Word: habits
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Reagan letter, according to one State Department official, "will keep the Soviets guessing about what our real bottom line is." Some in the Administration are pleased with this strategy. They say it is a healthy change. The U.S. had grown too much into the habit during the '70s of making the first move, then adjusting and compromising to accommodate Soviet recalcitrance. They are glad to see the tables turned, with the Soviets saying "please" and the U.S. saying "no, thank you" for a change...
...makes offensive an enterprise that so accentuates the positive. We have tried in our stories to point out that much remains to be done for the U.S. to fulfill its promise to all its citizens, and to avoid what Senior Writer Lance Morrow in this issue calls the "manic habit" Americans have "of thinking they are either the best of peoples or the worst of peoples...
...television appears to reflect marvelous diversity, it in fact fosters uniformity. Varieties of American speech, fashions and opinions are modified toward sameness by the examples of what millions of Americans watch. It also seems to me that television achieves part of its power by appealing to human weaknesses. The habit of viewing it does not encourage reflection or contemplation. The eye is trained to crave novelty, while the brain rests or slumbers. Political debate, which during my last visit seemed a passion and a recreation among Americans, has shrunk to brief bursts of pleasant images. And television's ascent...
...charity events like Live Aid could help get the young into the habit of giving. But organizers are already worrying about "compassion fatigue." Pop charity may turn out to be one more passing fad. At the upper end of the economic scale, some wonder if charity is in danger of succumbing to chic. New York Financier Felix Rohatyn, who along with his wife Elizabeth has launched a small crusade against events that concentrate more on social glamour than helping worthy causes, is concerned that the pet charities of the New York rich, the favored museums and cultural institutions and hospitals...
...perfectly American to run between extremes of self-loathing and self- congratulation. Americans have a manic habit of thinking that they are either the best of peoples or the worst of peoples. This may result from the fact that Americans tend, still, to hold a Ptolemaic rather than a Copernican view of their place in the universe. Whatever America is, best or worst, it is at the center of things. At the moment, after the long self-lacerations of Viet Nam, Watergate and the rest, Americans in the Reagan era seem in the mood for assertive self-celebration...