Charm School

It was nice to get back to the science (https://luysii.wordpress.com/2024/04/17/cholesin/) after several long detours through current events but reality continues to intrude.  The firing of 30 Google staffers who protested Google’s choice of clients and the mass arrests and academic suspension of the Columbia University students who set up a protest encampment on campus is worth a post about a bit of history.

Just shy of 56 years ago I entered the service under the Berry Plan as an Air Force doctor.

After serving as an army doc for two years in ’68 – ’70, a time when we had 500,000 troops in Vietnam, I left with little respect for its leadership. I was stateside at Fitzsimons General Hospital, one of the Army’s premier hospitals, which was a plum assignment (because the army was very short of neurologists). This meant that 2 year docs who’d served their first year in Vietnam got their choice of assignment when returning stateside. So I saw plenty of them and  NOT ONE thought we were winning over there, despite what the top brass said to the press and the president.

So who would have thought that 33 years later I’d be friendly with and respect a retired Major General, George Baker. Never say never. He was a very intelligent man, an orthopedic surgeon, who’d been chief at Walter Reed and found retirement boring, so he practiced at my hospital. He told me about something he called charm school. It was where officers newly promoted to  General  rank were sent for training. They were told to toe the straight and narrow sexually and in other matters, and that if a planeload of them went down, the army would have no trouble at all filling their shoes.

Why should future protestors hear about this? Because, according to the net, Columbia accepts under one in 25 applicants and Google accepts around one in five hundred (look it up).  They are not so wonderful that they can’t be easily replaced with people of comparable quality.