Word: machiavellis
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Mansfield seems to have adopted this system under the misguided notion that a two-tiered system will put him in line with the times. Arrogance and a deprecating demeanor may have been requirements of teaching positions in Machiavelli's Europe, but sometime in the last several centuries pedagogy accepted the principle that it isn't the job of a professor merely to point out how little a student knows. Indeed, if Mansfield weren't so preoccupied with standing up against the liberal gods of grade inflation--who have so erroneously fooled the world into thinking that ignorant Harvard students...
...tried, and he's always selected good ones. In Texas he chose (or was chosen by; let's keep that open) lieutenant governor Bob Bullock, one of the shrewdest s.o.b.s who ever walked. Let's just say that if Bush had studied politics under Lyndon Johnson or Machiavelli, he couldn't have done better. Dick Cheney is apparently the new mentor, and I'm favorably impressed, certainly by Cheney's demeanor; one worries because his voting record is so nutsoid...
...been easy. The agitation for television is constant. When Bush v. Gore reached the high court and the networks demanded entry with cameras, the chorus grew particularly loud. Rehnquist said no. His denial seems anachronistic, but it represents a deep understanding of the modern sensibility. Like Machiavelli, he knows how important an air of mystery is for maintaining authority. And TV's very essence is to demystify. Everything it touches becomes familiar and ordinary, ripe for irony and camp...
...Harvard's 14 or so registered members of the GOP, I find the whole business rather entertaining--and as Machiavelli noted wisely, it is a far better thing to be feared than loved. Nevertheless, my heart goes out to my fearful fellow students, with their Mondale-Ferraro memories and their yearning glances at socialist Canada--and so I try, without much success, to point out that a Bush victory in November might not be all that...
Stanley Bing's most recent book is What Would Machiavelli...