the postwar period. The New Criticism, casting off the old historicism of German philolopgy, produced a generation of academics trained to think of literature as largely detached from historical context. This was ideal breeding ground for French theory, a Saussurean paradigm dating from the 1940s and 50s that was already long passe when American academics got hold of it in the early 1970s. French theory, far from being a symbol of the 1960s, was on the contrary a useful defensive strategy for well-positioned, pedantic professors actively resisting the ethnic and cultural revolution of that subversive decade. Foucault, a glib game-player who took very little research a very long way, was especially attractive to literary academics in search of a short cut to understanding world history, anthropology and political economy.

The 1960s failed, I believe, partly because of unclear thinking about institutions, which it portrayed in dark, conspiratorial Kafkaesque terms. The positive role of institutions in economically complex societies was neglected. The vast capitalist distribution network is so efficient in America that it is invisible to our affluent, middle-class humanists. Capitalism's contribution to the emergence of modern individualism, and therefore feminism, has been blindly suppressed. This snide ahistoricism is the norm these days in women's studies programs and chi-chi, Foucault-afflicted literature departments. Leftists have damaged their own cause, with whose basic principles I as a 1960s libertarian generally agree, by their indifference to fact, their carelessness and sloth, their unforgivable lack of professionalism as scholars. The Sixties world-view, which integrated both nature and culture, has degenerated into clamorous, competitive special-interest groups.

The universities led the way by creating a ghetto of black studies, which begat women's studies, which in turn begat gay studies. Not one of these makeshift, would-be disciplines has shown itself capable of re-creating the broad humane picture of Sixties thought. Each has simply made up its own rules and fostered its own selfish clientele, who have created a closed system in which scholarship is inseparable from politics. It is, indeed, questionable whether or not the best interests of blacks, women, and gays have been served by these political fiefdoms. The evidence about women's studies suggest the opposite: that these programs have hatched the new thought-police on political correctness. No conservative presently in or out of government has the power of intimidation wielded by these ruthless forces. The silencing of minority opinoin has been systematic in faculty recruitment and promotion. The winners of that rat-race seem genuinely baffled by such charges, since, of course, their conventional, fashionable opinions have never been stifled.

While lecturing at major American universities this year, I have come into direct conflict with the politically correct establishment. At Harvard and elsewhere I was boycotted by the feminist faculty, and at several colleges leaflets were distributed, inaccurately denouncing me as a voice of the far right. Following my lecture at Brown, I was screamed at by soft, inexperienced, but seethingly neurotic middle-class white girls, whose feminist party-line views on rape I have rejected in my writings. Rational discourse is not possible in an atmosphere of such mob derangement.

The Books: "Sex, Art, and American Culture" (Camille Paglia)

Next book in my Daily Book Excerpt. Onward into my 'cultural commentary' section.

Next book is Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays , by Camille Paglia.

God, I love Camille.

This is a collection of her essays. The topics range from: Madonna, to date rape, to academia, to Elizabeth Taylor, to drag queens, to multiculturalism, to Cleopatra...You know. Typical Camille. Pop culture, ancient culture, and politics all mixed up into one pot. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't .... but even when it doesn't work, I love Camille. I'm reading her new book on poetry now, and it's terrific.

The following excerpt is from her essay "The Strange Case of Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill", which appeared in the Philadelphia Inquirer, on Oct. 21, 1991.

Amen, Camille. At the time, I remember hearing Bonnie Raitt at some concert, give a shout-out to Anita Hill ... and blah blah blah ... Like: what exactly did this woman do that I should clap and cheer for? Be a "victim"? First of all: I will NEVER cheer because someone is an honest to God victim. I'll sympathize, but I will not fucking cheer. But I'm not so sure she even WAS a victim. Listen Anita, sweetheart: there are plenty of us women out there who flat out don't tolerate shite that makes us uncomfortable, and we address it AT THE TIME. (Ahem.) If you were uncomfortable at his joking (and I'm with Camille: if you can't handle joking like that, then that's YOUR problem) ... then it's your responsibility to say: "That makes me uncomfortable." And 9 times out of 10, someone will stop if you say that.

