The difference between culture and conspiracy

Sam Smith - When I asked a reporter who covers the Pentagon whether it was true that Ashton Carter, like John Kerry,  was a member of Skull & Bones he responded, .."Come on, that's silly and irrelevant... .but he's clearly a member of the Illuminati and New World Order."

One of the thing I noticed in my years as a Washington journalist, and as a former anthropology major, is how little media attention is given to the effect of culture on politics. Thus the class warfare that has developed within white culture,based in part on the rise of what I call the gradocracy - government by those with graduate degrees - gets ignored even though it is a major factor in the decline of the Democratic Party. The complexities of black culture get overlooked. The manipulation of lower class cultures by elites -whether political or corporate or media - and so forth.

And you don't need a conspiracy for this, you just need a culture. Pretending it doesn't exist doesn't help. Here's something I wrote on this topic back when Kerry was running against Bush for the White House:

 Why Skull & Bones matters

Sam Smith - As we learn more of the strange little society called Skull & Bones, it is useful to remember that what we know already is enough.

America is about to choose between two presidential candidates who belonged to an organization whose values were infantile, elitist, misogynist, anti-democratic and secret and whose purposes include the mutual support and protection of its members as they make their into the upper ranks of American society and throughout their adult lives. Far from apologizing for this, the two candidates refuse to give open and honest answers about their participation...

The most benign view of this was expressed by the conservative columnist David Brooks, who told CBS, "My view of secret societies is they're like the first class cabin in airplanes. They're really impressive until you get into them, and then once you're there they're a little dull."

Certainly, Skull & Bones is not alone. For example, a decade ago in 'Shadows of Hope' I described a more open if just as dubious influence on American politics:

    While institutions such as the Council on Foreign Relations, Brookings and the American Enterprise Institute have long added theoretical underpinnings to political policy, Clinton's arrival has forced such institutions of the New York-Washington axis to take seats behind the Cambridge-headquartered John F. Kennedy School of Government. In fact, the Clinton administration seems practically a subsidiary of this academy of wonkdom. Half of Clinton's cabinet has ties to the school either as students, officials, fellows or faculty....

    The Kennedy School is to government what the Harvard's business school was to corporations in the 1980. There is a similar emphasis on technical skills -- decision trees, case studies and so forth -- and little interest in ethics, philosophical or humanistic principles. Not surprisingly, a lot of the money for the school comes from large corporations who are more than happy to have their tax deductible contributions used to teach public officials the Kennedy School way of governing.

  This bureaucratic boot camp did once consider creating a "chair in poverty" to study "who has been poor for a long time and why," but according to the Washington Post, then Dean Graham Allison (now in Clinton's Pentagon) was unable to come up with the money. It didn't really surprise him since, after all, most donors are "wealthy people, not poor people." ...

    Harvard grads permeate not only the upper level of politics, but also of the media, the law and the think tanks, carrying with them an aura of what songwriter Allen Jay Lerner called Harvard's "indubitable, irrefutable, inimitable, indomitable, incalculable superiority." This Harvard old (still mostly) boy network is a significant -- yet because of its discretion underrated -- influence on the city's values and policies, reflecting, in the words of the historian and reluctant Harvard grad  V.L. Parrington, the "smug Tory culture which we were fed on as undergraduates."

    Seventy-five years later, this smug Tory culture quietly thrives in Washington, Not the least indication of this is the fact that products of Harvard and/or Yale comprise one-third of the top positions in an administration that said it was going to look like America.

Now the control has passed to Yale or, to be fair, the offspring of one of its most childish manifestations. It is said, of course, that if you raise such matters you are engaging in 'conspiracy theories.' In fact, this phrase is popular among the political and media elite precisely because it provides a dirty mirror reflection of the very values that this elite holds: "If the country needs to change, let's face it, we're the ones to change it." It is schools such as Harvard and Yale that inculcate their political science and history majors with a sense of change being the product of a small number of great minds working in concert with their peers. It is this arrogant illusion that kept blacks, women, and the poor so long out of the history books in such places. They called it the Great Man Theory of History.

In fact, you don't need any conspiracy at all to create a Skull & Bones, a Kennedy School, or a Washington Post newsroom. All you need is the right environment. If you want a field of corn, all you have to do is plant corn and get it enough water.

Besides, those who have used such institutions as Skull & Bones to make their way through life tend not to be clever enough to engage in a conspiracy. That requires social intelligence, lateral thinking, imagination, all of which are in short supply among the products of such places. That's one reason they need the institutional assistance in the first place.

I know. I was supposed to be one of them. I was punched by several "final clubs" at Harvard but quickly turned them down for I found their members among the most boring people I had met at college. Instead, I found my way to the Harvard radio station - a salon des refuses for many of the most interesting people at the school...

The other day, Jim Ridgeway of the Village Voice, a former editor of the Daily Princetonian, and I were trying to think of people who had served in major Ivy League media positions yet had not become - in the manner, say, of Adam Clymer or Don Graham - totally embedded in establishment values and media. We could only think of two others: William Greider and Larry Bensky. There are probably more, but it's certainly a far smaller club than Skull & Bones. We were the weeds in the corn field. Another one, interestingly, was a guy named Howard Dean.

The problem with such people is that we actually know how the system works. We have been probationary members of it and have betrayed and deserted it taking along the secrets of the crypt. Yes, as David Brooks says, it is as boring as first class, but who said the distortion of power, the corruption of society, and narcissistic excesses of ambition had to be interesting? Power at play is often the dullest thing on earth because in the end it is only a bad substitute for what really matters.

Still, we are left with the problem that our supposedly democratic system has narrowed itself down to a choice of two members of an ersatz nobility smaller yet more powerful than the British nobility. And not only are its members not meant to say anything about it. According to them and their friends in the media, neither are we.