Word: earthly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...from nowhere the news leaps out and grabs one by the collar. (What is news? Do you people know nothing?) This year alone, a widowed housewife deposed a foxy tyrant, a stockholder took hold of a giant entertainment company, a space vehicle that was supposed to fly crashed to earth, a peace meeting between the world's two leaders that was supposed to fly crashed to earth, a disease took on the look of a plague, a nuclear power plant exploded, a country that keeps blacks and whites apart started coming apart...
Meanwhile, as static conquest of the air, the skyscraper multiplied the site, extruding a patch of earth into a stack of pure property: the abstract, universal sign of capitalism. The standardization of its floors invoked the image of the machine, like the use of bodies as mechanical parts in Busby Berkeley's choreography or the precisely drilled production-line kicks of the Rockettes. Its soaring shafts, tapering setbacks and elaborate stacking (for this was the age of Rockefeller Center, not of the banal glass box) hinted at vastly oversized Mayan temples; the contrast between glittering surface and deep wells...
...What on earth was half of the Reagan Administration, or what seemed like it, doing in Europe last week while Washington burned? There was Secretary of State George Shultz, arriving in London on the first leg of a five-day fence- mending trip. While in the British capital, he crossed paths with Attorney General Edwin Meese, who had come to urge a meeting of European Community interior ministers to stand tough against terrorism. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger had just been in Belgium shoring up U.S. arms-control positions with his NATO counterparts. And at week's end Shultz...
...addition, lasers in space could act with lightning speed, igniting 70-80 fires on the earth every second--and that is the capability of just one station. The Reagan Administration has suggested deploying 160 such stations, leading one of the researchers to conclude that, "all of the major cities of either superpower could be targeted for thermal attack by intense lasers with the potential for creating mass fires in all of these urban areas in a matter of hours...
With that I lowered myself to the ground and crawled chest to earth between the rows of strawberries, trying not to emit the sound that would send the fanged canines to do me in. I was too scared to visualize the surreal implications of my plight. Each foot was emotionally exhausting, each moment a frame from a real-life thriller. And all I wanted was fantasy: the mundane reality waiting at Cinderella's Castle...