Word: dismalness
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This loud and largely dismal exercise represents the culmination of one direction contemporary American movies have taken. Despite the functional presence of actors, the cars are the true heroes. Romantic interludes are represented by automobiles pulling up alongside each other at midnight on a long stretch of highway. Car crashes must do double duty: they serve as both spectacle and comic relief. This film, as mechanical as a lube job, gives the distinct impression that it could have done without characters completely. A good thing that people are still required to get cars started and keep them on the road...
...fought triumph over Ronald Reagan, the President got some good news from the first polls taken after the Republican Convention in Kansas City. Gallup showed Ford trailing Jimmy Carter by only 39% to 49%; in July, after the Democratic revival meeting in Manhattan, Gallup had Ford behind by a dismal 29% to 62%. Opinion Research Corp. put Carter nine points up. TIME'S own poll gave Carter only a six-point edge...
...International Congress of the Transplantation Society, some of the loudest applause was given not to a physician but to a philosophy professor from Indianapolis. In 1959 the man, John Riteris, now in his early 40s, was stricken by severe kidney disease. Faced with the prospect of imminent death-or dismal years on a kidney machine-he agreed to what was then still a highly experimental treatment: replacement of his dying kidneys with one donated by his twin brother. Now, 17 years later, John Riteris is one of the longest survivors of what is a major unsung success story of contemporary...
More optimistic Republicans note the dismal shape that the Democrats were in following the defeat of McGovern and take comfort in the cyclical nature of American politics. After a drubbing the G.O.P. tends to rebound, as it did following Barry Goldwater's huge loss in 1964. Observes Teeter: "Every time the Republican Party takes a real shellacking, it bounces back. But it's like a rubber ball. It doesn't bounce as high as it did the time before...
...always disjointed by bureaucratic stupidity. The most frequently cited example is agriculture. It is true that the Soviet Union suffers from natural handicaps, including bad weather and arid soil. Even so, the basic problem is its communal farming system, which fails to provide the farmers with sufficient motivation. The dismal results are well known; Moscow must buy huge tonnages of grain from the profit-seeking farmers...