Word: civics
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...Last week in Tokyo, Honda and Mitsubishi simultaneously said they have developed engines that can increase mileage up to 20% without cutting performance. Honda's VTEC-E engine, which the company says can get up to 65 m.p.g. on the highway without sacrificing power, will be offered in the Civic Hatchback VX, which makes its U.S. debut later this year. The new engine, which will eventually be available in all Honda models, is likely to be slightly more expensive...
Zealotry of either kind -- the puritan's need to regiment others or the victim's passion for blaming everyone except himself -- tends to produce a depressing civic stupidity. Each trait has about it the immobility of addiction. Victims become addicted to being victims: they derive identity, innocence and a kind of devious power from sheer, defaulting helplessness. On the other side, the candlesnuffers of behavioral and political correctness enact their paradox, accomplishing intolerance in the name of tolerance, regimentation in the name of betterment...
Though people on both sides deplore them, these annual summer brawls over Supreme Court nominees can be valuable exercises in civic education. The Robert Borkathon of 1987 forced millions of Americans to think about the role of a constitution in a democracy: the proper way to interpret 200-year-old phrases, the conflict between majority rule and individual freedom...
...controversies he relishes, but he remains a remote man and a bit of a ditherer. It is Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, 90, her daughter, Queen Elizabeth II, 65, and Diana who dominate this unlikely and quizzical institution and are capable of making it seem as much a part of civic life as the post office...
...would be just 30 years ago that Nathan Glazer and I finished Beyond the Melting Pot: The Negroes, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, and Irish of New York City. There were then two dominant expectations about ethnicity in America. The 'liberal expectancy' suggested a fading of differences into a common civic culture. The Marxist expectation was that class would obliterate background distinctions of every kind. Glazer and I argued that ethnic attachments would grow more, not less, pronounced. It may help to know that the present tumult was anticipated. It may also help to know -- and teach -- how much the cast...