Word: graspings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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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...
...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...
...kind of official blessing to it: old Bernini patting heads in the studio. "We stand at an enormous watershed," he remarked. "We stand at a place where maybe we haven't stood for 50 years, and that is a shift in sensibility so revolutionary that it is hard to grasp because we are right in the middle of it. It is the watershed between what we have all been brought up with as the Modern, and something new, uncharted, uncertain and absolutely delightful." But to understand the newness of this terrain one must first grasp the culture out of which...
...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...
...their guardedly complementary roles, Hua and Teng have so far managed to bridge the chasm between the sanctified but turbulent Maoist past and the future. Hua, who owes his career to Mao and honors his memory, pronounces, "Politics is the commander, the soul of everything, and failure to grasp political and ideological work will not do." During a conference not long ago, when Hua expounded Mao's philosophy, Teng retorted, "There are those who, day in and day out, talk of nothing but Mao Tse-tung's thought while failing to grasp even its most fundamental elements: practical experience...