It doesn’t cost me anything to say so, as the likelihood of it ever coming up in my life is as near nil as can be, but Harper Lee getting the Medal of Freedom, along with Brian Lamb, for both of whom I have immense respect, from this president, for whom I don’t so much, is an object lesson in why one (where one is a non-politician) should never accept an invitation or award from any White House. (The tortured syntax accurately reflects my tortuous reasoning.)
Because who knows what the occupant thereof will do five minutes after you’ve gone? “President awards Kelman Medal of Freedom, defends waterboarding as ‘not torture.’” Swell headline to put in your scrapbook.
Also, you would probably have to get your medal along with the likes of Henry Hyde (for what, exactly?) as Lamb and Lee did.
All part of the case for a monarchy, to dissociate political power from the head of state.
1 comment
November 16, 2007 at 4:54 pm
kelmanari
I’ll go you one further: I wonder if the way we, as a profession, go about hiring people isn’t wildly screwy. We have no evidence to suggest that we have the ability to pick a winner, as you say, until candidates have produced several books. But yet tell ourselves that we’re able to make these decisions. Why? Ego? Probably. Really, though, there’s no reason to think that historians have the tools to pick out excellence from a pile of job applicants. Nobody has trained us in doing this. It’s a problem. That said, some places seem to make better decisions than other places. I don’t know what accounts for that. But it’s pretty obviously true.