Word: cogito
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...would lead to car pooling and increased use of rails and other mass transit. The tax would cut down on the Sunday joyride, the midnight trip to the corner drugstore to get a pack of cigarettes, the national restlessness that led one observer to update Descartes's Cogito, ergo sum for America: "I move, therefore I'm alive." And the tax would be effective. The Federal Energy Administration reckons that every penny of such a surcharge would reduce gasoline consumption by 25,000 bbl. a day. The highest tax considered-30? a gallon-would save...
Goldfein's comedy manages the odd trick of being broad and donnish at the same time. He does Hegel with a sauerbraten accent: "Veil, now, vot ve got here? Ve got, for shtarters, ve got Descartes. Him and his Cogito, ergo sum ... Dot's an insight?" Not every one of these brief sketches works. But the author does a fine turn on the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, and he perceives, in an epiphany whose correctness is apparent, that Economist John Maynard Keynes wrote not only The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, but also The Myth of Sisyphus...