Prominent man of letters Walter Kirn writes an essay in the New York Times Magazine “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Aptitude,” in which he explains (to the extent that “explain” can be used to characterize his effort):

1. He wants you to know that he got very high SAT scores, which helped get him into Princeton
2. But he’s not all stuck up over it; in fact, he says he’s really not that smart
3. Women of Color worked much harder at Princeton than he did
4. So, Sonia Sotomayor was right about Ricci
5. Now that he’s long graduated from Princeton, he sort of thinks that his place should have been given to “another Sotomayor.”
6. Walter Kirn, a frequent contributor, is the author, most recently, of “Lost in the Meritocracy: The Undereducation of an Overachiever.”

It’s always fun to learn about people on Wikipedia. One thing you learn is that it’s easier to theoretically give up in the name of diversity privileges you got in the past than to give up in actuality privileges you are getting in the present. Wikipedia reports that Kirn has two academic jobs that no doubt he could have foresworn so that “another Sotomayor” could have had them instead of him, but, for some reason, he didn’t:

In addition to teaching nonfiction writing at the University of Montana, Kirn was the 2008-09 Vare Nonfiction Writer in Residence at the University of Chicago.

Kirn, who has published seven books (two of them have been filmed), appears to have had something going for himself besides just his SAT scores:

Kirn married Maggie McGuane, a model and the daughter of actress Margot Kidder and novelist Thomas McGuane, in 1995. Kirn was 32 at the time; McGuane was 19.

Margot Kidder, who played Lois Lane in the original “Superman,” was one of the great beauties of the 1970s. She was married from 1975 to 1976 to the then-promising novelist Thomas McGuane during his “Captain Berserko” phase as a Hollywood screenwriter and director (92 in the Shade). Glamorous in-laws, but perhaps not the most stable ones: Kirn’s ex-wife writes in the current Vogue:

Nor did I have role models of frugality to draw on: My mother, who raised me with both an excess of funds and socialist-leaning ideals [one of her mother's boyfriends was Pierre Trudeau], likes to joke that she considers wealth the way most view bacterial infections—to be gotten rid of, before it has a chance to grow.

Apparently, the Kirn-McGuane marriage didn’t end all that amicably. The New York Observer reports:

Mr. [Jay Bright Lights Big City] McInerney was standing with Maggie McGuane, the daughter of acclaimed writer and legendary partier Thomas McGuane. … Mr. McGuane’s daughter said her father considered his drinking days “invisible—never happened.” She used to be married to the writer Walter Kirn. “He used to be a big drinker, but now he’s a teetotaler, too,” said Ms. McGuane, who resides in Montana and works as a journalist. “If I had any message, it would be ‘Beware of the teetotaler.’ Because they’re absolutists, and they can be a little dangerous.”

It turns out that Kirn might be a little personally biased about the Ricci white firefighter case, since, judging by Jezebel’s brusque summary of Maggie McGuane’s 2007 article in Vogue about how her boyfriend’s son is enlisting in the military, his ex-wife may have cuckolded him with a white firefighter:

The things you learn when you divorce your raging a****** literati husband to marry a firefighter! The story goes on to talk about how sometimes we forget that there are actually white people in the military with moms who take yoga and everything, and that firefighters don’t necessarily think it’s a stupid idea for their sons to enlist in the army which can be a BIG turn-off if you are a wealthy writerly type who is married to one. (Quote: “Our once fiery romance grew closer in temperature to Haagen-Dazs.”) But then when Maggie’s brawny new fireman husband watches his son go to Kentucky and thinks about maybe what it would be like if he replaced “Kentucky” with “Ramadi” he too realizes Operation Iraqi Freedom was a bad idea, just like she was telling him all along, and even starts to attend peace protests, so it’s really okay that rich people don’t have to shoulder as much of the burden as poor people because if poor people didn’t lose so many lives in wars they wouldn’t realize how f*****-up American foreign policy is, which rich people know about just by reading erudite publications such as Vogue.

With baseball’s All-Star game coming up and Dominican star Manny Ramirez back from his 50 game suspension for steroids, here’s the full-length version of my review from The American Conservative of the film “Sugar:”
“Sugar” is a critically acclaimed indie film about a 20-year-old Dominican pitcher’s minor league baseball season in Iowa. “Half Nelson,” the last collaboration of its married auteurs, Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck, brought Ryan Gosling a Best Actor nomination as a caring white liberal teacher in a Brooklyn slum school attended by African-Americans and Dominicans. Because numerous Dominican immigrants in New York City are failed minor leaguers, “Sugar” was a logical next film for the pair.

