It's nice to find out that Lynda Barry is a fellow member of the Class of Jimmy Carter. During that high tide of financial aid, my fancy-pants liberal arts college was pretty much as affordable as Northwest Missouri State. And though the shock of those first encounters with the upper crusts was painful, it was also way too central and complicated an experience to regret.

Not that anyone was waiting for my opinion to resolve its ambiguity. By the time I graduated, a few years of Reaganomics had ensured a shock-free campus whose incoming class seemed split between rich kids who wanted to be the heroes in Animal House and rich kids who wanted to be the bad guys in Animal House.

Which is how it should be, says Nicholas Lemann, who I quote:

I'm more with the American people on this.

mostly 'cause of the patrician tang of that old speakeasy password "the American people": Nicholas Lemann, the American people; the American people, Nicholas Lemann... Nicholas Lemann is the one with the suit.

Lemann is appalled that scholarship kids, in contrast to preppies, are so often intent on selfish ends. But if we drop that nasty pseudo-egalitarian testing crap, how do we decide who should be allowed four years of private school? Simple: we only pick those who have already successfully completed four years of private school!

You should make judgments about people not prospectively based on a score but in real time based on how well they perform the activity for which they are being selected.

Which makes sense as long as you never want anyone to learn anything new. And Plato says you can't really learn anything new anyway, so there you go.

Movie comment: National Lampoon's Animal House

I'm dumb, I know, but even so, I know a thing or two I learned from school.

Like I learned that America has a class system.

I learned limits to my charm, and to my death wish.

I also tried to learn French, but that didn't go so good.

With the aid of Animal House I learned two especially useful lessons.

1. The first doesn't need teaching any more, but screen comedy was different in the 1970s. Leaving Neil Simon adaptations outside the category of the cinematic, there were Mel Brooks and Woody Allen and the hippie sketch compilations; Allen had just begun making his self-adoration more explicit, but we hadn't yet realized just how exclusive the townhouse was, it was so startling to see any warmth at all. Otherwise, nothing but parodies: very cold, very stand-offish.

   Reviewers called the subgenre established by Animal House "slob comedy," which missed the point. These weren't just any slobs; they were lovable slobs. Bluto didn't just smash the folkie's guitar; he apologized for it. Like the Shakespeare comedy, the Congreve comedy, and the Lubitsch comedy, the slob comedy assured us that everyone failed, everyone was foolish, everyone was immoral, and that everything would be OK once everyone recognized these things.

   The definitive slob comedy would come a few years later, while John Landis's best film would be in that other great '80s genre, high-budget horror (albeit with a slob comedy protagonist). But Animal House came first.

   That's the historical context. There was a biographical context too, but suffice it I learned that the comedy of forgiveness temporarily shrinks swelling and relieves burning in an inflamed soul.

2. The second was what happens to lessons that don't need teaching anymore.

   Over the next few years, the incoming classes had all seen Animal House, and they knew what a small liberal arts Quaker college was supposed to be like: A fraternity in a segregated football school in the early 1960s. And they'd picked up an essential point I'd missed. In lovable slob comedies, the lovable slob POV was always a teenage boy. He was forgiven; everyone else could go to hell.

   Meanwhile, somewhere off-campus, Reagan took office. Financial aid went under the knife and emerged as the stomach-stapled system of today.

   Thus began the reign of the self-satisfied preppie, which turned out no better than the reign of the self-satisfied hippie. These boys had been presented with a platinum credit line of forgiveness even before their consciences had dropped. And they put it to use.

   What I learned from this, I suppose I could have learned just as well back home, by more closely observing the indefinitely renewable spiritual bankruptcy of those bible-thumpers who sinned at length, and were caught, and loudly and briefly repented, and then, excuse the interruption, returned to the fire and brimstone.... In my adult surroundings, folks have tended to switch brandnames -- Earth First to Transcendental Meditation to EST to PETA to the Atkins Diet -- but otherwise the cycle stays the same: Wash in the blood of the lamb; a new lamb born every minute.

   I might even have derived my lesson from the ruination wreaked on the National Lampoon itself by that shit-eating manicure-licking hound, P. J. O'Rourke (who's just slapped his name on the front of a cheap-ass reprint of liberal Doug Kenney's High School Yearbook).

   But the point is I learned it. And it's stood me well as I've seen feminism used to attack and exploit women, and Affirmative Action used to club financially-based assistance and financial need used to club Affirmative Action, and humor and honesty used to justify ignorance and intolerance, and middle class vertigo used to eliminate taxes on lazy parasites, and hip-hop's exuberance harnessed to reinforce racist fears and fantasies, and the bizarre rise, flight, and fall of the techno-utopian flock, and, back in the world of warm forgiving movie comedies, as Wes Anderson decided to drop the pretense that less-than-wealthy characters held any interest for him.

   It may be the only lesson ever learned by my fellow mediocre student, George W. Bush, whose every blundering disaster has been picked up and applied without a moment of hesitation or shame.

   That lesson being:

   Any effective liberatory tool will promptly be re-purposed to make the powerful more powerful.

   Or, from a higher viewpoint:

   Park Avenue finds its own use for things.

   Or, from a lower:

   Free your ass and your wallet will follow.