In what we might think of as Kenneth Starr's America--a nation where the imperative to root out "impropriety" gleefully sets secretaries against their bosses, friends against friends, mothers against daughters--personal loyalty has no place.
"I cannot figure out where some imperative exists to take the words 'under God' out of the Pledge of Allegiance, or to ban the mention of the 10 amendments in a public square," he said, after discussing the Bill of Rights.
Ira Berkow focuses on the football culture, where the imperative to appear tough can overrule common sense ("In Plain Talk, There Is an Explanation for Stringer's Death," Aug. 5).
This is the result of the fog of government, where the imperative to "be seen to be doing something", to respond to the demands of the security services, to make government more efficient in the interests of "delivering services" – and so on, always as inexpensively as possible – distorts their grip on principle.
That uncomfortable conundrum appears in another medium this week, even one where the imperative is even more strongly to convey "the work" and "the art," and not concern itself with vulgar matters like celebrity.
Since participants could not know in advance where the imperative stimulus would appear, about half of the saccades during the preparation interval were directed into the opposite direction relative to the subsequent imperative stimulus (and corresponding manual response).
The international community remains obstinate in its failure to confront this question, which needs to be explored with special urgency in cases where the imperative of repaying external creditors threatens to conflict with domestic public expenditure priorities related to health equity and SDH.
But Kashmir has for decades been a state of exception, a gray zone where democratic imperatives are subservient.
One tends to think of Israel as a country where survivalist imperatives do not allow for much antiwar sentiment.
The Danes and the Swedes have operated in this way, in stark contrast with Spain, where political imperatives have kept monstrously managed banks alive – or, in the case of Bankia, created an agglomeration of many failing regional banks, presumably on the grounds that the bigger the entity becomes, the less likely it is to be "allowed to fail".
