Success

Now if Mr Andrew Carnegie, or any other millionaire, had wished to invent a God to suit his ends, he could not have done better. Benjamin did it for him in the eighteenth century. God is the supreme servant of men who want to get on, to produce. Providence. The provider. The heavenly storekeeper. The everlasting Wanamaker. And this is all the God the grandsons of the Pilgrim Fathers had left. Aloft on a pillar of dollars.
--D.H. Lawrence on Benjamin Franklin

Hanging out at the Hippo Park just off Central Park West and 91st Street the Phantom was struck by the pseudo diversity of the folks who swarmed over the wondrous statues of hippopotomi, some partially submerged, some hippos standing fully on terra firma.  A babble of languages, from Central Europe to South America rang out, but the children were all dressed alike in their expensive, colorful clothes, Canada Goose jackets, Nordstrom play pants. Many were mixed race, and beautiful as mixed raced children often are.  

But their parents were cut from the same cloth: you could hear it in their occasional call outs to their children:
1. Success goes to the persistent!
2. Don't run with that stick! You are rushing into a  lawsuit !
3. Running up the slide? No, you slide down the slide. Oh, well, maybe not Harvard. We'll start thinking about Wesleyan. [Knowing laughter from scattered other parents]

Hippo Park, officially: Safari Playground

The fathers were American nerds or European high tech, at a glance. The mothers physically more attractive, and certainly well maintained and expensively done up, but from snipits of conversation, expensively educated:  Yale, Princeton, Stanford the names I heard over just a twenty minutes. 

Summertime in Safari Playground

Nothing wrong with any of them. They were polite, friendly, clearly accomplished, but their kids were not just there to frolic, but to be trained. 

Perhaps the Phantom is seeing what he wants to see. 

But it did make the Phantom remember a single incident from years ago, when his son came home dejected over a C- on a history paper, at the famous Sidwell Friends School in Washington, D.C.  And a C- was only the first phase of rebuke.

His assignment had been to write a biographical paper about a famous early American and he had, characteristically, procrastinated, and finally scoured the stacks of the school library and stumbled upon a slim volume which recommended itself by its size, a mere 50 pages, which meant it could be quickly consumed, but, better yet, it was immediately absorbing, as it was written in that breezy British style which amuses not just 15 year old boys but adults as well. 

It was D.H. Lawrence's subversive, lancinating piece on Benjamin Franklin, who was, the Phantom's son, quickly learned, a hypocrite of major dimensions, having made his mark with scads of little ditties on the virtuous life, all the while womanizing, conniving and violating most of the virtuous homilies he had espoused. 

D.H. Lawrence

Mark Twain, of course, had argued that any boy trying to follow Franklin's advice would lead a sorry, joyless life, never spending a penny for the sake of immediate pleasure and missing out on most of the pleasures Mr. Franklin had never denied himself. 

The Phantom's son was much taken with the Lawrence tract and promptly wrote up a report incorporating the ironic and needling wit to suggest this American hero had, in fact, clay feet.

His teacher, who had a degree from Columbia University's school of education, was scandalized, infuriated and appalled.  She could not bring herself to fail the boy--nobody fails at Sidwell; only the school fails the child, but she wrote a scalding note about how shamefully this unworthy student had denigrated one of the heroes of American history. This teacher had learned American history at Columbia and she did not get into and through Columbia by disrespecting anyone.

The Phantom, of course, read the teacher's comments before reading the paper,  but upon reading it, found himself laughing and enjoying it greatly, and learning things about Franklin he had never known, and went on to read more about Franklin.

If the Phantom had downgraded his son's effort it would have been because he had relied on only one source.  Franklin, it turns out, was ahead of his time with respect to racial theory.  He did own slaves, but returning from Europe, freed them all and became an abolitionist activist.  Before that, he condemned fellow colonists who, after an Indian insurrection, killed Indians indiscriminately, as if one Indian's transgression tainted all Indians. 

The Phantom told his son not to worry.  The son had just had his first experience with the dangers of rebellion and speaking unwelcomed truths to authority figures.

The Phantom well remembered his own insurrections with teachers in the public schools, who were every bit as  party line disciples as the Sidwell history teacher.  He had thought a private school would be populated with teachers who had been better educated, which, of course meant, more open minded, exposed to a broad variety of opinion.

But elite schools are not immune from narrow mindedness or constricted thinking. 
Horror at "blasphemy"  was alive and well in the elite system.  

This was the first time his son encountered punishment for speaking heresy but not the last.

In the 21st century, we see Zuckerberg and Gates as men who jettisoned the elite school (Harvard) for the freedom of the West Coast gold rush in IT.

But  now we also see the limitations of the thinking of these iconoclasts, bound not by concepts of institutionalized blasphemy, but by the limitations of their own educations, bound, as fate would have it, by the lack of a liberal arts education. 

So Mr. Zuckerberg cannot see the harm his Frankenstein monster has wrought, and cannot correct it.  And Mr. Gates, admirably wants to give away some part of his immense fortune, but he hasn't the foggiest idea of how to maximize the benefit such largesse might convey. Clean water in Africa, malaria vaccines are worthy goals, but there are far more potent and far reaching efforts which could meet needs closer to home, which would make a real difference, like backing the right changes in government efforts to address these problems.