A national emergency was declared as parody reservoirs ran suddenly dry around the country today, when a student at an “elite” northeastern university discovered to her dismay that military academies were somehow all tied up in, you know: The military.
Crazy, I know, but her findings appears to be true:
I know why I chose Columbia: the campus is magnificent, the education is top-tier, and my peers are intelligent. I could look at a stranger, tell him or her that I went to Columbia, and hear the predictable, “Wow, you must be smart.”
When my brother was getting ready to go to the Naval Academy, everyone ooohed and awed about how brave he was. Aunts and uncles would say, ‚ÄúJohn, you must be one of thousands of kids who wanted to go‚Äîyou must be so smart!‚Äù When he appeared unsure about whether he wanted to choose Navy or University of California, Berkeley, one uncle who works on Wall Street said, ‚ÄúJohn, businessmen love hiring people from the academies. You will be set for life.‚Äù With that kind of promised prestige, my brother found it tough to give up a spot at Navy. So in June, my family dropped him off in Annapolis…
(A lot of overwrought, self-referential emotionalism has been emended by the site owner. It is the lunch hour, after all. You may thank me later.)
When I looked at the course catalogue, which boasted seminars about leadership and selflessness, they were in fact seminars about weaponry and leading troops into combat. The reality of sending my brother to the Naval Academy began to set in: this was not a school; this was the military. While they boast a first class education, the main goal of this institution was to get my brother “combat ready.” During the first two “induction days,” the head of the Navy openly admitted that their goal was to transform these boys into men who would willingly die defending our country. They said to my parents, “We will manage to do in 18 minutes what you could not do in 18 years—we will discipline your boys and have them calling you Sir and Ma’am.” When they talked of courage and bravery, they showed a video of a Navy marine rounding off an unlimited supply of ammunition.
Wow, she is smart. A military school is not a school – nor even (and this might be grounds for legal action) a military school. It’s the military. With seminars on leadership and selflessness. And discipline. And stuff.
And videos of a “Navy marine rounding off an unlimited supply of ammunition.”
Navy marine #1: “My ammunition supply is unlimited – do I round up, or round down?”
Navy marine #2: “What, did you go to Columbia or something? Being ready to willingly die in the defense of your country means you always round up! Defective myrmidon!”
I know, I know – that’s not what she meant. I still think it’s funny.
But really, the tempting conclusion to draw from this is that the somebody’s standards for an “elite” education are slipping (hint: Not ours). But that would be unfair, after all there’s always that 5% that slips through. She got into one of the finest private institutions of higher learning (ed – actually, it appears to be a fine school in its own right, but not Columbia. For those who make these kinds of distinctions) in the country, while the same sand-poundingly stultifying milieu which filled her head with such an enormously revealing collection of smug, self-satifisfied, unchallenged assumptions also let her brother escape to Annapolis, the most selective public university in the country.
No process is perfect.
(And a H/T to Claude for the link.)
Update: I guess I should have entitled this post “the truth about Barnard,” since there is a seemingly crucial distinction. If you really want to see the Ivied set get all pissy with each other, bundle up over to this discussion over here.
Makes us look like saints, it does.
No mean feat.
Ah Geeze, where to start… I never saw any film of Marines “rounding out” or whatever the vocabulary is of ammo while surrendering my dearest loved one to the USNA. What I did see was a boat load of people with a whole lot of lettuce thanking me for allowing my son to SERVE MY COUNTRY. This was made clear from the get go and, I might add, we had numerous invitations to just have our son sign at the bottom of whatever form it was that day and they would pull him out of the process…
Surely, this sister was present at at least some of these communications. I surely was. I NEVER aided the process by returning anything on behalf of my son. I made him physically mail each and every form requested of him. I never expidited the process other than to develop a flow chart because the process was so complicated. It just makes me sick to read an account like this. What? YOU DIDN’T REALIZE YOUR BROTHER WAS JOINING THE NAVY? Did you get a clue after he raised his right hand and swore in on a predictably opressive humid day in Annapolis? If not, then you are a moron and we should discount anything you might say.
Even then, your brother had TWO YEARS to walk away clean. No harm, no foul… You stupid ass.
Cap’n,
I take note that Columbia University includes the Columbia School of Journalism. Nothing more need be said regarding the level of academic scholarship at the University.
The reality of sending my brother to the Naval Academy
Poor lad had no choice. He was sent, you see.
This makes me scratch my head,”However, for anyone else out there considering a career in the academy”. A career in the academy??? Do you become an instructor or something after graduating???
Aarrgghhh! Kinda makes you want to bang your head against the wall.
Well that’s where this all gets so criminal, Dave. They sent her brother to the Academy.
That’s where they send poor people.
