Word: americanizing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...heading toward a politics of human rights that supersedes the politics of established frontiers and, in some cases, laws. Substitute private property for frontiers and the Second Amendment for laws, and one begins to see that the politics of humanitarianism requires a trade-off involving the essential underpinnings of American life. To tell Americans what they can or cannot own and do in their homes is always a tricky business. As for the Second Amendment, it may pose an inconvenience for gun-control advocates, but no more an inconvenience than the First Amendment offers those who blame violence on movies...
...When I gave that speech," she says, "I was talking more to the American people than to my colleagues. I could see that most of my colleagues had already made up their minds. I saw games being played. But this was not a game with me. I looked up in the balcony, and I saw people who had been with me all along on this issue. Victims and families of victims. We're the ones who know what it's like. We're the ones who know the pain...
...ordinarily might never vote at all become convinced that their freedoms, their very being, will be jeopardized if they do not vote Smith in and Jones out. Once convinced, these folks in effect become the NRA in the shadows. They are the defense-oriented "little guys" of the American people, beset by Big Government, big laws and rich liberals who want to take away the only power they have...
They are convinced, I believe, of something wholly untrue--that the possession of weapons gives them stature, makes them more American. This idea too was a Colt-manufactured myth, indeed, an ad slogan: "God may have made men, but Samuel Colt made them equal." The notion of guns as instruments of equality ought to seem self-evidently crazy, but for a long time Hollywood--and thus we all--lived by it. Cultural historian Richard Slotkin of Wesleyan University debunks it forever in a recent essay, "Equalizer: The Cult of the Colt." "If we as individuals have to depend...
...doesn?t look good for the drug's makers. The lawyers for Debbie Lovett, 36, sounded like they?d watched a tobacco trial or two in their time. They claimed that Wyeth-Ayerst Laboratories, a subsidiary of American Home Products, knew the dangers of fen-phen?s dangerous half, fenfluramine, long before the FDA yanked it off the market in May 1997 -- and hid their research from an unsuspecting public. Which left the defense spluttering that Ms. Lovett?s obesity carried its own risks; she knew what she was getting into. The jury didn...