Mad Man
18th May 2015
Steve Sailer does a little fisking.
That’s kind of my point, which is that Diversity was already a real thing in this part of L.A. when I was growing up (and Weiner, from the richer side of the Hollywood Hills, is six years younger than me). Society was getting complicated in ways that the rest of the country only began to understand decades later. For example, Dr. K. told me at lunch in 1981 that Harvard School had a policy of discriminating against Oriental applicants because they didn’t contribute as much to classroom discussions as their test scores would indicate. Presumably, opinionated students like Weiner were preferred, even if they weren’t as smart. Today, we hear that Harvard University is being sued by Asian-Americans for discrimination in admissions, but I heard about discrimination against Asians at Harvard School 34 years ago.
It’s a little bit like how I can relate to Barack Obama (b. 1961) because Honolulu was like L.A., only much more so. But nobody is interested in how racially integrated little Barry’s kindergarten class was in 1965. Instead, when New Yorker editor David Remnick wrote a quasi-biography of Obama, he called it The Bridge and made it, somehow, all about the 1965 civil rights struggle on the bridge in Selma, Alabama, even though Obama spent 1965 feeding the hamster in Miss Yomiguchi’s kindergarten class along with little Jimmy and Soon-mi. It was a bestseller.
In contrast, I wrote a book putting Obama into the context of his growing up at a prep school in Hawaii and going to college in Los Angeles in 1981. It was not a bestseller.
Similarly, Weiner loves to tell interviewers about how Jews were a down-trodden one-eighth or one-tenth of the student body at Harvard School, even though a Los Angeles Herald-Examiner article from 1981 mentions that two-fifths of the student body was then Jewish. It’s a bizarre thing to dissemble about since Harvard and Westlake (the boys school and the girls school merged in 1989) figure in the lives of so many prominent people. According to Harvard-Westlake’s Wikipedia page, it’s alumni include Shirley Temple, Jon Lovitz, H.R. Haldeman, gay basketball player Jason Collins, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Tori Spelling, swimmer Dara Torres, Mark Harmon, astronaut Sally Ride, Governor Gray Davis, reluctant NFL player Jonathan Martin, Salon founder David Talbott, etc etc