July 05, 2007
High falutin' docs cut down to size
John Derbyshire isn't buying into the "how can doctors -- who are so intelligent -- be terrorists?" meme going 'round in the aftermath of the attempted car bombings and jihadi-BBQs in the U.K.
I'll confess I'm getting a bit of cognitive dissonance with all this comment about how astounding it is that the latest batch of Brit Islamo-terrorists should be doctors. Barry Rubin in the NY Post: "Consider ... the kind of people who become doctors—relatively intelligent, well-organized, hard-working."
Really? I attended a British university with a large and famous teaching hospital attached. The medical students were pretty widely regarded as the dumbest on campus, and as the heaviest drinkers and stupidest pranksters. Of the five or six student rock groups, the medics' was the loudest and worst. (Its name was "Perry Stalsis and his Abdo Men.") My subsequent experience of doctors has done nothing to erase those early impressions. Sure, medical students have to memorize the names of a lot of little parts. So do auto mechanics.
More to the point, we learned almost six years ago that the hijackers who murdered thousands of Americans on 9-11 were well-educated, monied sociopaths from privileged backgrounds, schooled in the West, denied nothing but wanting nothing more than to kill infidels.
Derbyshire's critique of physicians and their shortcomings reminds me of the derisive military slang for doctors: chancre mechanics.
Now we can say that they bring their medical expertise to the bomb-maker's table, using the knowledge of the human body acquired from years of education and training and using it to devise better ways to eviscerate, disembowel, exsanguinate and disassemble those same bodies.
Posted by Mike Lief at July 5, 2007 08:57 PM
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