This movie is about a black Dominican, but it was very much made for white Americans. Indeed, “Sugar” exemplifies Sundance movies. It’s so sensitive, subtle, soft-spoken, averse to crowd-pleasing gimmicks, and generally beholden to the Stuff White People Like rulebook that few ballplayers of any nationality would pay to see it. Dodger slugger Manny Ramirez would snore so loudly through it that the audience couldn’t hear the soundtrack’s climactic song: Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah sung in Spanish.

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The common-sense opinion piece excerpted below comes from an unlikely source, Roberto Suro, who was the Director of Pew Hispanic Center until 2007 after founding it in 2001.

He employs history (!) to argue that the Statue of Liberty was not meant to be a welcome mat for immigrants, but was instead designed as a symbol of the nobility of representative government, as indicated by the sculptor’s title “Liberty Enlightening the World.”

The Statue of Liberty’s crown is open again for the first time since the Sept. 11 attacks. That’s symbolic. It was reopened on the Fourth of July, very symbolic. The decision was announced in May on the “Today” show — hugely symbolic — by Interior Secretary Ken Salazar. “The economic times we’re going through really call for hope and optimism,” he said, and “nothing symbolizes” those things like the Statue of Liberty.

Icons are handy that way. They’re instantly recognizable. But the meaning of this one has gotten muddled over the years. So, to mark this occasion, I’d like to suggest a little surgery that will make the symbol more appropriate today: Let’s get rid of The Poem.

I’m talking about “Give me your tired, your poor…” — that poem, “The New Colossus” by Emma Lazarus, which sometimes seems to define us as a nation even more than Lady Liberty herself.

Inscribed on a small brass plaque mounted inside the statue’s stone base, the poem is an appendix, added belatedly, and it can safely be removed, shrouded or at least marked with a big asterisk. We live in a different era of immigration, and the schmaltzy sonnet offers a dangerously distorted picture of the relationship between newcomers and their new land.
[She Was Never About Those Huddled Masses, Washington Post, July 2, 2009]

The phrases of that tiresome do-gooder poem (e.g. “Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” etc.) are dragged out relentlessly to guilt-trip Americans that we should welcome every hard-luck case on earth.

As a result, when reason fails to convince the citizenry that overpopulating the country with neo-slavery is a good idea, then the open-border hucksters utilize emotional drivel to make their case. For example, Rep. Gutierrez’s recent nationanwide Amnesty Tour was a showboat of tearful kiddies sobbing out their victimhood stories about dear dad possibly being deported. Immigrants and refugees continue to be admitted on auto-pilot even now when 15 million Americans are unemployed.

Back to the op-ed — Suro suggests twice that the Emma Lazarus poem can go away: does he really mean we should take the darn thing down and banish it entirely? What an excellent suggestion.

I’ve long thought that it would be a useful project for our team to demand that the plaque be removed from the statue grounds. The Lazarus poem was put up at the request of the poet’s supporters to memorialize her, and its removal at the behest of concerned citizens could be a fine symbolic act to show that we want the Golden Door CLOSED.

America is full: additional immigrants are neither necessary nor desired by the majority of citizens. In fact, responsibility to future generations compels us to stop immigration. If the nation ever needs to import more foreigners at some future time, then we can start it up again.

As the late nature photographer Ansel Adams remarked, “When the theater’s full, they don’t sell lap-space.” He was discussing congestion in Yosemite Valley, but the principle holds true for the country as well, where environmental sustainability has been trampled by the immigration-fueled population explosion. Our population is rapidly approaching 307 million, including “one international migrant (net) every 35 seconds.” However, the population number that would not damage the regenerative capacity of our natural resources is estimated at 150 million.

In fact, the environmentally correct number of immigrants is ZERO. Developers are paving over farmland to house the expanding population, and America no longer feeds itself, but relies on imported food. Water shortage is a pressing problem in many areas, where additional users draw down on the finite supply more rapidly. In Crowdifornia, public transportation planners plot a future of standing room only for riders.

Plaque removal — it’s not just about dentistry any more. Let’s demand that the Park Service retire that dinosaur to a dark closet.