I gather the news is still wallowing in chin-pulling and navel-gazing about the shooting at Virginia Tech. As the entire world knows, Cho Seung-Hui killed at least 30 people and wounded others before taking himself out. One can question his time line, perhaps, but not his efficiency.

Lucinda Roy, the former chairwoman of the English department, had recognized his internal "anger" and had reported it to security who, without an overt threat, felt they could do nothing about it, and so she decided that she could not send him back to the classroom and tutored him herself. Let me save for another blast the cowardice of security for I only mean to throw stones at Roy and those of her sorry ilk right now.

I cannot but think that this is not the best use of Roy's time, to engage in one-on-one tutoring with a student who is obviously not intending to take advantage of the opportunities for education, who had, in her own words, refused to participate and listened to music in class. (Although, having heard this woman being interviewed on the radio, one might make the argument that her time is best spent away from as many people as possible, except possibly to ask, "Do you want fries with that?") This does not, however, detract from my argument that she or any other jobsworth is paid to educate people efficiently. She is, after all, disposing of other peoples' money, hereinafter referred to as OPM. The fact that OPM is taken, by menaces, must make disposing of it all the sweeter, which defines the character of a jobsworth.

Some years ago I saw, on early-morning television before I quit wasting brain cycles on such drivel, a social worker for an Indian tribe in the Midwest. An infant had been abandoned by her mother when the mother learned that she needed five organs to be transplanted to survive. The social worker on television, with an evangelical gleam in her eye, bragged that this child was the first ever to have had five organs transplanted; that she was learning to chew properly instead of with her front teeth like a rabbit; that (sigh) her mother still hadn't come back (so there was more chance for the flattering light of publicity); and--get this--all the medical staff for the reservation had taken a junket to a big city to learn to care for this child, who had no chance of survival past a year or so. I wonder if the Four Seasons gave group rates and invented a Compassion Cocktail for the visit. A variant on the Rusty Nail using Kennedy scotch?

Utterly ignored was the fact that Indians were left without medical care: people who could benefit from it were abandoned, left to fend for themselves, perhaps to die of renal failure for they are plagued with that, all owing to the quixotic, and self-serving, to the social worker, attempt to give life to a poor child whose life was prolonged at huge expense to all concerned, at the cost of great pain to the child. But it was OPM. And other peoples' lives, hereinafter referred to as OPL.

Some years ago I was traveling on vacation in the Rockies; I had said one too many inflammatory things and thought it best to leave for a while, after making sure my home insurance was paid up and I boarded the cats just in case. I checked into a caravanserai in Salt Lake City and saw on the glass eye a man give an address at the matriculation of the entering class at Brigham Young University.

This man looked like James Carville, but without the calculating sleaze or the feeling that out of his mouth would emerge the tail of an imperfectly swallowed demon. He was addressing them as one of the Council of Twelve, which I was given to understand is the governing body of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Mr. Not-Carville welcomed the students to BYU, including the ones who were not LDS. He hoped that they took the advantages offered them there, to learn, to grow. He mentioned the sacrifices made by the LDS congregations to fund BYU, and the individual LDS members too, and then hoped again, with knives in his voice, that they would take the advantages offered them there.

How refreshing. There was none of the utter codswallop doled out by the usual bleating, ovine university types on entering classes--after all the entire raison d'etre of an university education is, well, education. Students are going there to learn and the usual crap that one hears about being "the best and brightest hope for the future" is just that: crap. Someone has to step into the shoes of people running things, and, faute de mieux, the young will do it for they're less close to death than I am, and it does no one any good to make them think that they can just step right in without a little work and wisdom. I recall this self-flattering (to those emitting it and those hearing it) rubbish well from my matriculation at Pricey Private University in Houston, and thought it a load of cobblers then; I knew that I was young and there to learn. Really. I did. I didn't even know half my nasty words and had a lot to learn.

Let's look at these three people. The first two made a great show of compassion, holding their actions up for admiration. No doubt they would resist my branding it as self-glorification, but it is just that. The social worker to the Indians is particularly vile, using a child as grist for the mill of her self-promotion, to strut down the catwalk of public compassion, basking in the light of publicity shown on her, tarted up in the miter and chasuble of smug amour propre. "Dono vobis pacem," uttered with an airy wave of a governmental regulation book.

Both these women made very poor use of resources, of OPM and OPL--in both cases and at the end of the day had, I'm quite sure, the pleasant feeling of having made a good job which in my mind is best accompanied by a sigh, a slump, the back of the hand to the forehead, and a glance out of the corner of the eye to see who's watching to see their virtue with an eye to parlaying that virtue into a chance to show even greater virtue, always of course at the cost of even more OPM and OPL.

Now for Mr. Not-Carville. He told callow youths that BYU was not Animal House; that older people had made sacrifices for them and that it was the height of ingratitude to spurn them. He also is the only one who had anything to say about private money.

Is this perfectly clear? God save me from these do-gooders with OPM, which is fact my money. Unelected jobsworths, petty bureaucrats, self-righteous pooh-bahs, armed with weapons they did not buy, or even invent. The pilot fish swimming after the shark of collectivist "compassion" who not only feel justified in spending--to them--OPM and--again, to them--OPL, but sniffing at those who object as being "mean-spirited." A tapeworm objecting to a wormer.

They're after me. They're after you. And you're just an old meanie if you don't like it.

Run.