Oh yes, her life is SO predictable in its banality, so predictable…in its own crass, elitist way. Personally, I’d look at her and say:
“No one else would take you, hunh?”
or better yet, one of my favorite insults:
“How nice for you.”
Elitist schools like Columbia, Harvard, Yale, et al – hold no appeal for me. They perpetuate a stereotype among the “lower classes” that begets some of the larger problems we grapple with today.
Hah Lex… Good comment! Yeah, only poor people, people that haven’t been saving up since the young man was a tike for his college education; people that have no where else to go but into the military for an education. JUST LIKE US, NOT!!!
We started saving for our children’s education on the day they were born. I will never forget overhearing my son tell the Navy Blue and Gold officer that his parents told him he could go to any college in the country (not totally exactly true without some huge financial wrangling but, close enough). In short, we would have made it happen or gone down swinging…
Funny thing, almost all my son’s friends families have the financial means to provide a first class education to their children. THE TRUTH IS that these young people wanted to go to Navy. It had absolutely nothing in most cases to do with financial circumstances. I would go so far to say that the majority of families we have met through USNA are in better financial circumstance than we are.
Actually, I’m in love with our best universities, and Columbia certainly falls into that category. But what I think a place like the Naval Academy does a far better job of doing is inculcating into its student body the knowledge that attendance and even graduation from one of these great places is not so much an accomplishment as it is an opportunity.
Some folks at the Ivies get that. Many, I think, do not.
The oblivious young lady above appears to have graduated from the same University I did. Except I graduated from Columbia in 1951, when it still had pretensions to excellence, still taught history and economics with relative objectivity and still required proof of having learned something other than schoolyard epithets before receiving one’s diploma. We even had to pass courses in Logic [a fascinating course to someone like me, who enjoys the ins and outs of language so much].
Alas, that whole academic approach seems to have withered away. Apparently, the students are so frightened of having to listen to other points of view that they caused a noisy protest a few months ago when the founder of the Minutemen was invited by the faculty to talk about that organization’s efforts to observe and record the blatant border violations by illegal aliens sneaking across our Texas/Arizona/New Mexico border. Kind of depressing, isn’t it, for a college that used to be great.
Reading this blog and its commenters who, I assume, are primarily professional military, except for some of the distaff side, bless them, I am more and more impressed with the quality and breadth of education offered by the USNA and West Point. If I had a son or a grandson, I would certainly try to send him to either of the above schools rather than any of the great majority of civilian universities.
The Wall Street guy was right.
Marianne Matthews
I hesitate to provide a link; just go over to http://Encyclopediadramatica.com and search for 16-year-old-girl.
WARNING! *Everything* at Encyclopedia Dramatica is NSFW!
Um, Marianne, there are also a few outliers here, like yrs truly. Dang, Ma’am, not only are you old enough to be my mother, but you remind me of her, with your good sense and wisdom. My Mom was never wrong when it came to business or politics, and had my Dad taken her advice I would be stinkin’ rich today, and so would the ex-brother.
Sometimes, a sensible woman just doesn’t get listened to.
P.s. That should be, “All too often, a sensible woman doesn’t get listened to, while an histrionic narcissistic silly bimbo gets all the attention, because the immature boys think that’s cute.”
At artillery school, when faced with a decimal of .5, we were alway told to “express” up or down to the next even number. As our instructor said, “Cattle ranchers round up, Marines express.”
And don’t even get me started on the whole “Navy marine” thing… sheesh.
Anyone else looking forward to the 3 remaining installments?
Some of the comments on the original site are just priceless.
And I thought I was being borderline nasty. Poor kid’s probably having a nervous breakdown by now.
It can be hard, exposing one’s deficiencies so publicly. Still, there’s no law against being either pompous or silly.
If there were, how on earth would we manage without all of the politicians?
MajHarvey, what are you doing commenting here? I thought you got yer legs blown off of your body near Jutland in 1916, just before you gave the order to flood the magazin
e. I mean, I’m glad you did that, and saved yer shipmates’ lives, and got the VC and all, but you’re dead, and fairly mouldy, by now.
I guess attending a prestigious university doesn’t cure ignorance or even stupidity. It seems that it only proves that her parents wasted too much of their hard earned money by “sending” her there. I’m sure she’d say she “earned” it while her brother was “sent” to the USNA. I can picture her “earning” it doing keg stands and bong hits with her friends. Then, the next day, looking down thier noses at the middle aged janitor who cleans up after them. Who works too hard to put food on the table for his family because he never had the same opportunities they had. He is the soul of America. These people will be somebody’s boss someday, probably mine.
Both my brother and I were told by a few people back home that we “hid” in the military while college was so hard. I don’t think I have to defend myself in present company but, you can see my point… My parents (Mom loves the military. Dad and step dad were Marines…er…are Marines) had family friends tell them that they didn’t approve of us joining the military because there was no war (at the time so we’d have been leeching off of the government) and that military service was only for poor kids from the south. What? Ok, we were poor kids from the north. So?
