Word: axioms
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There is a familiar axiom of sports competition that goes something like this: the lesser teams tend to get pumped up to play the better teams. A more obscure corollary to this axiom states that the better teams, in turn, don't always have the the easiest time beating the lesser teams...
Often companies wind up extracting concessions far beyond what would have been necessary to get them to set up shop. Even with their limited cranial capacity, local politicians know the axiom of their craft: namely, that jobs win elections. When County Commissioner Hatfield tires of gloating over stealing a factory from Town Manager McCoy, he'll finally realize that he's hopelessly broken the county's budget for the next ten years. But by that time of course, Conglomerated Industries' consultants are vacationing in Bimini on the bonuses they've earned from this particular boondoggle...
Fully recognizing the political benefits of protectionism and xenophobia, the Clinton administration has chosen an unlikely--and unconvincing--strategy to sell NAFTA. President Clinton tries to paint NAFTA as bad for Japan and Europe (using the converse of the Perot axiom: Anything bad for them is good for us). He recruits Lee Iaccoca to boast that other nations fear NAFTA because the treaty would create the world's largest unified trading bloc. And he asserts that if Congress rejects NAFTA when it votes on it November 17, by the next day the Japanese finance minister will be in Mexico saying...
...tell her she had been considered, and passed over, for the title role as the fantasy creature of the decorator's reveries. Having cast an actress a generation younger, they belatedly realized they needed, as Rivera laughingly phrases it, "a diva." Once the show's creators bowed to the axiom that it takes a star to play a star, Rivera, like many an actress before her, wanted her part built...
...axiom that next to running the National Endowment for the Arts, curating the Whitney Biennial is the worst job in American culture. Every two years, the dread summons to represent the most vital and interesting currents in American art looms before the museum. Its curators do their stuff, and the result is nearly always the same: abuse from the art world and the fanged calumny of critics. "Every time I award a state commission," some 19th century French Minister of Culture was heard to sigh, "I create one ingrate and 20 malcontents...