Lawrence Summers has so frequently been airbrushed, and has himself so frequently airbrushed others, it’s a miracle he and his cronies continue in the realm of visibility at all. Harvard law prof Lawrence Lessig (that’s him in my headline) doesn’t really care about that, though:
There’s little need to reform Larry Summers. He will, I suspect, pass quickly from Harvard’s orbit. But it is the culture that would have allowed Larry Summers to be protected that must now be called to account. How could Harvard have allowed this production of Hamlet without the Prince? And will it now commit to a practice that will not protect the elite among us… ?
As you know, UD has wondered for years how Harvard could have airbrushed so corrupt a figure as Summers for so long; she has also long speculated that the appointment of Ma Ingalls (à bas “excessive materialism”!!!) right after Summers was a crude reverse engineer.
I mean, crude but effective. Lasted for years, until Summers’ grody to the maxness eventually sucked the air even out of the most elite of airbrushes. You can sort of see the supersecret superelite Harvard Corporation secretly gathering back then to brushbrushbrush its president’s rep. You can see them sweeping dual-action, adjustable pressure tools over Summers glossies. Keep spraying! Tell no one! Tell Drew Faust to name her price!
Not sure, though, about Lessig’s Hamlet thing. He seems to have in mind a production of Summerskrantz and Epsteinstern.
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An enlargement of this theme.
People are right to sense that, as the [Epstein] emails lay bare, there is a highly private merito-aristocracy at the intersection of government and business, lobbying, philanthropy, start-ups, academia, science, high finance and media that all too often takes care of its own more than the common good. They are right to resent that there are infinite second chances for members of this group even as so many Americans are deprived of first chances.
And C. Lasch, 1995.
To an alarming extent the privileged classes – by an expansive definition, the top 20 percent – have made themselves independent not only of crumbling industrial cities but of public services in general. They send their children to private schools, insure themselves against medical emergencies by enrolling in company-supported plans, and hire private security guards…. In effect, they have removed themselves from the common life. It is not just that they see no point in paying for public services they no longer use. Many of them have ceased to think of themselves as Americans in any important sense, implicated in America’s destiny for better or worse. Their ties to an international culture of work and leisure – of business entertainment, information, and ‘information retrieval’ – make many of them deeply indifferent to the prospect of American national decline.