Word: crack-up
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...what the big numbers and the gaudy pageantry hide is how close the sport came to a total crack-up last year, and just how rickety it remains. At times over the past few years, Formula One has looked as ungovernable as California: big teams quit, and more threatened to do so; the financial industry canceled its lifeblood sponsorship almost en masse; track attendance is down; and scandals have tarnished everyone from a world champ to the former head of motor sport itself. Bernie Ecclestone, the septuagenarian who is usually described as F1's principal stakeholder (a description that doesn...
...there's little reason to worry. NASA told TIME on Sunday that the events seen and heard earlier in the day bore the hallmarks of a natural incident; debris from a satellite collision is generally too small to be seen. The satellites involved in last week's cosmic crack-up were relatively small machines. The Russian ship weighed 1,235 lbs.; the American ship was about a ton. Once that mass is broken up into smaller pieces, the atmosphere ought to do a pretty good job of incinerating it. Skylab did shower the Australian outback with wreckage during its reentry...
Still, the rise in borderline diagnoses may illustrate something about our particular historical moment. Culturally speaking, every age has its signature crack-up illness. In the 1950s, an era of postwar trauma, nuclear fear and the self-medicating three-martini lunch, it was anxiety. (In 1956, 1 in 50 Americans was regularly taking mood-numbing tranquilizers like Miltown - a chemical blunderbuss compared with today's sleep aids and antianxiety meds.) During the '60s and '70s, an age of suspicion and Watergate, schizophrenics of the One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest sort captured the imagination - mental patients as paranoid heroes...
...After the past few days, the pertinent question to ask is, is the crack-up happening already? Far-fetched as it would have seemed a month ago, the seeds of self-destruction are being planted in the war of coded words about race between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. The bickering has exploded in the space of a week into Topic A in the Democratic race, supplanting for the moment the war and the economy and health care - and shows no sign of a quick resolution...
This year's mortgage crack-up comes with a different story line. It was made not in Washington but in the strip-mall offices of mortgage brokers and on the trading floors of Wall Street. The general rule this time around has been that the farther away from the prying eyes of federal bank examiners a transaction occurs, the more likely it is to cause trouble...