Word: ferment
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...Americans are wearying of inflation, regulation and budget busting. They realize that those three mighty forces have impeded investment and caused the nation to fall behind, and they may be ready to support the courageous political leader who will tackle the special interests headon. In times of such ferment, the public may well be prepared to accept fairly radical steps. Some possibilities...
This scientific smorgasbord may indicate great creative ferment, or simply confusion, a hedging of bets against what will turn out to be the hot therapy of the 1980s. Psychiatry seems sure of one thing: it does not want to move in the direction of the pseudo therapies, although it occasionally profits from them. Says Miami Psychiatrist Paul Daruna: "Some Pop therapies generate business by stirring people up, jostling them about so they eventually turn to individual therapy." Still, many psychiatrists already feel underemployed, because they often fill many of the same functions as psychiatric social workers, nurses and related professionals...
Overhanging all the ferment is the shadow of the Soviet Union, which has done little to promote the troubles but tries to capitalize on any chance to lessen U.S. influence. Said Kremlinologist Dimitri Simes: "I don't believe the Soviet Union has any grand design in this arc of instability, any master plan, any timetable. All those things belong to the imagination of some editorial writers and intelligence analysts." But Simes thinks that the Soviets are so eager to damage the U.S. that they will even act against some of their own national interests...
...long run there may even be targets of opportunity for the West created by ferment within the crescent. Islam is undoubtedly compatible with socialism, but it is inimical to atheistic Communism. The Soviet Union is already the world's fifth largest Muslim nation. By the year 2000, the huge Islamic populations in the border republics may outnumber Russia's now dominant Slavs. From Islamic democracies on Russia's southern tier, a zealous Koranic evangelism might sweep across the border into these politically repressed Soviet states, creating problems for the Kremlin...
...among the architects themselves there is an undeniable ferment, unlike anything in "classical" Modernist architecture. The receding tide of orthodoxy has left all manner of different organisms exposed on the reef. At one taxonomic extreme is California's Frank Gehry, 49. Gehry prefers materials-corrugated iron, chain-link fence, asbestos shingles, raw plywood-that allude to the commonplace substance of 1960s sculpture, and his formal interests frankly lie with what he calls "a fascination with incoherent and illogical systems, a questioning of orderliness and functionality." At the other