Word: cataclysmic
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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That is the concern of former Secretary of Defense (and more recently, of Energy) James Schlesinger. In an interview last week with TIME Diplomatic Correspondent Strobe Talbott, Schlesinger described the fall of the Shah last January and the rise of Khomeini as "a cataclysm for American foreign policy?the first serious revolution since 1917 in terms of world impact." Said Schlesinger: "It is plain that respect for the U.S. would be higher if we didn't just fumble around continuously and weren't half-apologetic about whatever we do. An image of weakness is going to elicit this kind...
...frightening a natural cataclysm as had befallen the young nation. Buildings tumbled and forests were destroyed. Giant fissures opened in the ground, accompanied by a thunderous roar and a spreading sulfurous odor. Wrote one eyewitness: "The whole land was moved and waved like waves of the sea." The usually placid Mississippi became an angry torrent of whirlpools and rapids, overflowing its banks and possibly even briefly reversing course...
...Miller. Charles Harrison, 31, a scholarly-looking accountant, says that the religious and racial rhetoric at the festival left him cold. But he adds that he and eight other families have bought a farm 150 miles from his St. Louis home, and plan to hole up there after the cataclysm. Says he: "One reason I'm here is to make contacts, build a network of people in Missouri who have a particular skill or some tools so we can barter with them when the money system collapses...
...frequently said, and he was right. But whatever his intellectual insecurities, Hayes was confident that he was receiving life's message loud and clear. Rectitude, he was certain, lay in Midwestern values, rock-ribbed Republicanism and college football. Just as surely, permissiveness led to social cataclysm, liberalism to national weakness. He built his personal philosophy on the lessons of war and football, and he saw numerous parallels between the two. His heroes were Abraham Lincoln, Ralph Waldo Emerson and, naturally, General George Patton. "This whole country," the coach liked to say, "has been built on one thing-winning...
...paperbacks on obscure Eastern cults, Cuisinarts, bud vases, I.U.D.s and LeRoy Neiman prints, jumbled with the bones of producers and promoters. Archaeologists even found the calcified remains of a Lhasa Apso, pathetically clutching in its teeth the rawhide doggie pacifier it had tried to keep while vainly fleeing the cataclysm: mute testimony to the suddenness with which nature had rebuked (but for future museumgoers, preserved) the frail pretensions of human culture. How like us-or so the visitor to the resurrected city, preserved in a giant tank at Sea World, might reflect-the Malibuvians were! How familiar their appetites...