Word: betters
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Jews in a bar" joke -- but he has more serious matters in mind. His subject is how to live morally in this world rather than penitently in the next, and the dynamic that fascinates him is why people make excuses, time and again, rather than attempt to be better. The title character, played by Treat Williams, is the conscience-pricked but ultimately expedient movie executive depicted in Mamet's Speed-the-Plow. Gould is called on the netherworld carpet for seduction and abandonment of a woman who, when summoned to testify, proves insufferable even to the great adversary. Mamet...
...years, he temporized, trying to get a bad system to work better by eliminating drunkenness, corruption and inefficiency. This policy failed, so he adopted bolder reforms. His purpose was not to abandon Communism but to save it. Ironically, by doing so he has become the darling of Western intellectuals and pundits...
Gorbachev has changed, but it is a change of the head, not the heart. At a time when he is using his head, we should not lose ours. In providing help for Gorbachev, we should adhere to a fundamental principle. If his ultimate goal is to make life better for the Soviet people, we should help him. But we should not help him if his ultimate goal is to make life more difficult for the West by using Western subsidies to build an economically and militarily stronger Soviet Union with the same aggressive foreign policy...
...Instability is likely to prevail in Eastern Europe for years to come, but for all its problems, the region has a far better chance of building democratic institutions and a market economy than the Soviet Union, which lags decades behind its former satellites...
Compared with his Soviet colleague, Geza Jeszenszky, spokesman for Hungary's Democratic Forum and dean of the School of Social and Political Science at the Karl Marx University of Economics in Budapest, was optimistic. Said he: "In Central Europe we have a better chance for controlled change...