Word: lincolnisms
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...unsavory riff about his host's open-heart surgery? His quick explanation that 60 overnight guests in the Austin, Texas, mansion--who had coincidentally contributed $2 million to him--were all "friends and family" eerily echoed Clinton's first line of defense when the high turnover in the Lincoln Bedroom was disclosed. And when Bush wanted to prove he was now up to speed on world leaders, after having failed a surprise pop quiz last summer, he goaded a reporter to ask him who the President of India is. He shouted the name of the Prime Minister instead. He wasn...
...address to the young men's lyceum, Lincoln worried that this impulse was responsible for increasing disregard of law, which he thought important because "if destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide." This, in turn, threatened to break down the people's attachment to their political institutions...
...Lincoln went on to worry that great and ambitious men, living after the great deeds of the Founding, might achieve fame through destruction rather than preservation of political institutions. An ambitious man of the loftiest genius, he wrote, "would as willingly, perhaps more so, acquire [distinction] by doing good as harm; yet, that opportunity being past, and nothing left to be done in the way of building up, he would set boldly to the task of pulling down." To overcome such a threat, Lincoln argued, a people must be united together and to their government...
Although what Lincoln had in mind when he spoke of "towering genius" is extremely rare--he gives Alexander, Caesar and Napoleon as examples--one still finds similar passions in the geniuses who grow regularly within a democracy, such as the kind of geniuses who fill the elite schools, Harvard not least among them. For these students, who might otherwise "boldly take to the task of pulling down," cheering for underdogs in the NCAA tournament is cathartic. The tournament allows their revolutionary energies to be safely spent...
...despite the politically correct curriculum, one of the most jarring sights at Lincoln is its de facto segregation. It has even spawned the saying "White by day, black by night." That's because most white students drive home when their classes end. There's even an unofficial white student union on the fourth floor of the Martin Luther King campus building. The dorms, fraternities, sororities and other social activities are dominated by blacks. "It's really sad," says Tanya Servick, a 19-year-old communications major who is African American. Josh Cleveland, 19, a creative-writing major from St. Louis...