Vive la Difference

...Spurred on by such defensive ingenuity, the publishers decided to resort to some of their own...

...He did side with me, but in such gingerly and tentative fashion as to make him an ineffectual ally...

...Feminists, meanwhile, do not want to change the way women think about them-selvessomuchasthe way men think about women...

...Paid maternity leaves, for example, are among his targets...

...But "if college used to be a reward for doing well in high school, it may now be a reward merely for having completed high school...

...The six deadly sins of multicultural-ism, we learn, are 1) the unexamined assumption that "fair" competition would automatically result in demographically proportional sharing of society's rewards, and that any deviation from such sharing is ipso facto proof of unfairness...

...special programs for the talented, and even these...

...It warns of the drawbacks to society and progress stemming from "empowerment" of the unintelligent, untalented and crippled, starting with such absurdities as calling the deaf gifted with "a birthright of silence...

...Kim Ezra Shien-baum of Rutgers...

...If I had my way, In Defense of Elitism would be compulsory reading for high-school seniors and college freshmen everywhere...

...Or the textbooks that reinterpret the past and present from the radical feminist vantage point...

...Nevertheless, I was shocked to read not long afterward about his sudden death...

...Years ago, I published an article in the Atlantic Monthly entitled either "In Defense of Elitism" or "In Praise of Elitism...

...And there are nationwide instances of young blacks being "scorned, assaulted, even threatened with death for the racial crime of getting good grades and wanting to go to college...

...It's faster this way," I said...

...Chapter One, "The Vital Lie," refutes the major American delusion that everyone is equal and deserves equal rewards from life...

...When these conditions are met, the honest reviewer is reduced to paraphrase, quotation and an unholy desire to transcribe the entire book...

...Along with this comes academic emphasis on popular culture and the concomitant decline in teaching classical disciplines...

...And the battle is not quite so lost as it may seem: "In the unspoken assumptions that underlie everyday discourse, we are an elitist society because nothing else is logical...

...Hard to summarize, too, being one of those books whose summaries are apt to mislead...

...He is not afraid to wonder why the media "in an era when religion is the basis for shooting up a van full of teenagers or exploding the World Trade Center—not to mention what it leads to in Belfast or Bosnia"—do not "approach religious fervor with some skepticism...

...The measure of a just society is...

...What good to us, he asks, are schools where one learns that "the United States had settled its conflict in Korea by 'using the bomb...

...Then this book appeared, making me realize I should have made an effort to know its author better...

...Chapter Five, "Nature and Nurture," concerns the irremediably unfair way intelligence, talent, good looks, etc...

...are among the first to go during...

...They are determined to change male sexual fantasies, as if these meant that everyone who indulges "turns into Ted Bundy—or even Clarence Thomas...

...Even though he admits that it is due to adverse social circumstances, the reality remains that "you could eliminate every woman writer, painter and composer...

...It is only 212 pages—short by today's standards of overwriting—yet still too long to reproduce here, paragraph by good paragraph, page by enlightening page...

...The dominant mood of contemporary American culture," he concludes, "is the self-celebra-tion of the peasantry...

...It may be more cruel to let them go on fooling themselves...

...Some of the most prestigious colleges are forced to run remedial programs for what should have been learned in high school, and being marked down for spelling or grammar elicits vociferous objections...

...Actually, the suggestions run to no more than four pages, the remaining 20 being taken up by an interview with the author conducted by Dr...

...it is politicians of every stripe and, ultimately, the voters who know no better...

...I expected him to back me up on not casting against color, gender and able-bodiedness where history and logic demanded otherwise...

...Finally, in Chapter Eight, "Politics by Saxophone," Henry concentrates on how political office is now acquired by images television creates, fostering the perception of the candidate as "nice" rather than qualified...

...The book is a potent argument against the preposterous yet widely accepted view that "everyone must be guaranteed his (excuse me, his-or-her, or perhaps the odious antisyntactical evasion 'their') place at the table...

...Although he was clearly intelligent, erudite and witty, he was often pompous, long-winded and self-serving...

...The most desirable jobs, he argues, can't be confined to a 40-hour week, and benefits to women as working childbearers constitute "a blatant form of special pleading...

...Particularly sinister is the condemnation of "Eurocentrist" reason and science, and the endorsement of more "intuitive" knowing, opening the doors to every kind of mumbo-jumbo...

...A fair society," he insists, "is one in which some people fail...

...They did not, of course, compare with the rabid replies Henry's book, and even favorable reviews of it, can boast of...

...The target is not only Bill Clinton (Henry, incidentally, is a Democrat...

...that in turn may be a reward simply for having shown up, or for having grown too tall to be kept back...

