Word: powerfully
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Marketing one's virtue has its limitations. It magnifies each compromise he makes: his opposition to taxing products on the Internet, a big hit with Silicon Valley; his reversal on clemency for Puerto Rican terrorists; his overtures to New York's black power broker, the Rev. Al Sharpton; his sudden support for ethanol subsidies (which he once called "highway robbery"). Then he insists he isn't just another vote-grubbing pol. "When you're a national candidate, you see things in a different context," he says. "I'm being upfront and direct about...
...implementation as a criterion for selecting outstanding individuals would be much more discriminatory than the use of intelligence tests. For all of its inadequacies, the SAT does not attempt to test opinions. Any selection based on "morals," on the other hand, would reward those who agree with those in power about what is and is not "morally good." Suddenly, anyone who is pro-choice or pro-life, a fundamentalist or an atheist, could be excluded--an unacceptable obstruction of our country's freedom of speech and of thought...
...less extreme statement of the principle that performance should be valued over potential is sound, but Lemann's statement that this principle is blatantly violated in today's America is not entirely convincing. Certainly, higher education is strongly linked to money and power and an impressive college credential carries weight. But Americans rarely work at the same job their entire lives these days. Our entire lives are tests, and to whatever end, the college-educated workforce is a driven population...
...truism of the psychologizing age that a book tells us as much about its author as about its subject. And the authentic power of For Common Things resides not in the originality of Purdy's thesis but rather in the not-at-all-incidental portrait of Jedidiah Purdy. The book is filled with autobiographical detail, and with confessions that spring from a mind uninterested in artifice and concealment: it is the example of Purdy's love of common things, rather than his sometimes boring case studies in the downfall of public culture, that proves effective...
...farm in West Virginia, we lack a politics that functions as a repository of our hopes and dreams." Even to a reader less self-consciously worldly and less corrosively bitter than Hodge, Purdy's tone and substance--the fact that this book is about Jedediah Purdy, and that any power in the book springs from his unshakeable convictions--may seem narcissistic; and his tendency towards moralistic aphorisms, towards a Thoreauvian epigrammatic style, seems a little bit pompous...