Word: supermen
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After men had quibbled, nit picked, and clashed for some time, a great legislator would come along. He couldn't exactly force people to live properly; that would contradict Rousseau's belief that a populace must retain sovereignty, misguided though it might be. Instead, Rousseau's Supermen would skillfully persuade men to listen to that part of their consciousnesses that instructs them to act as public-minded citizens and to ignore their self-serving desires. Thanks to this great legislator-educator, society would advance spiritually, cooperation would become the norm, and everyone would be fulfilled...
...George Smiley, the hero of John Le Carre's series that began with The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. However convoluted his adventures, Smiley provides an anchor for every Le Carre story because he is a real person--a troubled, depressed, aging spy. Forsyth deals in Supermen, plastic men whom we will root for but never really care about as human beings. He came closest in Jackal, with his portrayal of the man who tried to assassinate Charles De Gaulle; he failed outright in his two later novels, The Odessa File, in which Superman infiltrated a society...
...prisoners to lick a parade ground clean of dog feces. "Today's legion is different," says one veteran of Algerian days. "Discipline is not what it was. The old ways are no longer acceptable. We are commandos now-exceptionally fit and capable commandos-but we are not the supermen of legend...
Despite the fact that Harvard's aqua-supermen dunked the Tigers, 58-55, earlier this season, Princeton--which has won the championship meet for the last five years in a row--is the decided favorite. You can forget the other ten or 15 teams that will be splashing around Brown's classy pool this weekend. This is a two-team showdown: Hackett's Heroes vs. the Incredible Orange Machine...
...lecture delivered at Columbia University more than a decade ago, David Brinkley proposed doing away entirely with "the role of the all-wise, all-informed, all-knowing journalistic supermen." Brinkley objected to the way "the whole apparatus of press agentry and promotion is put to work ... promoting stars along with promoting news, to the point where it is not clear which is which." The only solution, Brinkley argued, was to "report the news the way newspapers report it," with many reporters spending the day developing stories, "then having them, all of them, report on the ah" whatever they have learned...