Word: bureaucratism
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...worse, he is made to cast a shadow larger than life." To Kraft, who sees him in somewhat sharper focus, "Hoover is in the most literal sense the 'G-Man'-the Government man par excellence. He is the supreme example of the successful civil servant-the compleat bureaucrat...
...comes to such well-publicized FBI transgressions as occasional, indiscriminate wire tapping, Kraft writes that off, too. In Kraft's view, Hoover is too often held accountable for directives that have come from above, from the President or the Attorney General. Kraft is satisfied that "the compleat bureaucrat" is the man who does effectively what he is told...
...important bureaucrat took these ideas a logical step farther, demanding an interest charge on capital and prices rooted in economic reality rather than planning fiction. Academician Vadim Trapeznikov, revered in Russia as the "father of Soviet automation," threw his weight in with the reformers all along the line, noting that "one hears the view that interest on capital is a concept of capitalistic society." Wrong, he insisted. "In fact, the form here is identical, but the essence is different...
Comparison shopping is the housewife's sole-searing equivalent of a bureaucrat's requesting sealed bids from competing contractors. But there are times when something gets lost in the translation, as Mary Scranton, 46, wife of Pennsylvania's Republican Governor, found to her sorrow when she submitted a $1,554 bill to the state for some rust-patterned draperies made for her husband's reception room by a Harrisburg decorator. "Absolutely illegal," sniffed the auditor general, a Democrat, refusing to pay on grounds that she hadn't asked for sealed bids. "A bargain...
Gogol was one of those writers who take up their country's venality as their cross. The closest U.S. equivalent of Dead Souls is Herman Melville's The Confidence Man. Gogol's confidence man is Chichikov (Vladimir Belokurov), an on-the-make bureaucrat who haggles with miserly and drunken aristocrats for their dead serfs (listed on the government tax rolls as alive) so that he may pose as a propertied man, float a mortgage loan, and make a fashionable marriage. Just as murder is war in miniature, Gogol's Chichikov is a comic common cold symbolizing...