Wondered a bit when I saw Wretch’s invocation of Buckley’s dis of Harvard. because I recall a few times when posters have been over-awed by Wretch’s own H-connection, though of course fear and loathing on this front is more common at the club. I’m reminded on this score that Wretch once invoked Bush’s status as a Harvard alum as evidence that the Pres was(obviously) not the dullard of certain leftists’ fantasies. He noted “there are precious few journalists” who could “claim” to be graduate of Harvard Business School or an ex- fighter pilot…

“and while neither being a Harvard alum, fighter pilot or US President is proof of any particular genius, people having those accomplishments should not normally be presumed illiterate or mentally retarded unless there is compelling proof to the contrary.”

Consistency IS the hobgoblin of small minds, but Wretch’s readiness to diminish what once seemed to him to be an “accomplishment” by echoing Buckley’s fauz-populism (and adding on to it) feels a little cheap. Is is possible that Wretch’s stance here has something to do with a felt need to apologize for Ms. Palin’s no frills education? Or perhaps to diminish Obama’s own academic “accomplishment.” …Though – thankfully – O. beat him to the punch there, noting that he learned more from his three years as a community organizer than at Harvard (or Columbia). Still, O didn’t say he’d wasted his time there. And he certainly heard something other than what “not to say.” There’s a nice passage in “Dreams” where he desribes the graffiti at Columbia – Lots of “hate speech.” So he knew that bubbling under the polite surfaces there was a lot of ugliness. I think he recognized then that American meanness wasn’t a phenomenon that was beyond the gentility – it was all up in the intellectual elites that fire up both sides of our politics. He’s out to provide an example of Mind and Morality that will work on all Americans. Been doing a pretty good job…

BTW – There was a good piece by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker a few months back about how the absence of Ivies is a real gift to Canadians – mitigates against pointless status-anxiety, insecurity, self-importance – and ends up sapping the sort of “anti-intellectualism” that Wretch mocks or cultivates, depending on the hour and the needs of his argument…