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Vindication
by L. Neil Smith
lneil@netzero.com`

Exclusive to The Libertarian Enterprise

Readers of the earliest edition of The Probability Broach, my first novel, are aware, from the author's biography, that I departed Colorado State University in 1968, as a fifth year undergraduate in psychology, with perhaps the lowest gradepoint average in the history of... well, I just don't know. I have never been able to figure out whether I wasted the opportunity of a college education or it wasted me.

It isn't that I didn't learn anything in college. I learned, to paraphrase Von Clausewitz, that college education is an extension of high school by other means, populated, for the most part, by parasites and charlatans in pursuit of lifelong job security at the unwilling expense of the Productive Class, four-flushers and frauds who, if they really knew a tenth of what they think they know, would constitute a menace to public safety. Both of these facts, once I discovered the courage to acknowledge them, became irresistable disincentives to continue.

I suppose it's possible, thanks to a lack of college education—or at least a certificate to prove I'd jumped in the correct direction through all the hoops—that I was never taken in by blather of the "population bomb", Keynesianism, acid rain, ozone depletion, global warming, victim disarmament, or any of the other bald-faced scams that have kept academic hoaxters alive, sucking down government grants for the past several decades. I prefer to think that I'd have had more character than that, even if I'd stayed in school, finished a degree (it would have been in physical anthropology by then) and taught and written.

For what it's worth, I was never worried about Y2K, either.

Or believed that "Paul is Dead".

Nevertheless, whenever I've thought about CSU over the forty years since I left (and it's been often, because my wife has worked there as a staffer for the last 25 of them, and I sometimes serve as a guest lecturer), I've always felt vaguely guilty. This despite the fact, a long time ago, when I'd only written half as many books as I have now, a maverick professor whose English classes I visited from time to time told me I had fifteen degrees that everyone on his faculty wished they had.

He was probably right. About the same time, a colleague of his, enjoying his Warholian fifteen in the academic market, came up to me at a party and snottily wanted to know whether my books were good, or commercial.

I think he's dead, now.

I believe the American west, maybe other parts of the country, too, has similar problems when it comes to the question of where you got your degree. All my life, it seems to have been an unconscious assumption on most people's part that if you graduated from one of a small handful of old northeastern universities—Harvard, Yale, and Columbia come to mind, and there are four or five others—your education was superior (and probably you, were, too), to those who had been compelled by unfortunate circumstances to seek their education elsewhere.

And yet, what have these institutions really produced?

John Fitzgerald Kennedy, notorious Harvard man who accepted credit—and literary awards—for ghost-written books, reportedly cheated on his wife thousands of times, and started America's involvement in Vietnam?

Harvard University is also the alma mater of Al Gore, Henry Kissinger, both Roosevelts, Charles Schumer, and many others who never cared how many innocents had to die to aggrandize their political careers.

Famous Yalies Bill and Hillary Clinton, who lied, cheated, and stole their way from the Arkansas governor's mansion into the White House and the U.S. Senate, leaving a long trail of dead bodies behind them?

Yale is also the location of Skull and Bones, a fraternity where, as initiates, both George Bushes, in their time, lay in a coffin, reportedly masturbating and confessing every sexual experience they'd had.

Columbia (and Harvard) student Barack Hussein Obama who wanted to bomb Pakistan, allegedly does business with Chicago mob czars, threatens to sue—or have arrested—anyone who speaks ill of him, and plans to create a cadre of loyal brownshirts as large as the U.S. military?

How many institutions of higher learning west of the Mississippi and east of California have such a shameful string of failures to live down?

And now, as we teeter on the brink of what is possibly the biggest economic and political disaster in American history, how many of those who are personally responsible for it—and haven't got a clue what to do to fix it—are proud alumni of these and similar ivy-covered halls?

Here's a hint.

Paul Volcker and Ben Bernanke, both architects of our current misery, are graduates of Princeton, along with Aaron Burr who wanted to be King of America, Woodrow Wilson, dean of 20th century American fascism, John Foster Dulles, inventor of the Cold War, and Donald Rumsfeld, chief conspirator in the 21st century nazification of America.

Get it? These guys are the biggest screw-ups in history, and they all hail from the haughtiest, snottiest, phony-baloney colleges in the world.

Except possibly for Oxford and Cambridge.

Look up that rogue's gallery, yourself.

Four-time Prometheus Award-winner L. Neil Smith has been called one of the world's foremost authorities on the ethics of self-defense. He is the author of 25 books, including The American Zone, Forge of the Elders, Pallas, The Probability Broach, Hope (with Aaron Zelman), and his collected articles and speeches, Lever Action, all of which may be purchased through his website "The Webley Page" at lneilsmith.org.

Ceres, an exciting sequel to Neil's 1993 Ngu family novel Pallas was recently completed and is presently looking for a literary home.

Neil is presently working on Ares, the middle volume of the epic Ngu Family Cycle, and on Roswell, Texas, with Rex F. "Baloo" May.

The stunning 185-page full-color graphic-novelized version of The Probability Broach, which features the art of Scott Bieser and was published by BigHead Press www.bigheadpress.com has recently won a Special Prometheus Award. It may be had through the publisher, or at www.Amazon.com.

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