Surprise! Surprise?

For over a week now since the failed car bomb attacks in London and in Glasgow we have been hearing an endless stream of blather from people shocked that the fanatics involved in this terrorist plot were doctors. We seem unable to grasp the idea that dangerous fanatics can be educated individuals.

First, anyone who has ever been to an institution of higher learning, including some of those with great reputations, knows that learning does take place there but on a much narrower scale than the student enrollment would indicate. The vociferous objection of a student shill for the neo-fascist Young America Foundation at Roger Williams University who was required to watch An Inconvenient Truth should be signal enough that one can lead fanatical whores to learning but can't make them think.

Still the surprise that the bombers in Britain and Scotland are educated professionals is utterly foolish. That fanatics can be educated professionals really ought to be obvious to anyone. We have a government rife with them here in the United States. At least four of them sit on the U.S. Supreme Court. One only needs to cite Dartmouth graduates P.J. O'Rourke and Dinesh D'Souza as evidence of why the terrorists in the British Isles are simply one expression of of a phenomenon one can see any day if one tunes in Fox News.

I must be fair and acknowledge that some of the surprise is justified on cultural grounds. In the U.S. we have our ideologues (e.g. Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, etc.) who will engage in utterly insane acts because of their fanaticism. However, far more common in our corporate society are the outright whores. O'Rourke and D'Souza, Ann Coulter, Andrew Sullivan, Tony Snow and the like are far less motivated by ideology than they are by money. The right-wing extremist foundations and the plutocrats that sponsor them pay good money to get the unthinking and unswerving loyalty of those folks. Thus we're lulled by the idea that these verbal terrorists will undergo a Huffington-esque change of heart and direction should the wind and the money that flies upon it blow from an opposite pole. Being mercenary ourselves we find it hard to understand that these doctors would set their car bombs and participate in the attacks without being paid very well for their trouble.

Still our shock that terrorists bent on destroying the prevailing order might be educated indicates our ignorance of their motives and of our own history. After all, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, Madison and Monroe were all highly educated gentlemen. And not very far from home there's the example of Fidel Castro, a doctor.