I don’t think they are now. Not even Dr. Fauci, who seems ridiculous, maybe contemptible, but much less the portent of a terrible future than are his admirers, who I understand are still numerous. Anyway, I am talking not of medical doctors but academic ones. And not of the present but of the past. Ones who succeeded to great power and also – for reasons I can only guess at – were usually referred to by their honorific.

I don’t think it was truly out of respect. Or of awe. Or of fear. Or of journalists being stupider back then. (They could not have been.) Whatever the reason, there is, at least to me now, something menacing about it. I am surprised we don’t, now, hear it as much or more. I am surprised that “Doctor Jill,” both the title and the person, faded so fast.

Anyway, the “doctors” to whom I refer are these three: José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, who was Paraguay’s first dictator; António de Oliveira Salazar, who was Portugal’s second to last; and Joseph Goebbels, who needs no introduction. I do not know if, at news conferences, the interviewers assiduously addressed them as Doctor. All I know, or think I know, is what I’ve read, and what’s in print almost always refers to them by title-plus-surname. It may be significant that the Spanish Wikipedia entry for the Paraguayan states in its very first sentence that “doctor” was just one more name for him. Maybe he was the only one in the country.

By the way, these guys, unlike Doctor Jill, did get serious degrees. Francia’s in “sacred theology”; Salazar’s in economics; Goebbels’s in philology. Which I keep thinking is a German code word. Wasn’t Nietzsche’s doctorate in “philology” too?

Maybe the only reason this absent-minded adoration ever caught on was, somebody once failed to abase himself before the great man and just called him Sir or You or Dude or whatever and he went ballistic. Unlike when Dan Rather kept addressing President Nixon as Mr. Nixon, and the guy ignored the slight.

Well, I just don’t know. If you do, please tell. If I were more passionate about this – a lot more passionate about this – I’d follow up on my readings about Andrew Dickson White, who was the first president of Cornell University, later served as U.S. ambassador to Germany and then to Russia, and had a comically ridiculous domestic life, the sort where one of his kids became a drug addict and he communicated with his wife, in their own home, not through talk but through letters. I do not know if he never forgot to remind everyone of his German honorary Ph.D. and his four Ivy League honorary LL. D.’s, but I fear the worst. You’d never guess this on the campus itself, but from the one bio I ever saw, he really was that kind of guy.

I will in any case note that Samuel Johnson, now almost always and exclusively referred to as Doctor Johnson, got an honorary degree…but I think we’d all concede that he earned it. In modern times, Condoleezza Rice seems to get the doctor treatment a lot; OK. And of course there was Indiana Jones, Zachary Smith, and Jonny Quest’s dad. But it was once my great misfortune to listen to a race-racket pep talk from one Dennis Kimbro, and he never let his audience forget he was a doctor, of something carefully unspecified. There was to his obsession with status a quaintness: quite contrary to his wishes I am sure, I had naughty visions of a bygone era, one where house you-know-whats never let field you-know-whats forget who is who.
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Back to Dr. Francia, but not to Paraguay: the great man did his academic “work” in, of all places, Argentina…and I’ve been to the very town! Which was and is Córdoba. When he was in town, the country wasn’t Argentina or even a country, it was the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, which had just been hived off the Viceroyalty of Peru. You want to get these details right. Following are some photos I took of Córdoba, though not of its university, about which I have mixed feelings. Latin American colleges aren’t necessarily awful or even disturbing, but neither have they given me the idea that anyone could ever respect or even be sentimental about them. (The book Feliz Ano Velho did make 1970s Brazilian student life sound fun, but I read on Portuguese Wikipedia that its author, Marcelo Rubens Paiva, became the sixth most politically influential person on Brazilian Twitter. Man, who are fifth and seventh?)

Anyway, and at this point I’m no longer saying anything about guys with doctorates or what they ever did, I give you Córdoba, as of 2012. I have linked to my summary of that trip in previous posts over the years, but the pictures are thumbnails and I decided to stick in, here, bigger and better ones.

Here’s a nice church, on the outside anyway:

Contra my waggish translations of the following, a straight one would be “You will be what you must be; otherwise you will be nothing.” Come to think of it, mine are better.

Argentina has always come across as stern, to me. But they got dancing boots!

Other entertainment options in Córdoba. The middle-aged woman, hands on hips as she stares at those billboards, is a perfect accent:

Not in Córdoba but in San Juan, the next town I stopped in. Domingo Sarmiento was, among many other things such as President of Argentina, an educator, though he seems never to have attended anything we would call a college. Apparently he is remembered fondly, by people who hold grudges.