Word: frontier
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...reaction to the spreading fear, Americans are arming themselves with guns as though they still lived in frontier days. "It's the Matt Dillon syndrome," says Jack Wright Jr., a criminologist at Loyola University in New Orleans. "People believe the police can't protect them." They are buying guard dogs and supplies of Mace. Locksmiths and burglar-alarm businesses are flourishing, as are classes in karate and target shooting. Banks have long waiting lists for vacated safety-deposit boxes. Many city sidewalks are a muggers' mecca at night; the elderly dread walking anywhere, even in broadest daylight. The fear...
DIED. Ray Allen Billington, 77, historian who chronicled the westward movement of the American frontier in such scholarly but vivid books as Westward Expansion: A History of the American Frontier (1949) and this year's Land of Savagery, Land of Promise; of a heart attack; in San Marino, Calif. Billington taught from 1944 to 1963 at Northwestern University, where he showed generations of undergraduates the way West in a course known as Cowboys and Indians...
...dismiss the advantages of a parliamentary form of government for the U.S. as going "one step too far." Our system of checks and balances, designed by a frontier community at a time of deep distrust of both royal executive prerogatives and the tyranny of the masses, has become an anachronism. This generation has witnessed the debilitating spectacle of a President trying to operate with a Congress controlled by the opposition. Will it take a political Mount St. Helens to blast us into recognizing the need for a more effective way of governing ourselves...
...twisted wreckage of rusty train cars signals the approach to the Sinai capital of El Arish. After twelve years of Israeli occupation, the town reverted to Egypt in May 1979. Many of the local people speak both Hebrew and Arabic and merchants hawk Israeli goods. At the frontier, travelers are greeted by a sign bearing the word PEACE. Passports are checked and at a makeshift customs depot bags are briskly inspected before a short bus ride across a no-man's land to the Israeli side...
...nation interprets itself is changing. Many believe that some time around the beginning of the New Frontier, the power of explaining America to Americans fell to a liberal, sometimes radical "new class"-academics, elitists, journalists -which, although accurate up to a point, somehow got the story wrong or told it from a vantage point of supercilious and frequently privileged hostility. "We have met the enemy and he is us," they wrote, quoting Pogo. Americans developed a moral inferiority complex of historic proportions: where once they hubristically viewed themselves as the world's best, many came to see America...