This is Frank Bruni’s last column with the New York Times. He’s going into academia. He is already genuflecting from the ivory tower. We see this often. A line worker gets promoted to a position as supervisor and becomes a different person entirely. Which is real? Consistency is sometimes demeaned as the hobgoblin of small minds, and often is as it morphs into unreasoning stubbornness. Certainly we must have the intellectual courage to become the later Wittgenstein through brutally honest reconsideration of earlier positions. Other times, I would venture, consistency is the product of thinking things through in the first place, before one puts pen to paper or mounts the soap box, for if not, there may not be a real, just a political and ethical chameleon.