Word: abyss
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Their fans--having welded emotions and season-ticket dollars to the fortunes of an erratic two-dozen men who would provoke expectations of ecstasy only to deflate them--were "a rope stretched across an abyss...
...athletic endeavors--indeed, just tries to keep up with other Ivy schools--the dangers of recruiting are not far from any Crimson follower's mind. Stoeckel, as liaison between admissions and athletics, has perhaps the crucial role in assuring that Harvard treads the tightrope well--without falling into the abyss of excess. Yale president Bart Giamatti, no doubt, will have one eye cocked toward Cambridge after his speech calling for deemphasis of recruiting...
...will end up making the wrong ones for decades to come. We will fight wars to defend a national interest determined in a few corporate boardrooms. We will continue to polarize our society economically so that a handful maintain their standard of consumption while many sink into an abyss of hopeless misery. Worst of all, as we struggle to save the least desirable qualities of the American way of life, we will lose hold of its most valuable freedoms...
...Into the Abyss...
...that has been part of their peculiar national "innocence" and residual Puritan sense of themselves as the new elect of God. Without such grace or rationale, without the comfort of their demonstrable virtue and uniqueness, Americans feel themselves sliding toward triviality, and beyond that, toward an abyss that might swal low the whole experiment like a black hole. "Either America is the hope of the world," one dogmatically friendly French man wrote 20 years ago, "or it is nothing...