...But multiculturalism, supported especially by the residual Marxism of academe, discredits competition that the "communal" groups fear they cannot win...

...Since the entire house of Doubleday could not accomplish collective heart failure, they did the next-best thing: They sent out, with the review copies, early positive notices and a pamphlet with suggestions for book-group discussions...

...Reviewed by John Simon THREE THINGS can make writing a book review very difficult: total agreement with the author, hearty approval of his style and organization, and fascination with his every page...

...Thus readers of the review can salvage a modicum of satisfaction: By not reading the book, they were at least spared some errors...

...We have taken the legal notion that all men are created equal to its illogical extreme," he writes, "seeking notjust equality in justice but equality of outcomes in almost every field of endeavor...

...Henry allows no absurdity to fall through the cracks of his Ship of Fools...

...I knew Bill Henry slightly...

...He had won one of his two Pulitzer Prizes for his television criticism, but I am insufficiently impressed with either the Pulitzers or television for that to have swayed me much...

...Many students of limited talent spend huge amounts of time and money pursuing some brass ring occupation, only to see their dreams denied...

...Such discussions lead back to education, a sore problem in a country where 75 per cent of Ivy League students don't know who said "government of the people, by the people, and for the people...

...In the exchange of lies and euphemisms that constitutes the surface of polite discourse, we are egalitarian, because nothing else is diplomatic...

...Only two cents out of every hundred dollars spent on education...

...Turning to the handicapped, Henry relates the case of the deaf-mute high-school girl who won the right to enter a noted annual speech contest in 1992, when the topic was, of all things, "My Voice in America's Future," without using sign language...

...Not that his stature needed increasing, Bill having been a man of uncommon girth, which made sitting behind him at the theater a serious impediment, especially as his tendency to sweat made him usually strip to his shirtsleeves—an offense to my fastidiousness...

...Concurrently comes the crusade against linguistic assimilation, so that already ludicrously supererogatory state laws declaring English the official language are flouted by judges in Arizona who swear in hew citizens in Spanish...

...But what are we to make of, say, the fact that at the University of Texas whites must be in the 92nd percentile for admission, blacks in the 55th...

...5) the idea that drug dealing, gang crime and retreat from learning should be regarded as natural, sensible, valid responses among the urban poor to the difficulty of their situation...

...The egalitarians, finding it easy to withstand a mere summary, may forgo a chance to test their beliefs against strong logic and powerful suasion...

...Egalitarianism celebrates the blissful ignorance of the Garden of Eden, where there were no Newtons to perceive the constructive use of an apple...

...3) a rejection of the European heritage responsible for most of mankind's freedom and material progress...

...4) the disbelief in the value of linguistic standardization, and the enshrinement of Spanish and "black English...

...1 would say you could also eliminate dessert from your meals, but at a sizable loss...

...But here I am, stuck with the late William A. Henry Ill's In Defense of Elitism, which I vastly enjoyed and wholly endorse...

...We consider it cruel not to give them every chance at success...

...A savvy reviewer, just learned enough to know a couple of facts that escaped the author, can always find something to carp at?say, the odd sin of omission...

...2) the concept of the equivalency of cultures...

...He was the drama and cultural critic of Time, and thus my colleague...

...The elitists will say, "We know this already," and so run the risk of losing out on countless hilariously harrowing examples and sovereignly laid-out arguments to bolster their position...

...Nor did his becoming the gray eminence behind the subsequent Pulitzer Prizes in drama, on whose jury he was a fixture, increase his stature in my eyes...

...It is a fire-breathing book, certainly, and to my mind a cauterizing one...

...Chapter Two, '"Good Old Golden Rule Days,'" finds that the trouble with our education is that it no longer favors the brighter students, but rather the backward ones, thereby slowing down and diluting education for those who could most profit from it...

...Low grades are automatically assumed to be the failure of the school and the teacher and perhaps the community at large—anyone but the student...

...to the present moment and not significantly alter the course of Western culture...

...Second Thoughts...

...Defending himself against accusations of snobbery, he retorts, "I am talking about values that inspire a society and make it cohere...

...It is scarcely the same to put a man on the moon as to put a bone in your nose...

...Henry is by no means an opponent of equal rights for women (or anyone else...

...And his last words are: "To speak in defense of elitism is not to tilt the balance of national life, but to seek to restore it...

...Chapter Six, "The Museum of Clear Ideas," takes up in greater detail "an educational system so egalitarian, so anti-elitist that even the elite don't learn what they need to learn...

...budget-cutting...

...From physical handicaps to moral lapses: "If the goal of the elitists is to distinguish confidently between better and worse cultures, better and worse ideas, better and worse contributions to society, then surely the judging process must extend to better and worse behavior...

