David Vitter, Harvard ’83
Anybody who criticizes the Ivy League and especially Harvard is immediately suspected of resenting his or her rejection from those ancient universities, but no such motive can be attributed to me, since I was guaranteed admission to Harvard when my grandfather gave them a cyclotron!
It was later revealed that this “cyclotron” was only a miniscule laundromat in nearby Brookline, Massachusetts, which my grandfather called “Atomic Wash,” and as if spinning washers and dryers didn’t already cycle enough to justify the cyclotronic hype on the posters my grandfather affixed to every telephone pole in Brookline, he added his own inertial mass to the spin by revolving around the laundromat on a large adult tricycle, wearing fire-engine red pajamas and screaming “I’m the Higgs boson!”
Luckily for me, I had already been admitted to Harvard before they inspected the Brookline “cyclotron,” and like every other legacy boy, I received an entire résumé of B minuses as soon as I walked onto campus, along with lifetime membership in every Harvard Club from New York to Calcutta, 12 hours of Berlitz training to master “Vocal Mannerisms of the Very Elite,” and all the rest of the “Harvard Package.”
The “Harvard Package” also includes a list of famous Harvard alumni, and it begins well enough with John Adams and John Quincy Adams and Henry Adams and other Adamses too numerous to mention, but sometime around the 1960’s it all went horribly wrong!
First came the geniuses who took us into Vietnam, like McGeorge Bundy, Robert McNamara, and John Kennedy (another legacy boy like me!), and when I skipped ahead to escape the Vietnam ghetto, I collided head-on with Antonin Scalia, John Roberts, Larry Summers, Grover Norquist, Bill Frist, Paul Bremer, Mitt Romney, David Vitter(!), Doug Feith (“the stupidest fucking son-of-a-bitch on the face of the earth”), Henry Paulson, George W. Bush (MBA), and of course Barack Obama, and a better friend of all the legacy boys on Wall Street they never had, than Barack Obama!
But I still might have rationalized away all the damage my alma mater has inflicted on the world, by exaggerating the feeble counterweight of Harvard alums like T.S. Eliot and Eliot Spitzer, except for a very unfortunate encounter in the Harvard Club at an undisclosed location, where I noticed Doug Feith and Richard B. Cheney chuckling quietly together in a corner.
“What are you doing here, you Yalie trash?” I said to Cheney, and just before the Secret Service explained that an 800 pound gorilla sits anywhere he wants to sit, and threw me out the window, I could hear Doug Feith shrieking…
“Now who’s the stupidest fucking son-of-a-bitch on the face of the earth?”
And that’s why I hate Harvard!
