Thursday I went to the dentist for my six-month cleaning.  This is the same dentist who two appointments ago said, "Do we even need to make another appointment?"  This time, the hygienist greeted me cheerfully with, "You look good.  I see you're still kicking."   I think the office may need a sensitivity training session.

Several posts ago, discussing the book Why Nations Fail, I mentioned that one of the authors' top ten phrases was "the iron law of oligarchy."  It's a term coined by a German historian, Robert Michels, to explain how, despite revolutions and reforms, the oligarchy retains its power.  For the authors, the phrase is too strong: it's a powerful tendency, not an iron law.  But it's a tendency that's hard to overcome.  As F. Scott Fitzgerald memorably said, "The rich get richer and the poor get children."

I came across the reference to Michels's law again this week in reading an excerpt from Chris Hayes's new book, Twilight of the Elites.  Hayes is the host of the weekend morning program "Up" on MSNBC, the most intelligent news/info show (IMHO) on TV.  In the part I read, he uses as an example of how what was meant to be pure meritocracy became another example of the powerful preserving their advantages.  Hayes is a product of the Hunter College magnet middle and high school in New York.  Students are admitted from all five boroughs solely on one criterion: the results of a test they take in sixth grade.  There are no legacies; there is no means testing.  There is no lottery, no quotas.  There is only one test, one score.  It was designed to be a system of pure meritocracy.  And what have been the results?  Because the school is so prestigious and the students who graduate have so many advantages, an entire industry of test preparation for just this one test has emerged.  Parents who have the money can pay thousands of dollars for their ten-year-old children to take classes that have no other educational goal than to prep them for this test.  Do the prep classes help?  Absolutely.  But what we know is that even the actual tests like the SAT have only one axis of predictability: students who do well on them will do well on other similar tests.  They won't have higher g.p.a.'s or assume leadership positions.  And for the Hunter magnet school the results has been ever decreasing numbers of minority and disadvantaged students and consistently increasing numbers of wealthy, already privileged students whose parents can pay for the prep.

That story, along with my comments on the unqualified Acocella being paid to write on linguistics and with some nice remarks from readers about the Bishop poem "In the Waiting Room," which I mentioned in the last post, led me to think of my own (though quite different) example.  Four times I rented a studio apartment in Paris from a woman in Los Angeles; her daughter lived in Paris and taught an occasional class at one of the "new" Paris universities created after the dissension of 1968.  These are located in the suburbs, which is where, in the reverse of the American pattern, the poor and immigrants live.  The daughter, whom I met only a couple of times, was attractive, but not exactly a deep thinker.  She was, however, having an affair with the editor of a famous American magazine, and so she was published several times.  Her first essay was deliberately provocative: she argued that the classroom was an erotically charged space (fraught and imbricated) and that the latent sexuality was a positive good that ought to be encouraged, especially in relationships between professors and students.  The first time we met in person, she told me that she was writing an article on modern poetry for the magazine, and since she knew nothing about poetry of any kind, she wanted to pick my brain.  I asked her whether by modern poetry she meant Modernist or something more general, but she had no idea what the question meant.  And so we met, after she had asked me to draw up a reading list for her so she could get her feet wet.  Our dinner meeting got off to a bad start when she told me she had begun her reading with the poetry of Elizabeth Bishop, understood none of it, and thought it was therefore awful poetry.  She particularly disliked "In the Waiting Room."  I love Bishop, and I love that poem.  But, as Whitman said, "logic and sermons never convince," and I don't think I made much headway.  Never-the-less, a few months later, I found her article in the magazine. 

I can't not interest myself in politics.  And as I watch the Republicans, who seem on the one hand to be appealing to an ever diminishing demographic and yet to have consolidated so much power and money that demographics may lose out, I wonder whether we're seeing the Iron Law of Oligarchy at work once more.