Word: idiot
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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According to Polonius, the highest loyalty is to oneself, but it helps to remember that Polonius was an idiot. We are not even capable of being true to who we are, and many of us would be better off as someone else. Auden had it right in the poem "Lullaby": "Lay your sleeping head, my love/ Human on my faithless arm." Ah, humans...
Unfortunately, those who derive a sense of status from their fancy little phones probably cannot be persuaded by reason alone. So, I encourage those of you with Nokia's strapped to your belt to look in the mirror and recognize that you look like an idiot. This ain't Star Trek, that's no Tricorder, and you're no Star Fleet Officer. There will be plenty of time later in life for you to fill the vacuum in your self-esteem with expensive gadgets. For the time being, spare the rest of us. If you're so worried about keeping...
...True. But I think Frum may not be sufficiently aware of just how much has been lost in the shaking-out. In a way, the John McCain phenomenon registers a nostalgia for discarded virtues (duty, honor, endurance) - for an authenticity that the '70s did their idiot best to destroy...
...here is H.L. Mencken's generous assessment of Henry James: "an idiot and a Boston idiot to boot, than which there is nothing lower in this world." And William Allen White's gracious description of Mencken: "With a pig's eyes that never look up, with a pig's snout that loves muck, with a pig's brain that knows only the sty, and a pig's squeal that cries only when he is hurt, he sometimes opens his pig's mouth, tusked and ugly, and lets out the voice of God, railing at the whitewash that covers the manure...
...calls "the first truly modern amoral thinker" to the modern business world, where malevolence and blinding self-love are demonstrated assets. With sly humor, Bing answers the book's title question in brief chapters with such headings as "He would do what he feels like doing, you idiot." Would-be tyrants, take note...