I WAS STRUCK BY a little story in the local section of the Washington Post. The Prince William County, Virginia, School Board has just completed construction on a new school and they had to figure out what to call it. Four thousand local people signed a petition saying it should be named after Jeff Simpson. Mr. Simpson was an emergency medical technician from the area who happened to be visiting lower Manhattan on September 11. He rushed four blocks to the World Trade Center and was killed in its collapse. All the speakers at the school board meeting were in favor of naming the school after Simpson. But the school board decided instead to name the school after the local development, Ashland. The school board officials said that it wouldn’t be right to single out one victim of September 11, when so many suffered. This strikes me as idiotic, even for a school board. Children learn from exemplars. Jeff Simpson behaved heroically and his example truly is a lesson for future school kids. But there is a radical egalitarian mentality around that says nobody is better than anybody else and nobody is worse, so no individual should be held up before others. Not to sound like Ayn Rand or anything, but this truly is an ideology of the mediocre. The Prince William School Board really should reconsider. ON SEPTEMBER 20, George Bush said all nations had to pick sides. You’re either with the terrorists or against them. Saudi Arabia has picked sides. They are with the terrorists. Last month they embraced the Iraqi regime at the Arab summit. Before, during, and after that, they have fomented anti-American radicalism, funded terror organizations and subsidized suicide bombing. So what happens? Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia gets invited to the president’s ranch in Crawford, Texas. I assume Bush will be tough with Abdullah, but if he is not, then the ultimate questions of presidential credibility will arise: Do Bush’s threats mean anything? Do his words carry weight? Saudi officials have been briefing reporters about what Abdullah is going to tell Bush. These are useful briefings because they remind us that the Saudi regime may look like real government officials but they are actually just Mafiosi. Abdullah will apparently spew out a series of threats. He will raise the specter of the “oil weapon”–imposing an embargo on the United States. He will embrace Osama bin Laden and other anti-American terrorists. According to the New York Times, the briefer said: “It is a mistake to think that our people will not do what is necessary to survive, and if that means we move to the right of bin Laden, so be it; to the left of Qaddafi, so be it; or fly to Baghdad and embrace Saddam like a brother, so be it.” We are dealing with lowlifes here. KAREN HUGHES and her family are returning home to Texas. Hughes’s husband and son never really cottoned on to Washington. What is striking about this story is the pattern, which seems to happen in administration after administration. People come to Washington from the outside. They’re nervous about life here. So what do they do? Do they move to Annandale, Virginia, or Rockville, Maryland–suburbs where life is normal and politics is actually not the dominant occupation? No, they move to Northwest D.C., where every house is filled with journalists, lobbyists, and politicos, and they send their kids to schools like Sidwell Friends or St. Albans (where Hughes sent her son), and where the campaigns for class president are managed by James Carville and Alex Castellanos. In other words they move straight to the most hothouse part of Washington. No wonder there is culture shock. My theory is that two things happen. When these future presidential aides find they are moving to D.C., they ask eminents to advise them about where to live. Naturally the Washington insiders recommend the neighborhoods and schools favored by Washington insiders. Second, they fall for the allure of prestige. Sidwell and St. Albans are prestigious schools but the atmosphere is not exactly welcoming to Republicans or conservatives, and for any kid coming from a public school in Texas, the atmosphere is going to seem strange and unfriendly. David Brooks is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.
