Jim Grant, my neighbor from across the street, has a joke he likes to tell. “You can always tell a Harvard graduate,” he says. “But you can’t tell him much.” Now, Jim’s got a graduate degree in business or accounting or something from the University of Alabama, so part of his love of that joke can probably be put down to the normal attitude those of us who didn’t attend Ivy League schools have about Elis, which is the nickname of Yale students for those who’re interested—just my bit of trivia for the month.
But this is only part of it.
A bigger part is that it addresses what my grandmother used to call the ‘educated fools’ of the world. You know, the people who think that because of where they come from, how much money they have, or where they went to school, they are the best thing since sliced bread, but who, in fact, are too stupid to know that they’re stupid. That’s how a friend of mine in Vietnam back during the war used to describe some people, and you know, Jim, my friend, and my grandmother were on to something.
The world, I have discovered, is full of educated fools.
The problem with this is that you can’t cure stupid. Like the joke about the Harvard grad, you can’t tell these people anything, at least, not anything they’ll listen to. They have this amazing ability not to be able to hear or see anything that contradicts their totally incorrect perception of just about everything. Reminds me of a bus trip I was on way back in the 1960s. I was on my way from Fort Dix, New Jersey to my mom’s home in Texas for Christmas leave just before being posted to Germany.
My seatmate was a young woman from Connecticut who was south of New York for the first time in her life. When I boarded the bus in Wrightstown, NJ, the only empty seat was next to her, and she invited me to sit with a warm smile. Our conversation was pleasant until we reached Washington, DC.
As we neared the bus depot, located north of Union Station, an area that was at the time, and to a certain extent still is, one of the dreariest looking areas in our nation’s capital. I remarked that it was a shame that the capital city of the free world’s richest nation at the time had such slums, as I looked past her out the window at the vacant lots, discarded tires, and rundown brownstones. Without missing a beat, or looking out the window, she blithely said,
“Washington is a city of beautiful monuments and Greek-revival buildings. It has no slums.” I was stunned, but soon realized that she had probably been taught that myth her whole life and was refusing to look at anything that contradicted it.
I learned a valuable lesson that day, which was to be reinforced many times over the next 50 years as I travelled the globe, first in uniform and then as a diplomat. When people have been thoroughly indoctrinated, whether it’s in a tribal group, a family, or an educational institution, they will cling to their beliefs even in the face of overwhelmingly contradictory evidence, sometimes getting themselves into really untenable situations—and still refusing to accept that it might be because they ‘got it wrong.’
When I was a young army lieutenant serving in Germany, I was commander of the aggressor force that was used to test our battalion when it went on field exercises. In the battalion, we had a captain who commanded one of the units who was a West Point graduate. This particular officer, who was no gentleman, was patronizing and dismissive of every officer who had achieved a commission through ROTC or Officer Candidate School, considering us his inferiors.
Tired of his arrogance, I decided on one exercise to teach him a lesson. I told him that my aggressor team would breach his defensive perimeter, and he laughed. How could a mere OCS graduate get the best of a military academy graduate?
The second night of the exercise, I showed him. Using tactics I’d learned, not in the army, but hunting in the swamps and forests of my rural East Texas home, I took four of my aggressor commandos and breached his perimeter just after 2 a.m., just when guards are getting drowsy and careless, and everyone else is sound asleep. In addition to pouring ink into his water trailers, we pulled down a few of the radio antennas, and for good measure, I tossed a tear gas grenade into his tent.
When the alarm sounded, my commandos and I rushed the entrance yelling, ‘attack, attackers coming from the rear.’ The sleepy guard was so shocked, he stood and watched with mouth agape as we blew past him. I looked over my shoulder to see the captain coming out of his tent, rubbing his eyes from the tear gas and curing up a blue streak.
Educated fools. You can’t tell them much. But, boy, can you show them a thing or two. – NND
