There is an interesting feature in the September 4th issue of the New Yorker concerning Jordan’s King Abdullah’s ongoing quixotic quest to build a New England-style boarding school in Madaba, Jordan, a mission that seems to be driven by little other than sentimentalism about his own formative years studying and acting like a doofus at Deerfield Academy in Massachusettes. The design and execution of this little pet project of Abdullah’s (or “Ab” as his American friends call him), is so focused on replicating the Deerfield experience–an experience that, from what I can tell, holds unique value only to privileged Americans and, evidently, Arab autocrats who wish they were–that he not only recruited Deerfield’s retiring headmaster, Eric Widmer, but he also rejected interior decor suggestions because they did not sufficiently evoke his old school to him.
Nonetheless, Deerfield’s student populace appears to not really have been very psyched about all this attention from the Jordanian monarchy. This past year, headmaster Widmer wanted to get King Abdullah to be the commencement speaker for this past year at the school. The student body had other ideas.
When Widmer had mentioned this possibility to the seniors, earlier in the school year, the class president had pushed instead for his uncle Steve Carell, the star of “The Forty-Year-Old Virgin.” “Carell turned out to be unavailable, Widmer explained. “So we were left with His Majesty, which was our wish all along.”
And I have to say, I am totally with the students on this one. Given the choice of this guy:
…versus this guy:
I’d take the hilarious Steve Carell over the Trekkie shrimp with a hereditary kingdom for my class’s commencement speech any day, thanks very much.
