Nepotism is Great!

Nepotism is much maligned among losers without famous and rich parents, but in the most exclusive clubs in America, the truth is whispered: nepotism is great!  Nepotism is the lifeblood on which our society runs.  If you don’t believe me, just ask its beneficiaries.  I mean, who are you going to trust: a bunch of deadbeats who have mortgages and fly commercial, or subscribers to the Robb Report?  The sooner that people without homes on at least two continents realize they should not have opinions of their own but should simply follow the wishes of their betters, the happier everyone will be.

Those who oppose nepotism do not understand basic principles of economics.  Nepotism is simply the free market at its free-est.  It works like this: the market is free, ergo people succeed or fail based on their own merits, one of which happens to be having been born to wealthy and connected people.  Would you punish innocent children simply for being born to their parents?  What type of heartless monster are you, who would take the bread out of Colin Hanks’s mouth?  Should we just throw away our most talented writers and film-makers, just because they happen to be the children of other successful writers and film-makers?  I can’t believe anyone would want to risk a world where there was a chance that Sofia Coppola’s 2010 movie Somewhere might not come into existence.  Are you saying she should be punished for having a famous film-directing father?  Why, it is not I who is prejudiced, Sir, but you!

Compare, if you will, the typical scion of Greenwich, Connecticut, with an aged hobo living under a bridge in downtown LA.  The hobo is dressed in unlaundered thrift-store clothing, his beard is ragged and bushy, his teeth are terrible, and he emits a distinct odor that, upon entering a city bus, causes people to abandon seats near him.  On the other hand, the young Andover alum has excellent posture, is clean-shaven, and exhibits a carefully-trimmed coiffure and confident handshake.  His pastel polo shirt is embroidered with a tiny crocodile on the chest.  His bowel movements smell like freshly-baked cinnamon rolls.  What more evidence of the superiority of one individual over another could there be?  Now you might say, “Correlation does not imply causation.”  However, I would say just the opposite: “Causation does not imply correlation.”  Q.E.D.

I don’t believe we should punish success.  If we punish it, we will get less of it, and how will we possibly survive without an adequate supply of people willing to write memoirs about their famous fathers?  Already the policies of the Ob-La-Di Ob-La-Bama administration have reduced us down to a six year strategic reserve of memoirists.  We’re in danger of being outstripped by Red Chinese memoirists writing delicately crafted and intensely felt tales of their childhoods as uncomprehending witnesses to Great Leap Forward madness from an “inside-the-palace” perspective.

People respond to incentives.  And without the incentive of being able to buy one’s child a Goldman Sachs internship, why would anybody ever bother getting rich?  It’s not as if there are any other advantages to having wealth, in the age of Obamunism.  I heard that in his second term, EPA thugs in black jodhpurs and Stetsons are going to take away everybody’s riding lawnmowers.  Why, you’re saying that everybody must be forced to live in identical cinderblock dormitories and wear unflattering jumpsuits that make our asses look huge, and everybody must eat porridge in cavernous cafeterias while listening to a scratchy loudspeaker drone on with readings from the Little Red Book, and that a government recreation committee will decide what type of dances we can dance at the annual mixer, and highly educated doctors and physicists must be forced to work as machinists in a factory or hoeing weeds in a rice paddy for alternating decades.  Because if you criticize any feature of the status quo, that’s what you’re advocating.  It’s either this or that, with no third option.  Any attempt to change anything irrevocably leads to a dystopia straight out of Orwell or Zamyatin because, as people respond to incentives, under the current set of incentives people are perfectly free, but if incentives were to change, they would automatically become unfree.  By the way, my belief in the power of incentives (i.e., external conditions) to change the behavior of individuals subject to those incentives definitely does not contradict my belief in free will.  No sir.

We’re all just primates after all, monkeys in an urban jungle.  And, just like monkeys, we like to throw our poo.  Except in our case, “poo” means “our children” and “throw” means “use our connections to bestow entrée into lucrative and exclusive careers.”  To the two things evolutionary psychology has conclusively proved (one, men like to drive jacked-up trucks with big wheels and, two, women like to watch TV shows about real estate) we can now add a third: both sexes like to talk about what college their progeny attends, especially if it’s Ivy League.  By the way, my belief in evolutionary psychology definitely does not contradict my belief in free will.  No sir.

Look at Luke Russert, author of this recent scintillating tweet concerning the national conventions: “So my uber watered down sound byte pundit comment after 2nite: DNC = heart, RNC = head.”  Luke, son of long-time “Meet the Press” moderator Tim Russert, has been ideally placed all his life to hear people who appear on “Meet the Press” say things like, “Republicans are the Daddy party, Democrats are the Mommy party,” so he has an almost inborn sense that a statement like that is not the braindead cliché it might appear to be to less learned members of the great unwashed, but is actually an infinitely wise eternal verity.  He is actually the single person in America best-equipped to convey such truths to the public.

Or look at James Dolan.  If Charles Dolan hadn’t founded Cablevision and given Dolan fils the CEO-ship thereof, the Knicks might have been deprived of his genius lo these ten years.  True, the team has won only a single playoff game in that time, but who’s to say that without the help of Isiah Thomas, Eddy Curry, Larry Brown, and Allan Houston, it might have been a lot worse.  You can’t say he’s not qualified, with a B.S. in communications from SUNY-New Paltz.  Or Chelsea Clinton, whose brilliant reports for NBC on such topics as an after-school program in Little Rock and a charter school in Rhode Island have set the world on fire.

Nepotism is just another word for meritocracy.  And merit- (“claim to respect and praise; excellence; worth) + -cracy (“rule”) is just another word for aristo- (Greek, “the best”) + -cracy.  No more succinct praise for the system that dare not speak its name could be imagined.