Nine months spent in Washington, DC, has provided valuable insight. Beltway insiders and area professions are their own breed. As I’ve gotten my sea legs, more and more of their world makes sense to me. Once I arrived here that I was immediately given some particularly infuriating advice, namely that other people were just as smart as I was, if not smarter, and that I ought to get used to it. I think he assumed I was just like everyone else—the latest newcomer eager to play the game in a town with more than its share of naked ambition and power plays. Perhaps he was the latest candidate for burnout, having recognized that institutional idealism is often an exercise in minutia. Though my background and my academic career may be relatively humble, I am no stranger to elitism when I see it, and I am just as repulsed by it now as I ever was.
Tag: modesty
Oct 19 2007
Chris Dodd: The Audacity of Modesty and Decency.
We live in an age of hypertrophic indecency and immodesty. This is perhaps best symbolized the Presidency of George W. Bush and his aggressive wars, rendition torture, illegal search and seizure, and absolute disregard for human suffering. A fundamental indecency and immodesty suffuses us. We have suffered a collapse of the sense of “enoughness.”