hard heads soft hearts |
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a scratch pad for half-formed thoughts by a liberal political junkie who's nobody special. ''Hard Heads, Soft Hearts'' is the title of a book by Princeton economist Alan Blinder, and tends to be a favorite motto of neoliberals, especially liberal economists. mobile
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Friday, June 14, 2002
more Gene Lyons, "The Higher Illiteracy" 1. The Washington Bureau is full of people who, when they say `we', don't mean Newsweek, but the Government 2. the danger to individual freedom posed by self-aggrandizing bureaucracies public and private seems to me greater every day. In putting it that way I mean to distinguish myself from the intellectual survivalists of the extreme right - who lampoon all public agencies save the military, but express only reverence for banks, insurance companies and multi-national corporations. (Imagine the fun if reporters could dig around, say, the Prudential Insurance Company's files, as they can the Texas Education Association's). 3. The Yankee Image was synonymous with Wall Street and the new York Times, the essence of pin striped arrogance, and if my father taught me nothing he taught me mistrust and dislike for that crowd, as well as the fear that, like the Yankees, they could not be beaten. 4. My father's jew hatred, like his nigger phobia, seemed to grow more pronounced as his own feelings of failure and my mother's barely submerged hysteria closed in on him. In 1956, by which time it ws plain he was not going to make his fortune with the Prudential, he sunk his life's savings and all he could borrow, together with what remained of his belief in himself, nurtured by all those years of athletic triumph and personal charm, into a Dairy Queen franchise on a badly chosen country highway in Wayne, twenty miles from our home. As he had been with the Prudential, he became a Dairy Queen believer. . .he could talk butterfat content for hours, extolling the merits of the Dairy Queen product over all competitors. . .Whatever, we never made it to Easy Street. Instead of working from Easter to Halloween and going south for the winter, my father spent the next ten years putting in sixteen to eighteen hour days all during the warm months, commuting home from "The Pru", grabbing a sandwich and heading for the D.Q. on the run, never making more than ten dollars a day he could skim off the top. It ended only when his cursed avaricious Kike of a landlord refused to renew the option on his lease so he could do it for ten more. Whatever he thought of the "miserable Jew bastards" when the vapors were on him my father was unfailingly polite and helpful towards our elderly neighbours and became a community favorite. Sensing a soft touch, many of them came to count on him for tasks my brother and I were too young to do. "Meesthair Lynz," Fanny Sachs once told me, is a good man. |