Word: ashley
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Both parties still have to satisfy the voter whose main problem is the culture of Washington. George Cronk, 66, a retired autoworker now living in Ashley Falls, Massachusetts, voted for Clinton in '92 but went Republican last year. Now he tells the TIME/CNN pollsters he's headed back to the Democrats. "The Republicans made a lot of big promises,'' he says. "Once they got into power, they seemed to change. Term limits went out the door. They became what they replaced.'' Cronk was never a Perot voter, but he voices the big complaint of Perot's followers. For them, Republicans...
...AFTER COLIN POWELL DECLINED TO enter the presidential race, many Americans felt an irritated deflation, followed by a wave of what might be called Scarlett O'Hara syndrome--a pining for the Ashley Wilkes we cannot have...
...surreal development in the American electorate's psychology that Powell should be the Ashley Wilkes in this piece, the unavailable paragon. (Pursuing the analogy too far is tough, since it involves transforming either Bob Dole or Bill Clinton into Rhett Butler.) As Powell's case shows, the romance of the withheld is powerful. Scarlett wanted Ashley because she could not have him. Human nature yearns for--idealizes--what is placed out of reach: Lycidas, the hero who dies in youth; Camelot, the bright, magic might-have-been. A politics of Zen--the most powerful presence is someone...
Anyone past adolescence knows what moral to draw from the Scarlett and Ashley Wilkes story: Keep your dreams if you like (though Ashley may turn out to be to be a jerk when deprived of his chivalric mystique), but work with what you have--which Scarlett, God knows, did. Americans get the Presidents they exert themselves to deserve. That may or may not be a good thing; it is a mistake to get prissy about it. Selflessness shades into self-righteousness. If Presidents are chosen by the exertions of selfless zealots, the process may prove dangerously unrepresentative...
America has become a society that makes too much of its living by marketing its own Impure Thoughts: a corrupt dynamic. Secular realists reply to the idea of abstinence with some snorting variant on what Hemingway's Jake Barnes told Brett Ashley at the end of The Sun Also Rises: "Isn't it pretty to think so?" (Jake's problem was not sexual indulgence, of course, but the reverse--grim chastity enforced by a war wound.) Get real...