DILBERT'S WORLD OR WALMART'S?

I came across this on National Review's "The Corner" blog the other day. An excellent little posting by a fellow curmudgeon I look up to- John Derbyshire. He writes:

Brave New Wal-Mart [John Derbyshire]

"I have got way behind with email, am struggling to catch up. Had several emails about my saying that reading George Will's Wal-Mart column started a chain of thought that ended up at Brave New World. Several readers were baffled....

Well, if I go into too much detail here I shall get into trouble of the PC sort; but the main idea was, that any society ought to offer useful and productive lives to its epsilons i.e. to citizens over on the left-hand side of the Bell Curve. The postindustrial West has been depressingly bad at this. Our basic approach to our low-IQ fellow citizens has been "Let them eat cake." It's hard not to get the impression that we have been busily building a society of law-school elites, by law-school elites, and for law-school elites; the "Yale or jail" society. Wal-Mart, with its simplified, stripped-down training programs that concentrate on a few easily-mastered skills and disciplines, is a small reversal of this deplorable (to my mind) trend.
Whatever you think of the society imagined in Brave New World, at least there was a place for everyone in it, bright or dim. That is not the case with present-day Western society, except in pockets like Wal-Mart."

Good stuff, Derb. As my dear departed Dad used to say to me, "Son, we need ditch diggers in this world, too". It was his way of saying that if any of his kids didn't choose to go to college, well, that's OK. As long as a means of living is attained honestly, it is honorable, too.

To paraphrase a succesful businessman I know- A college degree doesn't necessarily mean you know anything useful in your field, it just means you were willing to sit still and be taught SOMETHING for at least four years. Sobering words , there. Of course, in the business world, that little piece of paper has come to mean a lot- enough that the merits of a long career of experience don't mean as much as they used to. Thus we get the Dilbert world we live in.