You think we live in an homogeneous society, all starting from the same line, with the same information, with melting pot backgrounds with various pluses and minuses that balance out in the end.
You're very wrong.
I went to a melting pot high school. There were only a handful of African-Americans, but no truly rich people. But some from the projects. I grew up fifty miles from New York City. Partook of New York media. I thought I knew what was going on.
Until I went to Middlebury College.
I went to Middlebury because it was in Vermont, had its own ski area, was coed and prestigious. It just seemed like another step in the endless road forward, of life.
But I was wrong.
I learned a lot at Middlebury. But almost none of it was in the classroom. You see 45% of Middlebury students came from prep school.
They were self-confident, they knew the game, and they were much better read than us, the public school denizens. That's right, you get a much better education in a prep school. Forget DeVos and vouchers, that's for the religious and poor, what's left of the middle class. Those with money like DeVos, they send their kids to prep schools. And I'm not talking about the exclusive NY and L.A. institutions like Trinity and Dalton and Harvard-Westlake and Campbell Hall. No, I'm talking sleeping away miles from Mommy and Daddy, being formed by the wisdom of the crowd. That's a reason breakthroughs are rarely from the preps. You see prep school teaches you how to get along. Sure, you want to excel, but you know first and foremost you want to be a member of the group. That life is long and relationships pay off. A public school valedictorian dreams of future opportunities, the prepsters are born to them.
They see education as a game.
The prep school kids taught me that you didn't have to hand a paper in on time. You could always go to the teacher and get an extension. And it was true!
The prep school kids are the ones who lobbied for a bar on campus.
The prep school kids joined fraternities.
The prep school kids knew what an MBA was, I certainly didn't.
And you can read on TMZ the inner-workings of seemingly every celebrity extant. But the prep school kids, the true insiders, know that it's best to remain silent.
Let's see... The prep school kids taught me how to rip off the Pepsi machine.
The prep school kids had names for all the girls in "New Faces," the printed Facebook of its day. Don't think you had one of those at your high school, never mind your college, right? It was the prep school kids who'd marked all the "attractive" women by move-in date.
So when I hear Kavanaugh and his cronies denying their behavior, I have to speak up, because it's BAKED IN!
You see there are two Americas, the privileged and the not. And most people never encounter privilege. They watch "Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous," but the truly rich try not to be famous and will never be on a show like this. And they can bury bad news, by hiring David Boies, as Harvey Weinstein did to try and keep stories out of the "New York Times," which was also paying for Boies' firm's services. You see it's a club, and you're not in it. Even worse, you don't know about it.
So you sit at home and judge shenanigans through the only lens you know, which cannot see bad behavior.
"Animal House" was based on Dartmouth. That's one of the reasons I didn't want to go there, back then there were still no women. Now a bunch of these legendary prep schools do have women. But the stories I heard...
Show weakness and you become a pariah. There's no running to your parents, if they're even paying attention. You learn not to snitch. You learn not to reveal bad behavior. You learn how to bend the rules.
Now I cannot tell you whether Kavanaugh behaved as alleged or not. But the only thing I know is this behavior is consistent with the prep school ethos.
And this is far beyond right and left, far beyond racism and abortion. Then again, the preps are overwhelmingly white, they let in a few anomalies, but listen to the testimony of those in endless books, they're outsiders living a separate life. You're stunned when you hear "educated" people utter anti-Semitic and racist comments? They've been exchanging them for years unsupervised in prep school.
That's right, there's no supervision. No accountability. No parental oversight. No one saying otherwise in your formative years.
I met rich and famous people in college, it's helped me in my so-called career. I learned you never fawn, never talk about money, that first you sidle up and become friends, and that's oh-so-hard to do, because the rich and famous are skittish, they are not open books, and they believe the system outweighs any momentary event.
There are some things you cannot learn unless you experience them.
Talk to a prep school graduate.
Then again, they won't tell you.
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