Well and truly romneyed!

/ Historiann

Let’s make up some new words and Googlebomb “romney.”

romney.  v.  To demonstrate utter incompetence again and again without any apparent shame or awareness.

romney. n.  A person who demonstrates utter incompetence again and again without growth or self-knowledge.  Indeed, his repeated failures only reinforce his sense of superiority.

romneyed. adj.  Alt:  romneyesque.  Characterized by incompetence and an absence of self-awareness.

Leave your alternative suggestions in the comments below.  If you have a blog, beat the hell out of “romney!”  It’s almost too easy.

In my real life, I don’t know how often I’ll have the occasion to use the word “romney,” because my colleagues and students are generally at least competent.  Perhaps more importantly, we at my public Aggie school are all about growth and self-knowledge.  My students generally have open minds and strive to learn something useful and to improve their performances on class assignments.  My colleagues are good at their jobs and yet they’re always working to improve their teaching and research.  Yeah, I know:  what a bunch of schmucks.

We’re into self-improvement and modesty because we’re not rich.  Rich people don’t think they have anything to learn about the world around them because they’re RICH ALREADY!  They deserve it, whether they inherited their money or made it themselves.  They may have been good at one thing–such as the thing that made them their money–but their mistake is that they think that this one area of expertise (if they have one) makes them an expert on everything.  They think their opinions are worth hearing just because they have one, and they’re rich.  Dig?

I’ve had a couple experiences mixing with donors to a non-profit organization with which I am affiliated.  Now, these people weren’t anything like Mitt Romney rich, but they still were completely convinced that their opinions on every subject in the world were just as valid as those of real experts in those subjects.  Because, you see, they’re RICH!  And it doesn’t matter how artfully or how bluntly you try to point out that they’re not in fact experts on x or y subject.  They’re rich!  So shut up and listen.

This I think explains most of the people funding and blathering on about both K-12 educational reform and the people pushing online courses and MOOCs at the university level.  It explains the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.  (If I ever win the lottery, I’ll establish a foundation for the development of less $hitty software, although of course I’ve never worked as a software engineer nor do I have any training or expertise of any kind in that field.  I know good software when I use it, just like they know good teaching!)   And I think it explains the entire 6-year presidential run of Willard Mitt Romney, of course.

10 thoughts on “Well and truly romneyed!”

  4. Mitt – a leathery faced person with non existent absorption ability.
    Mittag – a person who always looks sunny despite the gathering clouds. (From German: midday)
    Mitta – a person with a flat brain wave. (From Hebrew: bed)
    Mittisyahu – a person who cannot carry a tune, stupid like Netanyahu.

    Your department is unique. Mine, and others I know, has about 50% capable researchers and 50% pretenders. Teaching is slightly better. As far as common sense and ability to carry out complex tasks, at most 10% are fit. What a bunch of schmucks. (From Yiddish: you better look up this one yourself…)

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  5. Amy Davidson says pretty much everything I meant to say here, in my snarky way, at the New Yorker today. She’s right: his ressentiment is striking:

    Romney has been running a campaign centered on resentment, in many forms: the resentment directed at the “successful” that he imagines is driving his critics; the resentment he is trying to fan in his base voters; and, increasingly and most strangely, his own. Romney’s resentment has become a matter of temperament, of policy, and of politics. He and his wife, Ann, have made it clear that they take offense when his good will is questioned. Fixated on what he sees as the jealous motives of his critics, he misses the important truths about our economy and the reality of people’s lives that might have informed his agenda. He also reveals a great deal about himself. . . .

    [In Romneyworld] Social programs are acts of pity . . .rather than investments in our futures and our communities. Perhaps this is why we are meant to be so grateful to high earners, and why Romney is affronted enough to decide that those who question the rich are beyond the reach of rationality. (It may also explain why Ann Romney thinks she can answer questions about the family’s unseen tax returns by talking about their gifts to charity.) . . . .

    Any gratitude toward the country we’ve all built, Romney seems to be saying, is misplaced. Instead, the feelings Romney regards as proper ones for the rest of us to assume are a cheerful appreciation of the wealthy and an eager resolve to be just like Mitt—and also a little nicer to him. Romney has reduced the great issues of fairness and a just society to the rather boring question of whether people are being fair to him and his friends, and whether they admire his fine qualities. Among other things, this cannot help him electorally: What is less attractive than a manifestly lucky man sulking about how everyone is jealous of him?

    (Emphasis mine.)

    I’ve felt all along that Romney’s secretiveness and shirtiness whenever he’s questioned would be his downfall. I don’t like people like that, especially when they’re asking me to do something for them. I’ve also predicted all along that in nominating someone even Republicans don’t like, they were dooming their chances this fall. And he’s not getting any more likeable, the more we get to know him!

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  6. A romney (n.): an ignorant or silly statement with no relation to any reality. As in, “His argument in the debate was a real romney.”

    We’re all competent scholars, and trying to do better; and we’re pretty good teachers, and most of us try to do better at that too.

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  9. I completely agree about the rich often feeling entitled to being experts on everything, but to be fair, having been an academic most of my adult life, I’ve met quite a number of academics with that same quality. You may just be lucky with your colleagues.

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  10. Pingback: Mad Glances – The Madwoman with a Laptop

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