What a freak Ethel Merman was! She was 68 when she performed that madly optimistic Anthony Newley-Leslie Bricusse song, one of my all-time favorites (Newley sang it better).

Harvard’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences announced that it will stop requiring a diversity, inclusion, and belonging statement as part of its faculty hiring process. Dean of Faculty Affairs and Planning Nina Zipser announced that the change was made because existing requirements were “too narrow in the information they attempted to gather” and potentially confusing for international candidates. Sure. This is a face-saving explanation, because Harvard’s DEI obsession has lost the staggering school alumni support, donations, prestige and credibility, and also because DEI is a fad that couldn’t stand up to long term scrutiny.

It’s also discriminatory.

And stupid.

In fact, nothing epitomizes The Great Stupid more than the DEI plague. It was a purely emotional and “everybody does it” response to the George Floyd Freakout in 2020. Before (and even after) Black Lives Matters had completely discredited itself as the opportunistic Marxist scam it is, few in the non-profit, corporate, entertainment or academic worlds had the guts to stand up and say, “You know this is absurd and bound to backfire, right?”

But hallucinations and tulip mania-like mass insanity don’t tend to last. Reality is a harsh master. DEI depends on a ridiculous fiction, that group membership is a superior reason to hire people, promote employees, appoint professionals, select experts, elect officials and to place the fates of countries, businesses , projects, fortunes and lives in the hands of individuals than making those choices on the old fashioned basis of ability, talent, character and experience.

Even some of the more bone-headed members of the public can come to the obvious conclusion that this is bonkers when DEI ideology produces such walking, sort-of talking, incompetent blundering public disasters as Kamala Harris, Karine Jean-Pierre, Fani Willis, Pete Buttigieg, Sam Brinton, Dylan Mulvaney, Katherine Maher, so many inept “of-color” big city female mayors and many more. Harvard, of course, saw its explicitly DEI president crash and burn after being exposed as an incompetent and an academic fraud. I know it’s Harvard, but even that loused-up school isn’t completely dim.

In my memorable private conversation with Herman Kahn, he noted that societies periodically suffer disastrous amnesia and forget why certain things have been done the way they have been for centuries. Who could have predicted, though, that a simple and obvious principle like “Those who have the most ability will usually do the best job” would be a victim of that amnesia because a lifetime hood overdosing on fentanyl died due to cop malpractice in Minnesota?

Yes, I know: DEI has wrecked destruction across society, aggravated division, rotted many brains, and is still embedded like a tick head in many places, including Joe Biden’s cabinet. Nonetheless, Harvard bailing on it is a wonderfully hopeful sign that sanity may not be gone for good, and that The Great Stupid may be running out of momentum at last.