Contra Cabal 004-02-2

The Machiavellian Weasels

Contra Cabal blossomed into an exposé of great size and force thanks to the Machiavellian Weasels and other Mustela rhetorica. They have now spawned and digitally nested within these pages. Accordingly, Nmesis dedicates the web launch of Contra Cabal to this magnificent duo:

Richard Scott Neel, Associate Dean
College of Education, University of Washington,
and
Merrill Duane Whitburn, Chair
Language, Literature, and Communication, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

The idea of publishing essays about academic impropriety would not have developed without their unswerving moral turpitude, ethical ambivalence, and unlawful artfulness. Nmesis will remain eternally grateful to them. By viciously ending his professorial career, they have given him a reason and a purpose to return to his former profession as a journalist: a career started in London's Fleet Street during George Orwell's time. This move to a potentially higher calling could not have taken place without these equivocating academic princes and Orwellian inspiration.

Dedication

Custom requires that those who want the favor of hubristic academic princes offer to them their most valuable possessions. These princes receive costly gifts worthy of their greatness. The gifts include academic tenure, department chairs, deanships, named professorships, federal grants, inflated salaries, bribes, and especially sycophancy. Accordingly, I wish to give you both a token of my homage. Fortunately, I have discovered a gift among my possessions that I prize more than the recognition of pandering graduate students.

The gift comprises the knowledge gained from fifty years publishing experience and a continuing study of both classical and modern satire. I have condensed this knowledge, with great diligence, into a series of essays entitled Contra Cabal. I now dedicate them to you both as the most deserving of academic princes. Although I deem my work unworthy of your narcissism, nonetheless I have confidence that it will attract your attention. I can offer you no more than the means to grasp all that I have learned during so many years of privation and frustration.

I use the plain style that instructs without extrinsic ornament. Other writers embellish their writing ornamentally but I do not need the applause that they seek from using those rhetorical devices. I wish my readers to judge my work only upon its truthfulness and the seriousness of its topics. A person of low station, I ask with humility that you forgive me for venturing into the hallowed realm of the academe. Especially, I ask forgiveness for presumptuously discoursing about academic cabals and their princes. However, lowly people believe that to have a clear notion of princes they must acquire princely knowledge. From that knowledge they learn that self-venerated princes eventually belong to them. From their life-experience low in the valley they have studied the mountain. They have also climbed the mountain to gain a greater perspective of themselves. Then they studied your academic publications (or lack of them) to gain a better perspective of you. They found that you do not possess the princely knowledge that you claim which gives them possession of you.

Therefore, please accept this plethora of rhetorical gifts in the spirit that I present them to you. If you will diligently read and consider them you will understand my desire for you to attain the eminence that your own merits deserve. When you eventually fall from the height of your greatness, turn your eyes to humbler regions. You will then realize how undeservedly your subjects have endured your keen and unremitting malignity. You will find that retribution occurs swiftly and suddenly.

Nmesis.

Niccolo Machiavelli (translated by N. H. Thompson), The Prince (New York, NY: P. F. Collier & Son), 1910.
Niccolo Machiavelli, and Anthony J. Pansini, (trans), Niccolo Machiavelli and the USA (Greenvale, NY: Greenvale Press), 1969.