THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

It is important never to let your dislike for an enemy blind you to what he can TEACH you. An old North Carolina joke has one man saying to another:

"You're ugly, your feet stink, and you don't love Jesus."

To outsiders this is a funny demonstration of a hick. But if you are a Southerner, you see the wisdom in it. Like other Southerners — and Brits — North Carolinians think nothing is as funny as making fun of themselves. Actually, it's a form of egotism.

I like to make fun of ME as a redneck, and that is pure egotism. I think the Yankee naiveté that I have exploited all my life is funny. Others think it is ridiculous for me to play the ignorant bumpkin, but ***I*** enjoy it because it reminds me of so many instances where Yankees fell for a more subtle version of it.

What is behind this "You're ugly, your feet stink, and you don't love Jesus?" It is a very profound insight: if you decide that EVERYTHING about your enemy is weak and ugly and bad, you are a damned fool. But that is a trap many people, especially the ones who think they are Knowledge Personified, fall into all the time.

Your average North Carolinian, raised on Porch Talk, knows that. Your average Harvard grad has no idea of it.

I despise Alexander Hamilton. But I admire the man. He did in fact get his power by being George Washington's staff man. But unlike Eisenhower, who never was near combat, Hamilton did get into the war and was a hero when he did. In fact his big break with Washington came because Washington needed him at headquarters and Hamilton wanted to get back to fighting.

You see, this Lesser Generation, who fought the Revolution before the Greatest Generation, had plenty of men on both sides who wanted to FIGHT. The Greatest Generation whines about how it got SHOT AT, poor babies, and how "We fought a WAR for those benefits." Washington was SWAMPED with young men like Lafayette and Hamilton who DEMANDED to stop scribbling and get out there and get ripped to pieces by shrapnel.

THEY were not the Greatest Generation, you see. I despise Hamilton. But the Masturbation Generation could not come up to his kneecap.

Below, with my usual subtlety, I shouted,

A MANAGER WHO DOES NOT SEEK OUT PEOPLE WHO ARE SMARTER THAN HE IS IS A FAILURE.

That is what leaves me in absolute awe of George Washington. George Washington was, to put it plainly, not all that bright. But you have to have a real grasp of American history to appreciate this man's MORAL courage. At his first Cabinet meetings, this slow reader had Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and Benjamin Franklin. In all of history no one was ever able to summon three greater minds than this. Each of them could have had your average Harvard genius for lunch.

TRY, just TRY, to imagine any media or academic bureaucrat today, with an IQ forty points above Washington's, appointing and ordering around a set of intellectual giants like THAT.

I am very smart, but I am old and tired. I am officially disabled. So I can either seek worshippers of my guruship or I can do what Washington did. Washington was one in a million. I want to be one in a million.

I'm a FANATIC. All that matters to me is that somebody grab the flag that is worthy to carry it.

And if that doesn't flatter your soul, you don't have one.