What's Up With This "Best and Brightest" Garbage?

I hear this phrase - the "best and brightest" - everywhere these days.

Obama says we need to attract the 'best and brightest" to be teachers.

TPM says Obama hands out awards to the "best and brightest."

Marxist funk-punk rockers Gang of Four are described as post-punk's "best and brightest" by NPR.

I dunno, google "best and brightest" and you'll see hundreds more recent examples.

But as Michael Fiorillo pointed out in a comment thread once, David Halberstam, the person who used that phrase as the title of a book about the geniuses who started the Vietnam War and dug in year after year after year, meant the phrase ironically.:

Here is wikipedia:

The title may have come from a line by Percy Bysshe Shelley in his work "To Jane: The Invitation" (1822):

Best and brightest, come away!

Shelley's line may have originated from English bishop and hymn writer Reginald Heber in his 1811 work, "Hymns. Epiphany":

Brightest and best of the sons of the morning,

Dawn on our darkness, and lend us thine aid.

A still earlier – and more pertinent – use of the phrase is in the letter of Junius published February 7, 1769 in the Public Advertiser. There Junius uses it mockingly and ironically in reference to King George III's ministers, whose capacities he had disparaged in his first letter the previous month. In response to Sir William Draper's letter defending one of Junius' targets and attacking their anonymous critics, Junius wrote:

To have supported your assertion, you should have proved that the present ministry are unquestionably the best and brightest characters of the kingdom; and that, if the affections of the colonies have been alienated, if Corsica has been shamefully abandoned, if commerce languishes, if public credit is threatened with a new debt, and your own Manilla ransom most dishonourably given up, it has all been owing to the malice of political writers, who will not suffer the best and brightest characters (meaning still the present ministry) to take a single right step, for the honour or interest of the nation.

In the introduction to the 1992 edition, Halberstam states that he had used the title in an article for Harper's magazine, and that Mary McCarthy criticized him in a book review for incorrectly referencing the line in the hymn. Halberstam claims he had no knowledge of that earlier use of the term. Halberstam also observed regarding the "best and the brightest" phrase, that "...hymn or no, it went into the language, although it is often misused, failing to carry the tone or irony that the original intended." In a 2001 interview Halberstam claims that the title came from a line in an article he had written about the Kennedy Administration. The phrase referred to President John F. Kennedy's "whiz kids" – leaders of industry and academia brought into the Kennedy administration – whom Halberstam characterized as arrogantly insisting on "brilliant policies that defied common sense" in Vietnam, often against the advice of career US Department of State employees.

Given that most people who use the term "best and brightest" these days are NOT referencing Shelley but are instead referencing Halberstam's use of the phrase, they just might want to stop using it.

I would say, however, that the phrase works quite well for the arrogant, hubristic education reformers who - like the geniuses around LBJ - insist on brilliant policies that defy common sense and are bringing the current to disaster.

Gates, Broad, Bloomberg, Rhee, Klein, McNamara, Maxwell Taylor, McGeorge Bundy, Clark Clifford, Dean Acheson...

...the nation's "best and brightest."