Ah, whatever. I just didn't get the "YAY FOR ANITA HILL" bandwagon, even way back then ... and kept thinking: "Wait a sec ... please ... someone tell me ... what exactly did she do? Besides put up with something in silence and NOT lose her job - hell, she got promoted - and then emerge 10 years later to complain about it? And I'm supposed to idolize her ... why??"

Nope. Didn't buy it. Give me a chick who is actually willing to lose her job, and stand up for herself, over that noise any day.

Take. Responsibility. For. Yourself.

Thank you.

This has been a public service announcement, brought to you by Red.

Here's the excerpt.

EXCERPT FROM Sex, Art, and American Culture: Essays, by Camille Paglia.

The sexual revolution of my Sixties generation broke the ancient codes of decorum that protected respectable ladies from profanation by foul language. We demanded an end to the double standard. What troubles me about the "hostile workplace" category of sexual harassment policy is that women are being returned to their old status of delicate flowers who must be protected from assault by male lechers. It is anti-feminist to ask for special treatment for women.

America is still burdened by its Puritan past, which erupts again and again in public scenarios of sexual inquisition, as in Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter. If Anita Hill was thrown for a loop by sexual banter, that's her problem. If by the age of twenty-six, as a graduate of the Yale Law School, she could find no convincing way to signal her displeasure and disinterest, that's her deficiency. We cannot rely on rigid rules and regulations to structure everything in our lives. There is a blurry line between our professional and private selves. We are sexual beings, and as Freud demonstrated, eroticism pervades every aspect of our consciousness.

Hill woodenly related the content of conversations without any reference to their context or tone. The senators never asked about joking, smiles, facial expressions, hers as well as his. Every social encounter is a game being played by two parties. I suspect Hill's behavior was complioant and, to use her own word about a recent exchange with a Thomas friend, "passive". Judging by her subsequent cordial behavior toward Thomas, Hill chose to put her career interests above feminist principle. She went along to get along. Hence it is hypocritical of her, ten years later, to invoke feminist principle when she did not have the courage to stand on it before. For feminists to make a heroine out of Hill is to insult all those other women who have taken a bolder, more confrontational course and forfeited career advantage.

The Books: "All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty" (P.J. O'Rourke)

Next book in my Daily Book Excerpt. Onward into my 'cultural commentary' section.

Next book is All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty, by P.J. O'Rourke.

I love P.J. O'Rourke. This book was written in 1994, and while it is very enjoyable to read - it's a bit odd to read, in light of September 11. O'Rourke's whole point of the book is: Let's stop it with all the doom and gloom. Let's get some perspective on how bad things REALLY are, and you know what? Right now? They're not so bad. The first couple sentences are: "This is a moment of hope in history. Why doesn't anybody say so?" He writes it from the affluence "peaceful" perspective, and he is right on a lot of things. His book is a diatribe against the professional worrier types. You know the ones. The ones who can afford to worry about certain things only because they live such affluent privileged lives. It's a FUNNY book. I love his prose, in general. At one point, he sees a sloth while he's traveling through the Amazon. He stares at the sloth. He describes it thus: "Sloths move at the speed of congressional debate but with greater deliberation and less noise." So while O'Rourke's insistence that everything is going GREAT, so why worry? comes off as a bit naive, I don't mind so much. A lot of thinkers and writers and world-watchers didn't see it coming ... (but a hell of a lot did!) - so if you read the book in the right spirit, it won't matter. He's right, he's right on a LOT of things.

Besides of all of that, he's one of my "freebies".

The following excerpt is from his chapter on famine. He was in Mogadishu in 1992, and he describes it.

EXCERPT FROM All the Trouble in the World: The Lighter Side of Overpopulation, Famine, Ecological Disaster, Ethnic Hatred, Plague, and Poverty, by P.J. O'Rourke.

Some thirty of us -- journalists, camera crews, editors, producers, money men, and technicians -- were housed in this compound, bedded down in shifts on the floor of the old audience hall while our mercenaries camped in the courtyard.

