We were intrigued the other day to read what was intended to be a damning criticism of a US politician.
Imagine we attended Harvard Law School as a tyro, but with a deep conviction that the world was over 70 percent ocean. Now, years later, replete with a Harvard Law degree, years of life experience, and presumably wiser, we still hold the same view: that the earth's surface is predominately water. Critics could doubtless allege that we were closed minded, of "calcified thinking, dangerously impervious to facts, reality, and a changing world."The time-capsule quality of Cruz’s politics is lost on no one who knew him at Princeton, none of whom could point to a political position that he held 25 years ago that he does not seem to still hold today. For some, that amounts to a laudably consistent belief system. For others, it reveals a man of calcified thinking, dangerously impervious to facts, reality, and a changing world.
"More than anyone I knew, Ted seemed to have arrived in college with a fully formed worldview,” Butler College colleague Erik Leitch said. “And what strikes me now, looking at him as an adult and hearing the things he's saying, it seems like nothing has changed. Four years of an Ivy League education, Harvard Law, and years of life experience have altered nothing."
Whilst the slur would be expectorated full of sound and fury, it would signify precisely nothing. Well, actually, it would signify something about the person doing the slurring. Let's deconstruct.
