Word: badness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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John Kennedy figured he had made a strike by persuading Nikita Khrushchev to meet with him in Vienna. But man-to-man he could not even get Khrushchev to admit that killing 70 million people with nuclear weapons in ten minutes was a bad idea. "I never met anybody like that," J.F.K. marveled. There was something else where the heart was supposed...
...basic problem, however, is that no one wants to suffer the pain that will be involved in any solution to the debt crisis. Banks are not eager to write off the bad loans and take the earnings loss, while governments in the developed countries are reluctant to halt economic growth just to please foreign moneymen. Thus, no sudden solution is likely to emerge. Says one IMF official: "It is a negotiating process that will run through most of the 1980s." Mexican Finance Secretary Silva Herzog last week recalled Economist John Maynard Keynes' dictum: "Men will do the rational thing...
...most productive loans were for development projects like dams, factories and roads, which can help build the basis for future prosperity. Brazil, for example, borrowed $7.5 billion to make its steel industry into a world-class competitor. But many other projects turned into financial sinkholes, in part because of bad planning and incompetent management. Brazil and Paraguay are cooperating in the construction of Itaipu, the world's largest hydroelectric project, which has a dam almost five miles long. To date, nine years after it was begun, Itaipu has cost $18 billion and has generated not a single kilowatt...
This is classic Bombeck, the wild exaggeration compressed into the stinging one-liner that only slightly overstates the awfulness of the truth. You don't think husbands and kids are that bad? Listen, let me tell you about bad. "After 30 years of marriage, I felt like a truss in a drugstore window." You think that's-overstated? Let me tell you what it's like to be a working mother, "racing around the kitchen in a pair of bedroom slippers, trying to quick-thaw a chop under each armpit . . ." Shared responsibilities? "Transporting children is my husband...
...Erma would get up at 5 a.m., fix breakfast for her daughter, see that she was dressed for school, and then leave in time to work the 7 a.m. shift at the Leland Electric factory. An adult observer would have seen a spunky young widow doing her best in bad...