Krugman & Nick Caraway: "A mind is a terrible thing to waste"

[alice wellintown]

In today's NYT essay, Paul Krugman, graduate of the JFK High School in
Bellmore, where Benny Profane could work on roads and the Owlglass
family, father in his J Press suit, daughter in her sports car, took
advantage of the civil rights movement and headed off to the the Ivy
Leagues and to Wall Street, once closed to Jewish Citizens...sounds
more like Nick than James Gatz or Wolfsheim or Wilson, as he calls out
Mitt the millionaire with the slogan of the United Negro College Fund.
Is Paul, a Bellmore boy who done good with an education, the boy from
Bellmore, calling the robot a legacy graduate? Is that it? Is Paul
calling Mitt a whiteboy?

Now, I know our President can sometimes pull this off even if his
claim to the African American experience is like a fine kettle of fish
complaining about fishermen with dynamite, but he married to an
African American and his daughters are black.

But there is some kind of wierd race / class war in his piece today.
Maybe it's just that I can no more imagine Paul Krugman teaching
economics to working class black kids, or poor white or asian or
hispanic kids for that matter, where he would surely  have the
opportunity to prevent waste, fraud and abuse, than Mitt paving roads
in Bellmore. Not too far from where Krug went to high school, a school
that had no kids of color, no poor kids, no minds threatned with
terrible waste, there are schools filled with young men who are just
wasting away.

So, it's nice that Krug is more Nick than Tom Buchanan, but he's no
James Gatz neither. Jimmy Gatz, like Good Will Hunting, had a mind,
but mopping floors and living on the wrong side of the tracks, never
crossing over to the Bellmore library, was a waste, so he took the
only track he could, he made a million, just like Krug and Mitt and
our President. There was never any chance that any of these men would
become an American Gangster. Their minds were never wasted on the
buckets and mops, on the roads, on the tracks. Get the money and get a
degree. Mitt and Krug mean well, I'm sure. But wasted minds are wasted
young. Yeah, it starts when kids or even before kids head off to all
black or all hispanic schools. And Krug's advantages, while not the
same as Mitt's advantages, or our President's advantages, are wasted
on Owlglasses and Pynchons and Caraways.