Word: dictums
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...George Bush and Dan Rather. The two hurled angry clumps of words, and their clumps broke and powdered against each other's gleaming indignation. Not a molecule of coherent information emerged from the encounter -- except the encounter itself. The medium is the message, in Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum. Bush afterward compared the exchange to combat, but if so, it was the combat of Saturday morning cartoons: Bang! -- Poof! Boom! -- Poof! Language disintegrated on impact. When Bush slugged Rather with the line about Rather's once walking off the set of the CBS Evening News, the anchorman looked...
...History, in Karl Marx's famed dictum, happens twice: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Haitians experienced tragedy in November when soldiers and thugs murdered some 50 people and halted the country's first free presidential elections in 30 years. When the polls opened again last week, the result was closer to farce. The country's four leading populist candidates refused to run, and less than 10% of Haiti's 3 million voters turned out for the election, which was held amid a boycott called by opposition leaders. Election officials examined each vote before dropping...
...while quoting Montesquieu's dictum that a "rational army would run away," Keegan has undertaken a kind of sequel that shrewdly explores the various ways in which a gifted commander can not only steel men for battle but lead them to victory as well. Once again he has chosen a few avatars to illustrate an evolution in leadership...
Megamillionaire Simon says he is simply following Horace Greeley's famous dictum by going west with his money. He has taken some high-powered talent with him in the investment partnership known as WSGP International. The head of WSGP's thrift unit is Preston Martin, a former vice chairman of the Federal Reserve Board and onetime chairman of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board. Gerald Parsky, a Los Angeles lawyer who served as Assistant Treasury Secretary under Simon, is his old boss's general partner and contributes his initials to the company's anagrammatic name. A select group of international...
...policy. Many rivals, particularly among the 50 major insurance firms, have since begun testing anyone seeking a high-value individual life policy. But those measures are less sweeping than they seem: some 85% of U.S. insurance policies are provided through group plans, which are usually unaffected by the testing dictum. Even where tests have been applied, the results so far have been minor. Transamerica received 168,000 insurance applications between January 1986 and June of this year, and rejected only 82 on the basis of suspected or diagnosed cases of AIDS...