Most people have a better reacting to our military service. Some others just don’t get it.
Jeez, look at me.
“Most people have a better reaction to our military service.” I should say…
Maybe I should’ve gone to school huh?
“…he comforted me that John was not at all forced to sign the oath.”
Good thing too; the poor dears are just never the same after that.
If this were still a real Republic, evverbody would have to show up for militia muster with rifle, boots, rucksack, etc, or he wouldn’t be allowed to vote.
I think it’s still done that way, sort of, in Switzerland.
I’m closer to 60 than 50 years old, so I’d prolly be exempt anyway.
I do, however, reserve the right to keep a revolver by the bedside.
His uncle is right, but there’s a reason that he’ll be set for life after going to the Naval Academy. Here’s a hint; it has a lot more to do with overcoming adversity and hands on leadership experience than it has to do with either a summer internship running copy for the NYT or studying drama in a Starbucks in Greenwich village with his male companion Estéban.
The Naval Academy: “It’s like college, only…harder”
The only comfort, I guess, is that when I am old, and people this age are running the country, she will be balanced out by her brother……
sigh.
d
Having just gone over to the comments to this article I can tell you they are running around 100 to 1 against the sisiter…
So, I am not the only one that thinks her a dumb ass…
Having had the privilege of working in the Naval Academy Admissions Office I can attest to the level of competition for admittance. One of my first observations of this fact was brought about by a letter from the Senior United States Senator from Arizona who was protesting the Admission Board’s decision not to qualify a young man to compete for an appointment. This individual was ranked in the top 10 of his class and had acquired perfect SAT scores (then 1600), but that was all. No athletics, leadership skills, extra-curricular activities. He’d spent his entire high school career studying and nothing else. That’s okay for a civilian academic institution, but it did not prepare him for the total education USNA was going to provide.
Many are called, few are chosen.
You mean there are 18-year old kids who DON’T speak to their parents as Sir and Ma’am?
Good grief! I had that knocked into me before I was out of kindergarden!
I think that Senator Webb has written at least one novel which has to do with this subject.
I bought it, I read it, and thought it was pretty good. There was a nerdy character in it, and a naive country-boy character, and a very nasty, but quite sexy, girl character.
“A Sense of Honor”, I think it is the name of that book.
Stupid really should hurt.
If nothing else, this young woman should be professing her pride in not only the intelligence, of her brother, but in his honor, courage, commitment and patriotism — traits that seem to have skipped at least one female member of her family. And “openly admitted”??? Was someone hiding that fact? Oh — just from the girls at Barnard apparently!! Given her tone, I just have to ask, “What’s this “our” country stuff, kimosabe?”
Oh my. I have to admit, I laughed all the way through reading that. The air of astonishment at what happens behind the walls of military academies is priceless.
I do feel awfully sorry for her brother, though. My guess is that the first year at the academy isn’t the easiest for anyone, and she’s just put a huge bullseye on his back. The upperclassmen are going to have fun with that article.
She replies on the first page of comments:
To all of you who took the time to read this article:
First of all, thank you very much for reading it. I do not know how to respond except to say that you are right in many respects: this article was not meant to be a piece of investigative journalism. It was not meant to serve as a litany of facts about the miltiary or specifically about the navy. It was not meant to dismiss the importance of having a military and it was not meant to pubically embarrass my brother.
In fact, my brother is such an incredible person that he and I have talked about how this reflects poorely on me, and he feels sorry that I come off as someone unable to conduct thorough research.
All I can say is that this article is not factual. It is based on emotion–and sadly emotion is what hinders rationality. Emotion and fear, emotion and uncertainty, emotion and sadness–is what prevents our clear vision and our normal perception of things. And I wrote this article as a function of my emotion. Because, truthfully, when any member of my family could be in danger (be it in the next month or next decade), I get emotional and I get fearful. Perhaps we all do. And for mothers and fathers whose lives have been bereaved by losing a son or daughter in the military, their lives may too become run by emotion.
The real question is: how do we balance an emotional knee jerk reaction to a personal experience with what should be done on a national level such that fewer families have to have this emotional shading of facts because they are too hurt to see anything else? How do we prevent either emotion, an an obstruction of facts, or personal motives from running our national polity? How do we do this on a citizen level, and how do we do this as a public official?
Before you criticize this article, please help me on the above questions–and if you can do this–if you can balance the emotional needs of military families with just and right conduct in the world–you can run the world.
One of the funniest parts:
“everyone ooohed and awed about how brave he was”
It’s “ooohed and aahed” of course, not “oohed and awed
Generally, when writing something that praises one’s own intelligence (even indirectly) it is a god idea to proofread carefully.
justhisguy came closest to the real tragedy:
She can vote.
