Word: cassandras
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...extraordinary set they were. His Carpathian peasant nurse, Cassandra, part witch and part illiterate earth mother, was given to romping naked with the pack of family dogs -- "a Lady Godiva with a pitch-black mane," whose fierce nurturing exuberance was in utmost contrast to the coddling anxieties of a beautiful, irascible Viennese mother. Mama believed she had gone below < her station in the polyglot provinces of the Bukovina. Father was sexually unfaithful to her and volcanic in temper; an anti-Semite who despised Nazis as Untermenschen; a watercolorist, photographer and architectural historian whose diversions included dragging a dead wild boar...
...think what encourages people is nothing they gain from being here, but attitudes they come in with," says Cassandra Q. Butts, a second-year student at Harvard. "And people often come in with an interest in public interest, but with the emphasis here on corporate law, they don't always leave with that attitude. There's heavy recruiting by large, high-paying firms, and students see an insurmountable number of loans they need...
...voters never displayed much interest in confronting the largely abstract problems, from environmental hazards to the trade deficit, that could threaten America's well-being in the 1990s. When the national mood is I'm-all-right-Jack complacency, it is unrealistic to expect political leaders to play Cassandra. Even public concerns, like crime and drugs, that consistently ranked high in national polls contributed to this air of unreality. Crime has always been a local problem largely beyond a President's purview, while drug usage remains so embedded in cultural attitudes that it virtually defies political remedies...
...comfort to the Cassandras, nobody -- Cassandra nor Pollyanna -- predicted the 1980s economy correctly. The decade began with the deepest recession since the Great Depression, engineered by the Federal Reserve Board to purge inflation. The early Reagan deficits helped stimulate the economy back into expansion -- a classic exercise in Keynesianism of the sort the President has spent his political career deploring (and still deplores, given half a chance...
...long been a fan of Elvira, not just because she's sexy or funny, but also because Elvira (a.k.a. Cassandra Peterson) comes from Colorado Springs, Colo., and I root for anyone who shoots for stardom from my home state...