Word: banishment
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Reagan's ability to overfly troubles of his own making on a magic carpet woven of his own illusions remains a wonderment. He has helped banish bad news from the political lexicon. "There are no bitter pills among Ronald Reagan's jelly beans," explains a durable adviser. But eight years of smile-button politics leave a heavy burden for those who would follow, Democrat or Republican. No matter how intractable the problems, the American people have come to expect can-do homilies from their President. Any honest talk about sacrifice or yielding self-interest to the common interest...
Before the presidential campaign goes ballistic, a modest piece of advice for George Bush and Michael Dukakis: Fire your pollsters, banish your gurus and spend a week in Crook County, the crystal ball of presidential politics. Since this isolated county was created in 1882 in sagebrush-strewn central Oregon, its inhabitants have successfully picked 26 consecutive winners, from Grover Cleveland to Ronald Reagan...
...local VIPs riding from one event to the next. This year the Jackson campaign has an entourage of staff and Secret Service, plus a fleet of official vehicles to handle such chores. The local limousines are dinosaurs in the 1988 campaign, a nuisance the Secret Service would like to banish. But Jackson holds on to them, although they often ride empty except for one proud driver whose fingers no one in the Jackson campaign wants to pry from the steering wheel...
...searching for a consensus since it arrived in the schools at the turn of the century, the brainchild of stern progressive-era reformers, mostly doctors and other upper-crust male professionals. The idea, the only idea, was to enforce sexual restraint. Reformers believed that enlightened mass education could help banish venereal disease, prostitution, masturbation and sex outside marriage. The notion of "scientific" sex education arose as a way of deflecting the curious from actual sexual behavior. Instruction, said a 1912 committee, "should aim to keep sex consciousness and sex emotions at the minimum." Then, as now, there were heavy implications...
...learned to regard their addiction. They understand that the craving never really disappears; it is merely denied. An alcoholic can stay sober for years, yet he still says, because he knows it to be true, "I am an alcoholic." If the current revulsion against drug abuse does manage to banish dope back into the shadows, society could use a measure of the same honesty and self-awareness. "It seems we forget so easily," says NIDA's Schuster, "and so we have repetitions of these cycles of drug-abuse epidemics. It almost seems that every other generation has to re-establish...