Word: oughtness
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With the appearance of "Traffic," the tangled drug-war mosaic from director Steven Soderburgh (late of "Out of Sight" and "Erin Brockovich"), America has a rare opportunity to observe the way that movie-making ought to be, stripped of the star wattage and special effects, the hackneyed scripts and Left Coast cant. "Traffic" is not the finest movie ever made, admittedly, nor even perhaps the best of the year. But it accomplishes something rare, something that Hollywood finds difficult to manage these days--it tells the truth about a pressing contemporary issue...
Harvard is a private institution, and ultimately no one has the power to force it to change. Harvard can do whatever it wants and the culture of secrecy is too entrenched for change to come easily. But someone in the Harvard administration ought to find the courage to try. The purpose of Harvard, contrary to what generations of faculty may have believed, is not to provide a setting for back-room intrigues and political power plays...
...electoral map in November? Yes, but not exactly. In millions of individual citizens' minds, elements of the two views blend. For example, I am essentially Tocquevillian, but the Tocquevillian American should nurture an enormous tolerance that is enabled by the assumptions 1) that American life ought, above all, to be fair, and 2) that there's enough here for everyone. But tolerance to a Tocquevillian is condescension to a Gramscian. Gramscianism lives on an invidious and Europeanized zero-sum kind of thinking about power...
...much out of the testimony, just a mild rally. But George W. Bush got more than enough sound bites out of the day's hearings to get his go-ahead - maybe more than he was expecting. But he also got some clear parameters as to how the tax cut ought to be done - and what sort of rhetoric should properly accompany it. The Democrats are still looking for ways to kill the cut's momentum, and Sen. Hillary Clinton, in full-on, uncoiffed, out-of-the-spotlight mode, talked about a "balanced approach" and "necessary spending" just long enough...
...antidote to the blind application of genetic engineering is to start talking about what should and should not be allowed, who will pay and what standards ought to apply to those who want to promote and sell services that promise to make utopian children. The proper response to ANDi is not legislation to stop the mad scientists but a public debate that will teach us how best to control ourselves...