Word: basics
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...could hear the show's executive producer, Al Goldstein, mouth off on any subject that grazed his mind: Gloria Steinem ("great legs"), a play he'd seen in London ("Skip it. Miss it. Crud"), health violations at local restaurants. On Midnight Blue and other sex shows, for the basic cable subscription price, you could watch all this and more...
...World: From giant India to tiny Grenada, more than 160 countries have written charters modeled on the U.S. version. Britain: For a unique set of reasons, an unwritten constitution rules the isles. Soviet Union: A basic law guaranteeing rights and freedoms is faithfully observed, but not when it clashes with the interests of the state...
...house he occupies is as strange as he is, at once balanced and perilous, like a house of cards. The basic text of the Constitution is the main building, a symmetrical 18th century structure grounded in the Enlightenment principles of reason, optimism, order and a wariness of emotion and passion. The Constitution's architects, all fundamentally British Enlightenment minds, sought to build a home that Americans could live in without toppling it by placing their impulses above their rationality. To these men, who grew up on Swift, Hume, Locke and Pope, stability and moderation were not only practical measures...
...human nature as existing in and requiring for its survival the most delicate array of balances between religion and science, reason and emotion, democracy and aristocracy, the individual and the group, self-interest and general welfare; that is, all the balances that found their way into the Constitution's basic text. On the whole, that original, unamended text is a model Enlightenment tract, carefully checking and balancing as if in imitation of the moderate universe in which 18th century Europe trusted. One of the framers, John Dickinson, even saw the proposed relationship between the states and the Federal Government...
...trouble with that original body of laws, as Henry May concluded in his study The Enlightenment in America, was that it reflected "all the virtues of the Moderate Enlightenment, and also one of its faults: the belief that everything can be settled by compromise." In other words, the basic Constitution was too balanced, and thus logically flawed: What moderate compromises are available when a nation seeks to retain the institution of slavery? The answer to the Constitution's excessive symmetry was the Bill of Rights, which did not overturn the basic document but represented a risky extension into the realms...