Cheer up, Gray. I feel sorry for this young woman in a way, although she annoys me, as I said above. She’s probably got a case of “I’ve just graduated from this nifty school and that means I know everything,” like most recent college grads. But I’m reminded of one of my Dad’s favorite quotes from Mark Twain, to wit: “When I was a boy of fourteen my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand him. When I turned twenty-one, I was amazed at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
I guess that the English department at Barnard doesn’t teach Mark Twain any more. Or Rudyard Kipling either. Not PC enough. Pity.
Marianne Matthews
Sister, not mother.
Brother needs to tell her to get her nose out of it.
All I can say is that this article is not factual. It is based on emotion–and sadly emotion is what hinders rationality.
Well, all I can say is YOU DO NOT CRY in front of Midshipmen. That was told to me early on. You want to cry about the situation of your loved one, you do it in private, not public. Many times I felt like crying in front of my Midshipman; it wasn’t all beer and skittles for our family. But, I DID NOT CRY and that is exactly what this young woman did, in print, in public. Dumb ass…
And another thing; all of a sudden this article is “fiction”. It is “fiction” now because I and a whole bunch of other people called her a liar… The “head of the Navy” said so and so to her parents? No, he didn’t…
Use of cell phones is restricted because someone might talk the Plebe out of continuing? No, pure BS.
Got your head shaved? Does that alter your brain waves, I think not…
So. here she is, trapped in a boxof lies… So now it is emotional…
Please help me Obi Wan to understand the greater picture…
A load of crap from someone that never thought she would get the response that she did. I guess it is better to learn early that there are other people out there as articulate as you are that happen to disagree and are willing to call you on the facts.
[...] think I know someone who feels like that right now. Here’s one of the more gently devastating takedowns I’ve seen on the [...]
Some of the comments posted on the Columbia Spectator site in response to her article are priceless – esp. Babs’ well-put reproach to Ms. Leppla.
Check ‘em out at http://www.columbiaspectator.com/node/26470
I can’t get over it. He was sent. For all you fresh faced recent Severn River Trade School grads….it’s good duty if you can get it….oh to be a junior and in command of your own press gang. And good for deck department rambling around the town conking young striplings on the head to be sent to a hulked ship of the line before their final destination of the USNA.
Poor kid my ass. She’s attended one of the most expensive colleges in the country – scholarship or not, she’s no poor kid. She got accepted into an elite – and elitist – school, which at some point had to take some level of intelligence.
She’s gotten what she clearly wanted – fame, or some form of notoriety. In the process she has embarrassed her family, perpetuated myths and stereotypes about our military and tried to say that she is the better person for it all. And now she cries “but my emotions got the better of me, I was worried about my brother”.
Yeah – so how does she react? Publicly, with idiocy. Ivy league???
Well, a romp through the comments will give you the best laugh of the week! I think they are now up to about 400.
My personal favorite was written by Mid X:
“If you come to the academy I’ll throw poop on you!”
I’m telling you, I laughed my head off!
i am proud to state that one of my SPCs, the junior member of my staff section, happens to have graduated cum laude from Barnard.
she’s sharp, intelligent, and a damn fine soldier.
they haven’t completely lost it.
Justthisguy-
When I read your earlier comment re. Jutland, VC, etc. I thought you’d been hitting the rum a little too hard… then I cruised over to Wikipedia and found out the story. Wonder if it’s too late to change my son’s name to Francis John William?
I’ve actually been to the Royal Marine Museum in Portsmouth – and no doubt saw Maj. Harvey’s VC – but didn’t realize at the time what I was looking at.
Here’s to a fellow Marine!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_John_William_Harvey
Two things raced through my mind as I read this. First;
“If she isn’t inventing her brother out of whole cloth, then he must be getting quite a sizeable helping of grief from his a) upperclassmen for having a family so anit-military, and b)classmates for bringing so much heat to their squad’s table.”
Second:
“Gee, that sound a lot like the way Cindy Sheehan speaks about Casey, as if she ALLOWED him to re-up and volunteer to return to the ME.”
That’s cool, Major, just happy to get the story out, and educate folks. I thank you for your help in doing that.
P.s. I believe there was a guy aboard USS Iowa when they had a similar Godawful problem who gave a similar order, to flood the magazine, and was later brought up on charges for some kind of silliness, before cooler heads prevailed and nonsense and Naval Investigators were slapped down.
He was eventually decorated, I think, just not with any VC equivalent. There was much sexism and embarassment and resignations of commissions and suchlike involved, as I recall.
There is an excellent book about it.
“A Glimpse of Hell”, I think it’s called.
Read the book. The situation aboard that ship was a train wreck waiting to happen.
When it did happen, the Navy made it worse
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