Word: existing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This book is irreverent, unfair and subversive. What more could anyone ask for? It begins with the 16th century geological musings of Martin Luther: "Longer ago than 6,000 years the world did not exist." It hurtles downhill from there toward outright insolence. Did Abraham Lincoln really say in 1859, "Negro equality! Fudge! How long . . . shall there continue knaves to vend, and fools to quip, so low a piece of demagogism as this"? Did the U.S. Labor Department truly announce that 1930 would be "a splendid employment year...
...mountaintops and mesas, down in valleys, out on beaches, back up in hollows, there is staged in America what goes by the name of outdoor drama. Historical works for the most part, family entertainment (young people playing good and brave and true Indians, loutish colonists, supercilious monarchs), they exist, in the hope of snagging tourists, in spots that afford a vista. The oldest of these productions is The Lost Colony, which was commenced in the summer of 1937 on Roanoke Island, a sandspit between Nags Head and the mainland of North Carolina. The director for the past 21 years...
...about 15%, ranging from oil production to banking to supermarkets and parking lots. Some 1.5 million bureaucrats now occupy 3,500 Mexico City buildings, and nothing seems to work very well. Four years ago, city officials proclaimed the establishment of block committees to express community needs, but those that exist serve mainly as organs of PRI patronage. About the only system that actually functions is amiguismo, roughly "friendshipness." Says Meyer: "When the water stops, our neighbor runs over to the waterworks and tells a friend, who sees to it that somebody turns on the right valve...
...meet just to show up. In Europe, appearance fees are openly paid. In the U.S., the money passes under the table, and officials of the various sports federations that rule on who is and who is not an amateur pretend that the practice does not exist...
...Citizens of the Soviet Union would think it bourgeois decadence to complain about such a trifle. The Soviets have turned waiting into a way of life. The numb wait is their negotiating style: a heavy, frozen, wordless impassivity designed to madden and exhaust the people across the table. To exist in the Soviet Union is to wait. Almost perversely, when Soviet shoppers see a line forming, they simply join it, assuming that some scarce item is about to be offered for sale. A study published by Pravda calculates that Soviet citizens waste 37 billion hours a year standing in line...