Never Been Tried Before

Things tend to come in threes. I guess three is a number that can catch one’s attention especially if it happens to elucidate a single point. First was this sentence in an article in Pravda that came to light earlier this week: “…the (American) population was dumbed down through a politicized and substandard education system based on pop culture, rather then the classics.” Next, an article in the opinion pages of The Hindu (South Indian English language newspaper) entitled , “What Business Schools Should Get Right”, detailing again how academe has failed us by shunning the basics and emphasizing “exotic financial instruments, private equity and hedge funds… complex trading strategies, mergers and acquisitions, shorting, straddles, an endless number of acronyms such as MBS,CDS,CDO and LBO, all valued as relevant and equated to rocket science.” All of this was done, of course, to figure out a way to dispose of billions of dollars in bad debt, fallout from the government-created housing bust. They took our best and brightest and essentially asked them to figure out ways to steal.

Prabhudev Konana of The Hindu continues, “Students poured into business schools to make that quick million after graduation in the finance world. At the same time, firms including those in the consulting sector needed thousands of accountants to make balance sheet complex enough using General Accounting Principles. And they needed even more to unhide or decipher what was being reported.”

Finally, Mr. Konana concludes, “…no one asked about the value added work from these accounting innovations. …we stopped asking if any of this complexity was actually adding value to our economy or to our society. Now we realize that all those supposedly value-adding financial instruments and accounting methods were in fact value destroying. (And) many of the jobs that were created artificially are gone, along with millions of real jobs, leaving the economy in tatters.”

The third indication of academe’s fatal collusion with government will be evident all week as President Obama heads off to the Middle East in an effort to remake the world. There’s no indication that he will arrive there with formalized facts, only with an ideology that says “I can do anything because I say so”, an affinity for Islam, a hatred for the Jewish State …and some say, for America as well.

To be fair, similar arrogance can be attributed to the men of past generations who also nursed prejudices, drew arbitrary lines on maps and sought themselves powerful enough to enforce just enough peace to maintain control for personal gain. But all those arguments are moot now. Things are as they are. It’s no utopia. It never is.

Some still think utopia is within our reach. Gandhi thought so when he agreed to divide India; the UN thought so when it shepherded a plan for the nation of Israel to exist side by side with the Arabs. Though ambitious in effort and good intentions, it seldom works out as advertised. Still, we must give high marks for trying. Obama’s current effort re the Middle East also deserves applause for boldness and vision. It may even succeed in breaking a blockage as it differs in one important aspect from everything that has ever been tried: Never before was a head of state so willing to sacrifice his own nation for something as elusive as a vision that history has consistently shown is impossible to achieve.