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UD is...
"Salty." (Scott McLemee)
"Unvarnished." (Phi Beta Cons)
"Splendidly splenetic." (Culture Industry)
"Except for University Diaries, most academic blogs are tedious."
(Rate Your Students)
"I think of Soltan as the Maureen Dowd of the blogosphere,
except that Maureen Dowd is kind of a wrecking ball of a writer,
and Soltan isn't. For the life of me, I can't figure out her
politics, but she's pretty fabulous, so who gives a damn?"
(Tenured Radical)

Sunday, July 24, 2005

DISCOMFORTING


“Despite his youthful summer jobs in the steel mills at Burns Harbor, Ind., where his dad was an executive, Roberts has led a sheltered life, absorbed in the law,” David Broder worries (via Betsy's Page) today in the Washington Post. “Private Catholic schools, Harvard, appointed jobs in the White House and Justice Department, a million-dollar-a-year corporate practice, married to a fellow lawyer -- all commendable but insulated. …[I]t would be comforting to know that Roberts has been ‘out in the world’ enough to know there's more to life than law books."



It is indeed discomforting to think of any important public figure who hasn’t been out in the world, who has not been tempered and seasoned by the raw reality of life.

One model here would be the famous statesman who began as a struggling painter, and then hawked tourist postcards on the streets of Vienna. At one point he was so poor he lived in a homeless shelter. During World War One, he served in the army with distinction. After the war, he was a street orator, and he eventually spent time in prison for his political views.