It was impossible to go outside our walls without "security" ("security" being what the Somali gunmen -- gunboys, really -- liked to be called.) Even with the gunment along, there were always people mobbing up to importune or gape. Hands tugging at wallet pockets. Fingers nipping at wristwatch bands. No foreigner could make a move without setting off a bee's nest of attention -- demanding, grasping, pushing crowds of cursing, whining, sneering people with more and worse Somalis skulking on the fringes of the pack.

One of the first things I saw, besides guns, when I arrived in Mogadishu was a pack of thieves creeping through the wreckage of the airport sizing up our charter cargo. And the last thing I saw as I left was the self-appointed Somali "ground crew" running beside our taxiing plane, jamming their hands through the window hatch, trying to grab money from the pilot.

A trip from our compound to Mogadishu's main market required two kids with AK-47s plus a driver and a translator who were usually armed as well. The market was walking distance but you wanted a car or truck to show your status. That there was a market at all in Mogadishu was testimony to something in the human spirit, though not necessarily something nice, since what was for sale was mostly food that had been donated to Somalia's famine victims. CONTRIBUE PAR LES ENFANTS DE FRANCE said the stenciled letters on all the rice sacks. (Every French school child had been urged to bring to class a kilo of rice for Somalia.)

Meat was also available, though not immediately recognizable as such. A side of beef looked like fifty pounds of flies on a hook. And milk, being carried around in wooden jugs in the hundred-degree heat, had a smell that was the worse than the look of the meat. But all of life's stapes, in some more or less awful form, were there in the market. If you had the money to get them. That is, if you had a gun to get the money. And a whole section of the market was devoted to retailing guns.

I wanted to buy a basket or something, just to see how the ordinary aspects of life worked in Somalia in the midst of total anarchy and also, frankly, to see if having my own gunmen was any help in price haggling. I was thinking I could get used to a pair of guys with AKs, one clearing a path for me and one covering my back. I'd be less worried about crime in the States, not to mention asking for a raise. And, if I happened to decide to go to a shrink, I'll bet it would be remarkable how fast my emotions would mature, how quickly my insights would grow, how soon I'd be declared absolutely cured with two glowering Somali teens and their automatic weapons beside me on the couch.

They were, however, useless at bargaining for baskets. Nobody gets the best of a Somali market woman. Not only did the basket weaver soak me, but fifteen minutes after the deal had been concluded she chased me halfway across the marketplace screaming that she'd changed her mind. My bodyguards cringed and I gave up another three dollars -- a sort of Third World adjustable basket mortgage.

She was a frightening lady. Ugly, too, although this was an exception. Somali women are mainly beautiful: tall, fine-featured, and thin even in fatter times than these. They are not overbothered with Muslim prudery. Their bright-colored scarves are used only for shade and not to cover elaborate cornrows and amazing smiles. Loud cotton print sarongs are worn with one shoulder bare and wrapped with purposeful imperfection of concealment. There is an Iman doppelganger carrying every milk jug. You could do terrific business with modeling agencies hiring these girls by the pound in Somalia and renting them by the yard in New York.

The men, perhaps because I am one, are another matter. They're cleaver-faced and jumpy and given to mirthless grins decorated with the dribble from endless chewing of qat leaves. Some wear the traditional tobe kilt. Other dress in Mork and Mindy-era American leisure wear. The old clothes that you give to charity are sold in bulk to dealers and wind up mostly in Africa. If you want to do something for the dignity of the people in sub-Saharan countries, you can quit donating bell-bottom pants to Goodwill.

When we emerged from the market our driver was standing next to the car with a look on his face like you or I might have if we'd gotten a parking ticket just seconds before we made it to the meter wtih the dime. Shards of glass were all over the front seat. The driver had been sitting behind the wheel when a spent bullet had come out of somewhere and shattered the window beside his head.

