The Talented-Ass-Kiss-Model for success — US Supreme Court and military

© 2018 Peter Free

 

11 July 2018

 

 

Institutionalized narrowness in perspective — the Court

 

A Politico article by John F. Harris and Matthew Nussbaum pointed to the obvious:

 

 

A generation of apple-polishers and resume jockeys is one byproduct of the decades-long partisan war over control of the [Supreme] Court.

 

[I]n nominating a conservative prodigy who checks all the conventional boxes — Yale Law, a Supreme Court clerkship, a stint in the Bush White House — President Donald Trump guaranteed that the Court will again have zero members who have ever held elective office.

 

Only one who ever served in the U.S. military (Samuel Alito, for three months [!!] active duty in 1975 followed by several years in the Army reserves).

 

Zero who started a business.

 

Zero who went abroad with the Peace Corps.

 

Zero, even, who zigged and zagged through their twenties or early thirties . . . between travel here, a false career start there, a wandering path in which they wondered with an open mind what they really wanted to do in life.

 

These nine people knew from early on: They wanted to be legal stars. They all proved uncommonly adept at shimmying to the top of the greasy pole.

 

© John F. Harris and Matthew Nussbaum, What’s Missing from the Supreme Court, Politico (11 July 2018) (reformatted)

 

 

As a result

 

Justices are (generally speaking) incapable of independent thought and feeling with regard to anything societally healthy.

 

Furthermore, their expertise in (and talent for) greasy pole-climbing tends to assume that hard work, combined with innate ability, led each to his and her lofty social perch. This judicial arrogance results in a shared inability to meaningfully connect with statistical Reality and Rabble.

 

 

Similar problems characterize top-ranking American military leadership

 

Not so much with regard to having educationally and experientially similar pedigrees. But certainly so, with respect to narrowly inculcated institutional perspectives.

 

One does not become a general officer by being intelligently (or stupidly) contentious. Creative minds are winnowed to the wayside. The Military Industrial Complex molds every general and admiral's already narrow "bash-the-bastards" perspective.

 

This winnowing process forces ass-kissing. And it results in more of the same non-strategic, imperialistic policy inanities that we have seen (and repeatedly disproven) before.

 

 

The moral? — priesthoods of the unaware

 

American leadership, on balance, spurts bottomless cluelessness with the velocity of impenetrable arrogance.

 

We have institutionalized mean-spirited rockheadedness upon thrones of personal advancement and profit.

 

Culturally limiting ourselves in this fashion, we argue about which blinkered elitist will lead us along previously experienced paths to ruin.

 

This is not a recipe for society-building success. But it suits the greasy pole's top sitters just fine.

 

Recognizing institutionalized mindlessness for what it is — is where constructive tumult might begin.

 

The trick is to sort the hordes of self-servers from the vanishingly small portion of the genuninely community-oriented. This, history demonstrates, is monumentally difficult to do.