Word: buttons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...swept quietly over vast sections of the American psyche. A sneaking preference for what once, generations ago, was called square has broken into the open. Certain values like stable family, satisfyingly useful hard work, competition and excellence have reappeared here and there: the moral equivalents of Bass Weejuns and button-down shirts. A cynic would say that the culture's manic quest for novelty has simply exhausted some of its adventurously kinky experiments (open marriage, bisexuality, a doctrinaire celibacy, banana smoking and roller disco) and so returned to the Real Thing, temporarily no doubt. It is all transient fashion...
...account for the need to go around periodically rediscovering the wheel. The notion that all human history began at one's own birth, a common delusion, remains extraordinarily strong, even in an electronic and allegedly literate civilization capable of reproducing the prenatal past at the touch of a button or the cracking of a book. As the Italian writer Giovanni Papini wrote about his generation of World War I, "For the 20-year-old man, every old man is the enemy; every idea is suspect; every great man is there to be put on trial; past history seems...
...Japan and the United States in the world of the 1980s have very large body of shared global responsibilities," Jack Button, executive director of the American delegation to the Wiseman's Group, told about 30 people at the Japan Forum of the CFIA...
Near Golden, Colo., at the Department of Energy's Rocky Flats plant, a technician pushes a red button marked REQUEST TRANSFER. Behind a 10-in.-thick concrete wall, a pair of claws reaches out to grasp a stainless steel container filled with pink powder, then lifts it into a furnace where it is baked at 950° F until it turns into a nondescript gray button three inches in diameter. Such a button could be worth $100,000, for the job of this robot, which goes into regular operation in a few months, is transporting reprocessed plutonium...
Suddenly, the White House console phone with the special red button at Powell's right hand buzzes. "Yes, sir," answers Powell, sitting up at attention. "The boss" wants him. Shrugging into his jacket, patting his pockets to make sure he has cigarettes and matches, Powell hurries off to see probably the only person he has never kept waiting...