Mogadishu is almost on the equator. The sun sets at six, prompt. After that, unless we wanted to mount a reconnaissance in force, we were stuck inside our walls. We ate well. We had our canned goods from Kenya, and the Somalis baked us fresh bread (made from famine-relief flour, no doubt) and served us a hot meal every night -- fresh vegetables, stuffed peppers, pasta, lobsters caught in the Mogadishu harbor and local beef. I tried not to think about the beef. Only a few of us got sick. We had a little bit of whiskey, lots of cigarettes, and the pain pills from the medical kits. We sat out on the flat tile roof of the big stucco house and listened to the intermittent artillery and small-arms fire.

Down in the courtyard our gunmen and drivers were chewing qat. The plant looks like watercress and tastes like a handful of something pulled at random from the flower garden. You have to chew a lot of it, a bundle the size of a whisk broom, and you have to chew it for a long time. It made my mouth numb and gave me a little bit of a stomachache, that's all. Maybe qat is very subtle. I remember thinking cocaine was subtle, too, until I noticed I'd been awake for three weeks and didn't know any of the naked people passed out around me. The Somalis seemed to get off. They start chewing before lunch but the high didn't kick in until about three in the afternoon. Suddenly our drivers would start to drive straight into potholes at full speed. Straight into pedestrians and livestock, too. We called it "the qat hour". The gunmen would all begin talking at once, and the chatter would increase in speed, volume, and intensity until, by dusk, frantic arguments and violent gesticulations had broken out all over the compound. That was when one of the combat accountants would have to go outside and give everybody his daily pay in big stacks of dirty Somali shilling notes worth four thousand to the dollar. Then the yelling really started.

Qat is grown in Kenya. "The Somalis can chew twenty planes a day!" said a woman who worked in the Nairobi airport. According to the Kenyan charter pilots some twenty loads of qat are indeed flown into Mogadishu each morning. Payloads are normally about a ton per flight. Qat is sold by the bunch, called a maduf, which retails for $3.75 and weighs about half a pound. Thus $300,000 worth of qat arrives in Somalia every day. But it takes U.S. Marines to deliver a sack of wheat.

The Books: "In Defense of Elitism" (William A. Henry III)

Next book in my Daily Book Excerpt:

Okay, done with true crime section. Now we move into what I vaguely call my "culture" section. Any of my books that have anything to with cultural commentary go here. We've got Camille Paglia, and Malcolm Gladwell, PJ O'Rourke, and others.

The first book in this section of my bookcase is In Defense of Elitism, by William A. Henry III. Woah, boy. The title kind of says it all. His wife thought that with a title like that they should probably get an unlisted telephone number. hahaha

What the book really is is a shout-out against political correctness. The original aims of political correctness were good and right. But now? We are living in La-La land where we have to pretend that Native American tribal chants are on the same level of achievement as Moby-Dick. Literature anthologies are now edited to redress historical grievances, rather than for what is generally agreed upon as the best literature. There's the rub. Nothing can ever be said to be BETTER than anything else, because someone's feelings inevitably will get hurt. This is the attitude that William Henry can't stand. He wanted to rescue the word "elite" from its present-day negative context. He loves learning, he loves excellence, he loves at least to STRIVE for excellence. If every kid on the Little League team gets a trophy - just for showing up, basically - then where is the impetus to push yourself, to strive to be the best on the team? Is the purpose of education EDUCATION or is it boosting up the self-esteem of the students? This book pissed a LOT of people off. I love it.

William Henry (I think he died shortly after the book came out, in 1994) was a lifelong Democrat. I mention that only to show that being annoyed about political correctness does not belong to one side or the other of the political fence - and there are many folks out there on the Republican side who seem to think they own common sense and clear thinking. I find that annoying and also blatantly untrue. Get over yourselves. I say that as a person who occasionally votes Republican (although I don't belong to either party) - but I will never ever align myself with the Republicans who feel they own goodness, and feel they own words like "family" and "God" and "morals" and "marriage" and "American". Those Republicans can suck it. They're just as bad as the political correct-ness armies. They are just as rigid, and just as exclusionary.

This is an important book. A breath of fresh air.

EXCERPT FROM In Defense of Elitism , by William A. Henry III.

