Still, Frank Luntz, the Republican consultant who was interviewing Mr. Trump in front of the evangelical audience in Iowa when he made the “cracker” comments about communion, said that he believes Mr. Trump’s reputation as a ruthless fighter is something that is appealing to Christian conservatives who believe their way of life is under constant assault.
Even after the “cracker” quip — “You could hear, audibly, shock in the room,” Mr. Luntz said — many people did not seem terribly bothered. “This is the Paul Simon principle of politics: A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest,” Mr. Luntz said, summing up Mr. Trump’s enduring and paradoxical popularity with many Christian voters.
Chronicle of a Riot Foretold
From the outset, the great difficulty has been discerning whether the authorities are driven by malevolence or incompetence. The Ferguson police let Brown’s body lie in the street for four and a half hours, an act that either reflected callous disregard for him as a human being or an inability to manage the situation. The release of Darren Wilson’s name was paired with the release of a video purportedly showing Brown stealing a box of cigarillos from a convenience store, although Ferguson police chief Tom Jackson later admitted that Wilson was unaware of the incident when he confronted the young man. (McCulloch contradicted this in his statement on the non-indictment.) Last night, McCulloch made the inscrutable choice to announce the grand jury’s decision after darkness had fallen and the crowds had amassed in the streets, factors that many felt could only increase the risk of violence. Despite the sizable police presence, few officers were positioned on the stretch of West Florissant Avenue where Brown was killed. The result was that damage to the area around the police station was sporadic and short-lived, but Brown’s neighborhood burned. This was either bad strategy or further confirmation of the unimportance of that community in the eyes of Ferguson’s authorities.
Save Footnotes
But annotation isn’t an invention of modern scholarship. The Hebrew Bible is, famously, a text that comments on itself, weaving elaborations of its own meaning into its various iterations. Grafton touts the French philosopher Pierre Bayle, whose “Historical and Critical Dictionary,” published in the sixteen-nineties, sometimes used its explosion of footnotes as an intricate and sophisticated form of argument, as an early virtuoso of the form. Noting is old. Yet it’s precisely because of its oldness that, for books, back matter is important—especially given the advent of new reading technologies.
.. At print magazines such as The New Yorker, every word of every sentence is checked (and, where necessary, cross-checked) against original sources, for accuracy and context; if an error somehow slips through the net, it is corrected, and the change is announced. Nonfiction books almost never get such scrutiny, however, so notes are a crucial mark of intellectual good faith.
.. Consider a writer like the nineteenth-century clergyman John Hodgson, whose multipart “A History of Northumberland” included a footnote running well over a hundred pages.
How ‘competitiveness’ became one of the great unquestioned virtues of contemporary culture
Underlying it is the problem that there are no longer any external, separate or higher principles to appeal to, through which oligarchs might be challenged. Legitimate powers need other powers through which their legitimacy can be tested; this is the basic principle on which the separation of executive, legislature and judiciary is based. The same thing holds true with respect to economic power, but this is what has been lost.
Regulators, accountants, tax collectors, lawyers, public institutions, have been drawn into the economic contest, and become available to buy. To use the sort of sporting metaphor much-loved by business leaders; it’s as if the top football team has bought not only the best coaches, physios and facilities, but also bought the referee and the journalists as well. The bodies responsible for judging economic competition have lost all authority, which leaves the dream of ‘meritocracy’ or a ‘level playing field’ (crucial ideals within the neoliberal imaginary) in tatters. Politically speaking, this is as much a failure of legitimation as it is a problem of spiralling material inequality.