Word: grasping
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Shortly after the U.S. announced its rapprochement with the People's Republic of China last December after nearly 30 years of bone-deep hostility, Secretary of State Cyrus Vance declared: "A new era is upon us." But the idea of "a new era" is a hard one to grasp, and despite acres of newsprint, miles of film footage and endless commentaries, nothing is likely to drive home the reality of it all more effectively than the tableau that is to unfold this week: a diminutive (barely 5 ft.), elderly (74 years) Chinese gentleman alighting from a white Boeing...
...unite with other countries against the Soviet Union. He said that Soviet activities around the Mediterranean littoral, in Africa and in Asia should cause concern to all nations. He derided the value of the proposed SALT II treaty between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. and demonstrated an acute historical grasp of East-West disarmament negotiations. Teng also rejected speculation about a "de-Maoification" campaign but, perhaps more notably, conceded that the Great Helmsman was not perfect...
American ineptness, the Shah also complains, applies not only to Iran but to the entire Middle East. In one conversation with Egyptian President Anwar Sadat at Aswan, the Shah spread out a series of maps to prove that "the Americans do not grasp the dimension of Soviet moves throughout the area." Later, addressing a joint session of the Egyptian and Sudanese parliaments in Khartoum, Sadat inserted a sword-rattling reference to Soviet "conspiracies in the dark" around the Horn of Africa. Aides said that Sadat had been prompted by the Shah's remarks...
...Americans paid for their goods and services by another $3 billion or so. Billions of this, trillions of that: it is beginning to sound as if the national currency were McDonald's hamburgers. More than all the other measurements of gloom, the one statistic that people can really grasp and feel is that the U.S. enters 1979 with prices almost exactly double what they were in 1967, the date that the government uses to mark the beginning of the inflationary spiral...
...last distinguished academic to pack so much brimstone in his scholarship was Lasch himself in Haven in a Heartless World: The Family Besieged (1977). The Culture of Narcissism shares that book's formidable intellectual grasp and the kind of moral conviction rarely found in contemporary value-neutral history and sociology. But the book also shares the early work's redundancy and disjointedness...