Just Sip Some Cristal With My Real...

[George quoting Fran Lebowitz:]

["...I am suspicious of the insistent and incessant focus on the exceptional. The endless discussion of law-school applications. The ceaseless debate regarding admission to medical school. Always the attention is placed on the gifted black person. So whites can point to these people and say, Yes, there's been historical progress. Yes, it is true that 50 years ago a black person with the I.Q. of Isaiah Berlin would have been a janitor, and now look: we've solved the problem of what to do with the black geniuses -- they have the same opportunities as the white geniuses. But we don't need affirmative action for these people and we never did. The problem of the talented tenth was actually solved by the civil-rights movement. It is to create parity between the untalented 90th and its white counterpart that we require what are perversely called racial preferences -- I say perversely because surely we all know which race is genuinely preferred, talented or not. We will have equality when dopey black people get into Harvard because their chair-endowing grandfathers went there. We will have equality when incompetent black people buy their way into the Senate. We will have equality when larcenous black union plumbers start not showing up in greater and greater numbers. We will have equality when the unjust desserts and ill-gotten gains are spread around impartially. One Clarence Thomas is not enough."]

[Well, OK, but is entropic mediocrity the best we can hope for in this utopian, egalitarian society under discussion? As Frank N' Furter said to Columbia, "I think we can do better than that!" Or am I missing something? (Like someone's tongue lodged firmly in her cheek.)]

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