Been meaning to mention this. I had the privilege, three weeks ago, of attending the Dalton School commencement at Lincoln Center. Dalton is an elite private high school in New York City. Maybe the most elite. Michael Steinhardt sent his kids there, so did Bruce Kovner (as I remember anyway). Jeffrey Epstein launched his meteor there, when he met and cultivated Ace Greenberg. Two things struck me about the charming and even-touchingly-homely proceedings. 1, there is a forcible effort on Dalton’s part to make its student body diverse. A school that could be all-rich-kids, or all-elite, or all-Jewish, is doing a lot to have a multicultural body. Dalton seems genuinely to embrace those values. I was moved by that. Ah, yes: here Dalton states that it is intentionally-diverse, and the School Head speaks of those values eloquently. This is the face of the new establishment. 2, There was not one reference to the Iraq war over 2 hours of speech and song. Charlie Gibson the ABC anchor was the commencement speaker (inoffensive, unmemorable, apart from some reminiscences of all he failed to learn at Princeton), Nathaniel Shapiro the senior speaker, Ellen Stein the head of school (Yes, my people are principals in American society), Lisa Waller the head of the high school. Not one mentioned Iraq. Lesson: American elites have no personal stake in this disaster, apart from the parlor game in which I am myself a player: Who was right in the debates of ’02-’03? A disgrace.
(P.S. John O’Keeffe lately told me that Milton Friedman considered it his greatest achievement to have gotten the all-volunteer army, eliminating the draft. And thereby the privileged left was coopted by the ultraright… )
