Word: habited
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...nature as well as by habit, the Soviet system has always run on fear and force. Gorbachev is now telling both rulers and ruled that it runs badly. But to make the system run well, is Gorbachev willing to lead his comrades toward a future in which command and intimidation are replaced by consent and competition? If he tries, will they follow? If they do, will the resulting society still be the Soviet Union? To judge from the resistance that Gorbachev talks about openly, quite a few of his fellow citizens are worried not so much about ideological purity...
Foreigners are sometimes bemused -- and appalled -- by the American habit of putting on spectacular show trials of the Watergate kind. Is America a sort of regicide society, a nation with a compulsion periodically to tear out the wiring of its own Government? One had thought Reagan would be the first President since Eisenhower to retire happily after two terms...
...Like Carter, he deadpanned, he discusses issues with his children. Babbitt quoted his nine-year-old son as saying, "Dad, you've really got to do something about colorization of classic films." The father had to confess that Gephardt beat him to it -- a jab at his rival's habit of riding trendy issues...
What sort of aesthetic air did Americans in 1787 breathe? A lot thinner than we probably think. Because the relics of the late 18th and early 19th centuries are preserved in museums, we fall into the habit of thinking of the past as a museum, dense with artifacts, Chippendale and Copley everywhere, a colonial Williamsburg stretching from tidewater Virginia to the Long Wharf in Boston. Of course, neither life nor art was like that. To understand the culture of early republican America, one has to begin with a tiny society scattered along the eastern side of a continent no European...
...tired, sir, but you've accomplished a great deal more than any President since Mr. Lincoln, and even he didn't acquire an empire for us, which you have done." Roosevelt, by contrast, is the "fat little President," a bellicose figure of fun with a falsetto voice, a habit of clicking his "tombstone teeth" and laughing like a "frenzied watchdog." These denigrations largely fall flat. In Burr, Vidal turned a villain into a hero, suggesting that another truth could be found on the dark side of legend; here the issue of Roosevelt's buffoonery hardly matters, since he is portrayed...