...We do not know whether there are racial differences in intelligence, Henry suggests, because we do not want to find out...

...Typical is the case of the University of Michigan graduate student ordered to remove a small, discreet, bikini-clad snapshot of his wife from his desk...

...addresses the excesses of feminism...

...what he is against is special privileges that lead to deleterious di-visiveness, and sundry procedures that contravene the principles of meritocracy, thus undermining social, political, intellectual, artistic and, above all, economic stability...

...It refutes the similarly widespread nonsense that equates elitism with racism, merely because so many over-cosseted underachievers are black or Hispanic...

...Henry is particularly persuasive in tracing the debasement of literature by political correctness, leading to such things as the awarding of the Nobel Prize to the likes of Toni Morrison...

...6) the prevalent conviction among young urban blacks that getting good grades in school and succeeding amounts to "acting white"—an equation more racially suppressive than anything conceived by the Ku Klux Klan...

...Typical targets are journalistic pleas for more plays by black women, prestigious awards to PC books without quality, the dumbing down of everything from college reading lists to television news and game shows, the rewriting of fairy tales from a feminist angle, and even the way technology (e.g., karaoke and camcorders) contributes to our national stultification...

...Partial failure," he argues, "is always better than delusory success...

...So too with Henry's book: If elitism has any chance in America, a work like this will speed its coming...

...The tyranny of the underclass sets in with the concept of "entitlement": "Once welfare became a "right" or 'entitlement,' that change of rhetoric inevitably eroded the sense of personal duty to survive and improve...

...In fact, Bill Henry, clever fellow that he was, did the only sensible thing to do before his work reached publication: He went and died of a heart attack at age 44...

...We get black children being taught that blacks invented the telephone, the elevator, the lightbulb, etc., when a sense of worth must come from individual competitive performance, not from group identity...

...The piece gleaned only a limited number of responses, mostly negative...

...whether any individual of talent can succeed regardless of what group he belongs to...

...Henry deplores the aim of many feminists to debunk the basic fact of history, that the civilized and cultured world was built almost entirely by men pursuing male aims...

...Many overachievers, Henry reminds us, are Asian-Americans, who can handle whatever hands are dealt them at birth...

...The slow students, often not in the least interested in learning, tend to belong to various minorities that our egalitarians choose to indulge and promote with counterproductive results for both them and the society at large...

...is for...

...Let them rise and fall as individuals...

...It is decidedly unsafe for reading in public, as I found when a fellow subway rider addressed me sneeringly: "If you read books like this," he said ungrammatically but venomously, "you should be riding in a taxi...

...So mediocrities thrive...

...are meted out, and warns about the greater unfairness of trying to combat them with various anti-excellence stratagems and legislation, euphemisms in public and private speech, and the like...

...Chapter Four, "Why Can't a Man Be More Like a Woman...

...Some cultures, though we dare not say it, are more accomplished than others and therefore more worthy of study...

...Luckily this predicament is rare...

...I was particularly disappointed at our last meeting, a panel discussion where the question of multiracial, color-blind casting came up...

...Chapter Seven, "Noah's Ark, Feminist Red Riding Hood, Karaoke Peasants, and the Joy of Cooking," is a clever catchall for other forms of dementia thriving under political correctness...

...This accessorizing is dangerous: It encourages reviewers to get all the information they need from the ancillary material...

...Chapter Three, "Affirmative Confusion," lays out the folly of most affirmative action, showing how it disunites America, notably when it reaches such heights of foolishness as "Afrocentric" scholarship...

...He singles out especially the wrongheaded college education for those who don't have a head for it, but want their sheepskins exclusively for financial advancement...

...To ask whether it would do any good is like asking whether Uncle Tom's Cabin really brought about the emancipation of the slaves...

...Some people are better than others," Henry insists, "smarter, harder working, more learned, more productive, harder to replace...

...But that "if" is as big as the tower of Babel, and probably a good deal more enduring...

...A sad fate, but one that beats being lynched...

...But he is still an old-time liberal at heart: "Belief in rule by an elite is no better than bigotry when ability is not the sole basis for admission to the circle of the elect...

...Or the "Afrocentric" curricula that, for example, attribute the achievements of the nonblack Egyptians to black Africans...

...The result, as Henry compellingly demonstrates, means subsidizing unnecessary community colleges and other second-rate schooling, 16 whose discontinuance would save us "spending $ 150 billion a year overedu-cating a populace that is neither consistently eager for intellectual expansion nor consistently likely to gain the economic and professional status for which the education is undertaken...

...Perhaps it is time to stop thinking of blacks—and having them think of themselves—as a category...