(( Once again, Dr. Bones, I have decided to store my supposed pearls here rather than cast them before possibly unappreciative swine over yonder )).
It is not helpful for analytical purposes, I think, to take so peculiar a specimen as little Tommy Wobble with the big moustache [1] as the representative of a class, as typical of anything or anybody much beyond the specimen itself.
To be sure, as an outrageous instance of what it *means* to be grossly overrewarded for being decidedly undertalented, TLF will do nicely. But I think we all have an adequate notion of that syndrome in advance and do not absolutely require invidious particular examples. Fun though they always are.
Considered as a class, economic or moralistic, protected "movers and shakers with real initiative" are not likely to recognize themselves in a creature that seems to have no initiative of its own, but merely rehashes the views of whomever it last had lunch with at the Union League Club or the Chamber of Protectionism. (Or the local equivalent thereof at whatever capital city of capita..., of globalism, I mean, Tommy jetted to last.)
Often the jackdaw makes plain who he is swiping the ideas in ‘his’ New York Times Company column this morning -- hi there, Mister Lawrence Katz of H*rv*rd! -- but quite often he doesn't.
It would be handy for Dean Baker's argument (Prosecutor Baker’s indictment?) if it could be shown that little Tommy F. always drops the names of the seven-to-twenty-digit Manhattanite or Ivy League overcompensateds when they are allowed to do his thinking for him, but hushes up mere five-and-six digiteers from, say, Bangalore or Xiamen. Although I suspect this is more or less the case, and although it is probably a sort of case widespread out there in overcompensated-mover-and-shakerdom, Mr. Friedman can always fall back with some plausibility on a ‘journalistic’ excuse about not troubling his corporation's customers with too many names that they never heard of before.
Run-of-the-mill protecteds and overcompensateds have no need to make any sort of public disclosures at all, at least not before they take to it on their defense attorneys’ advice. Whereas if we humble did not hear from T. L. Friedman fairly regularly, why, even the _Times_ might begin to wonder about that salary of his.
Moving on to the gloomy Dean's general conclusion,
"Th[is fairy] story of the elites doing well in the global economy is not one about their education and savvy, it's about protectionism. They just aren't smart enough to recognize it,"
I wonder if ‘protectionism’ is the exact right word for what is going on. For what has _always_ been going on in the world. The good folks who are OnePercenters already much prefer that that the OnePercenters of tomorrow should look more or less like themselves. To call such commonplace human self-preferencing ‘protectionism’ instead of, say, _peccatum originale_ makes it out a good deal more specifically economic and legal and indeed, conscious and deliberate, than it really is.
I don't think it is altogether accidental that our preacher wanders off into an unsatisfactory by-way in which he admits that the ascendancy of our own local OnePercenterdom is not primarily a matter of laws and law enforcement: "Maybe no one enforces the [‘prevailing wage’] law today, but there is no guarantee that it won't be enforced tomorrow."
No *guarantee* against enforcement, to be sure, yet few things are less likely to actually happen. If the likes of T. L. Friedman were, collectively, in any serious danger of law enforcement they would already have lost their ascendancy. They would then be in the position of the French First- and Second-Estaters of about 1788, their doom irrevocably decreed even if not yet executed upon them.
But that is a fantastic idea, or looks fantastic to me at least. Surely Friedman, Rove, Cheney & Associates. are quite as securely _legibus solutus_ as ever? Not each one of them individually, of course, but the whole crew of gentry and neogentry taken together?
I certainly *wish* that the OnePercenters of 2009 were a little more afraid of their financial and social and educationalistic/credentialistic [2] inferiors then they act, but that is far from the same thing as supposing that they have any serious need to worry about preservation of their exalted status. Plainly they do not. [3]
Healthy days.
___
[1] Tommy's wobble side I shall leave alone. Also the facial hair, although the former would be the most important point about the specimen if considered in isolation. The appearance of infinite zig-zagging results naturally enough from Master Tommy's rarely stealing from the same data bank twice.
[2] ‘Credentialistic’ is important. In a country as large as ours, it is out of the question to expect all incumbent OnePercenters to know one another personally even at second or third hand. So there has to be some impersonal or ‘objective’ mechanism to help them recognize one another reliably and not admit somebody from the scheduled castes by mistake.
In fact, there are scads and scads of such mechanisms available. However one should bear two points in mind: (1) none of them are backed by the force of law, and (2) the gentry and neogentry will short-circuit these devices as much as possible when they can, as for instance with that off-the-record (hopefully!) phone call or e-mail that makes quite clear what the formal letter of recommendation REALLY meant to imply about the candidate.
That is to say, our Friedman-Rove-Cheney-H*rv*rd-NYTC classes do not really depend on "wink, wink; nod, nod" much more than they depend on formal legislation, despite the way their characteristic operations tend to look from the outside. Their true _modus operandi_ lies somewhere in between.
[3] This is our fault, not theirs, obviously. If we were less tame, our betters would be less insufferable and more immune from Dean Baker zingers. No doubt about it!
Considered as a pure moralist (which is the way I myself consider him, even though I understand that it is not quite what he intends), the Dean runs off the rails at the very end of his sermonette with "They just aren't smart enough to recognize it."
That won't do, because not wishing to know anything against oneself has little to do with ‘smart’ unless the word is twisted like a pretzel. Worse -- from a purely moralistical standpoint -- is that this formulation tends to suggest that we good guys ARE "smart enough."
Like everything else that tends towards self-flattery and self-exceptionalizing, that product is to be avoided.
Let's leave the whole self-wunnerfulness _shtyk_ to Rio Limbaugh, shall we?
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