Why did you listen to that man, that man’s a balloon

“Friend of Mine,” The National

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Many years ago when I was teaching high school English in the Upstate of South Carolina, my hometown, I had a student turn in an essay about the legendary rock performer Pink Floyd.

Yes, this student wrote an entire essay praising Pink Floyd as an individual, not accurately as the group.

This sort of ignorant bravado was not uncommon for a teen, and was a bit funny—although I used that situation to send a clear message to the young man that ignorance wasn’t funny or impressive.

And then decades later, this:

And this ignorant bravado by the billionaire owner of the Social Media Site Formerly Known as Twitter prompted well deserved derision:

Decades after the nonsensical essay on Pink Floyd by a high school student , I suspect that my lesson was simply another adult lie, one grounded in the meritocracy myth.

You see, in the real world, ignorant bravado can lead to you being a billionaire.

And I guess, this reality is no different than a joke I often use in my classes—one that isn’t funny—when I cover citation and plagiarism.

I explain to students that academic citation is essential in college writing and that plagiarism will result in failure or even expulsion. But the good news is that plagiarism in the real world is a stepping-stone to being a senator (Rand Paul), First Lady (Melania Trump), or even president of the US (Joe Biden)!

The celebrity billionaires and millionaires (like Trump) are not smarter than most of us, are not more innovative, and are definitely not working harder.

Most of them have outsized privilege and then the sort of black heart that allows them to exploit their way to wealth.

Ethical people, we must admit, do not become billionaires; ethical people probably never get elected as well.

And you’ll notice that billionaires and people with enormous power are the ones leading the charge to deny that privilege exists, to promote above all else the meritocracy myth.

That’s because the denial and the myth serve their unearned power and wealth. Privilege, none the less, is a fact, but it isn’t a condemnation.

Simply considered, look at the NBA. Every player in the NBA is an elite athlete, and then there are the elite among the elite—Michael Jordan, LeBron James, and Larry Bird (an outlier heralded as a “hard worker” as a veneer for his whiteness).

If we set aside the racism in how white and Black NBA players are described (a big ask), let’s focus on Bird as a hard worker and elite-of-the-elite in the NBA.

Yes, Bird has white privilege, but his working-class roots complicate that status; however, the essential privilege Bird possessed was his height. Being 6’9″ allowed his other accomplishments, including the outcomes from being hard working.

At 5’5″, Bird would have never been known as an NBA elite.

Height, then, is an unearned advantage, and that is what privilege means.

Celebrity billionaires are almost all white, but also, they all had huge financial advantages that they did not create. Like Bird being 6’9″, they started with unearned advantages.

So we are left with the meritocracy myth that is at least an exaggeration, if not a lie.

Hard work matters, but so does work within an ethical and moral context.

Hard work matters, but that work may not see fruition in ways that people achieve through, mostly, the advantages of their privilege.

Let me end by returning to my early days of teaching high school.

A state college at the time was riding high with football success, and one of the players, a very large lineman who went on to NFL fame, was a bit of a celebrity.

On a segment of ESPN, that player did not represent himself or his education well with some garbled use of the English language.

When I made a joke about the university based on that player’s non-standard language usage (and I was actually just kidding), a student blurted out, “Yea, but he’s rich, richer than you.”

And there it was, a lesson by a student for his teacher.

Just get rich. Nothing else matters.

‘Merica.