Christopher Hitchens, who wrote that sentence in an essay about Jerry Falwell, would have been fascinated by the brotherhood on view at Donald Trump’s latest rally, where Trump’s warm-up bigot, a loud-mouth diploma mill graduate (not Trump University; another diploma mill), shrieked that Bernie Sanders doesn’t believe in God and must be made to come to Jesus.
I wish Hitchens were here to describe this man.
March 14th, 2016 at 6:34PM
Trump University doesn’t really count as a diploma mill, though, does it? When you buy a diploma mill degree, you know exactly what you’re getting – a fancy piece of paper that’s intended to impress the gullible and the inattentive. It’s the employer of the degree-bearer who’s being cheated. Trump’s victims really thought they were buying something of value. They were the chumps.
March 14th, 2016 at 7:28PM
Alan: You’re right that in a sense I’m mixing fraud-types here; yet TU was I think a diploma mill in that it advertised itself as a university (until a judge told it to stop doing that), and misrepresented itself as an institution that provided knowledge, qualified professors, and meaningful credentials in exchange for money.
Whenever they’re caught, diploma mills grads also claim to have been naive, to have believed in the legitimacy of the institution. Of course you’re also right that virtually all of them are acting with cynical and mercenary awareness (typically they’re aiming to get raises based on having attained higher levels of academic degrees); but the case can be made that in at least some of these cases there is a certain level of stupidity.
March 15th, 2016 at 1:12AM
Hitchens is gone, so is Alexander Cockburn, but the latter once described a politician as a “bilge sodden pig’s bladder.” Does that help?