Egalitarians -- or at least the sort who rile me -- believe that all humans are equal ("men" being no longer a politically correct synonym for mankind) and, worse, that they should be, on a more or less permanent basis, whatever the real-world differences in their performance and contribution. However much Karl Marx may have been rejected by the nations that once enshrined him and ostensibly followed his dicta, American egalitarians continue to believe Marxian romantic twaddle about the invariable blamelessness of the unaccomplished. They argue that talent is distributed evently along class and educational lines, in defiance of everything we know about eugenics. Consequently, they insist that differences in attainment are explained entirely by social injustice. Egalitarians fear and detest the competitive impulse. They regard exploration, conquest, and colonization as having been unrelievedly barbaric and destructive, thereby mulishly overlooking the impact those movements had in dispersing administratively and technologically superior cultures and compelling inferior ones to adapt. Egalitarians are the sort who are trying to end ability tracking in elementary and sometimes secondary education, on the theory that bright children ought to be helping slow ones rather than maximizing their own achievements and pulling ahead. (I'm not making this up. This is actually a popular, if not prevailing, educational theory.) Not far below the surface, this attitude embodies a Marxian belief that the smart pupils' intelligence is not theirs alone to allocate and command but is instead a communal asset to be deployed for the whole class' good.

The same impulse is spreading into athletics, which used to be a safe haven for striving. The New York Times reported in a May 1993 front-page article that if games are to be played, increasingly an elementary school class is apt to be divided into so many teams that no one is the last chosen. Children are thus supposedly shielded from noticing who is better or worse. For the most part, games and scores are avoided altogether in favor of self-development. Running is not necessarily timed; basketball hoops are adjusted in height and distance to fit each pupil's capacity. The point is not to measure oneself against absolute standards but to feel good about exercise and taking part. That is about as concise and benign an embodiment of egalitarianism as I can imagine. And I still think it is pernicious.

Elitists of equal misguidedness, and some of equal outright menace, permeate American society. I hold no brief for those who consider themselves superior by virtue of birth or theology -- those who believe in the natural dominance of men or white people or Christians or heterosexuals (or of women or blacks or Muslims or homosexuals). To belong proudly to a selected or favored group is morally repellent when soemthing other than learning and achievement serves as the basis for that selection or favoritism. (In my mind, this applies to exclusive country and city clubs, however private they claim to be, and I consider it a valid claim to raise against appointees to public office.) Belief in rule by an elite is no better than bigotry when ability is not the sole basis for admission to the circle of the elect.

The kind of elitists I admire are those who ruthlessly seek out and encourage intelligence and who believe that competition -- and, inevitably, some measure of failure -- will do more for character than coddling ever can. My kind of elitist does not grade on a curve and is willing to flunk the whole class. My kind of elitist detests the policy of social promotion that has rendered a high school diploma meaningless and a college degree nearly so. (All right, a Harvard degree means something. But what is the value of "honors" when up to two thirds of Harvard undergraduates have been getting them?) My kind of elitist hates tenure, seniority, and the whole union ethos that contends that workers are interchangeable and their performances essentially equivalent. My kind of elitist believed that maybe the worst thing about Japanes business was the de facto lifetime job guarantee it offered, and saluted the recent erosion of that pledge.

Egalitarianism has done great good for American society. Who can dispute the rightness of ensuring legal counsel for indigent defendants in criminal cases or of compelling employers to fork over the pensions they promised to faithful and productive workers? Without the egalitarian impulse to ensure the funding of public schools in poor areas as well as rich ones, we could have no meaningful elitist impulse in judging those schools' graduates.

Wait a minute, I can hear ideological oppoents expostulating, it can never be as easy to learn in a poverty neighborhood's school as in a plush one's. Fairness does not compel giving way to egalitarianism to that extreme. Opportunity does not need to be exactly equal. It needs only to exist. For the talented and motivated, that will be enough. The rest may have a harder time. So be it. The vital thing is not to maximize everyone's performance, but to ensure maximal performance from the most talented, the ones who can make a difference. Society typically makes the opposite and erroneous call; it underemphasizes winners and overassists mediocrities. That egalitarian style makes society more manageable politically, but at the price of productivity, and it ought to change.