Word: heedless
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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ONCE IN A GREAT WHILE, A DEEPLY FELT NOTION SEEMS TO grip almost everyone at the same time. In 1991 Americans said, "Enough," and became sensible again. Out went heedless consumerism, the cult of the new, the expectations of Having It All. As the 1980s began to come into focus as a misguided era of borrowed luxury, Americans got back to basics. They cut down on spending, started to pay off their debts and learned to make do with less. It happened just in time. The recession, which at first seemed quick and painless, took a scary dive...
Others quickly follow. Mack's discreet little affair with his secretary (Mary-Louise Parker) threatens to become indiscreet. His best friend, a heedless movie producer (Steve Martin), is permanently crippled in a mugging. His wife Claire (the luminous Mary McDonnell) discovers an abandoned baby on her morning run and, afflicted by empty-nest malaise (their son is growing up), begins a campaign to adopt the foundling. An earthquake thunders through town, a neighbor dies suddenly, and overhead the police helicopters endlessly circle, their probing searchlights constant reminders of disorder and imminent sorrow...
That will be the painful consequence of the heedless and high-flying '80s. "We live in the box we've got ourselves in," says Lyle Gramley, chief economist for the Mortgage Bankers Association of America and a former Fed governor. "We are paying the price for what we did in the past with this enormous federal deficit. The price goes beyond the poor functioning of the economy now. Here we are, this great, wealthy, affluent nation, and we cannot afford to rebuild our highways or bridges. We cannot afford to have a really serious war on drugs. We cannot afford...
...Rose and baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti -- the former Yale University president who banished Rose from baseball in 1989 and then died suddenly little more than a week later -- never quite works. The irony is too heavyhanded, the juxtapositions too stark, the character of Rose too pathetic in his heedless self-destruction. Oddly enough, it is Giamatti, the exuberant intellectual fleeing Yale for the greener pastures of baseball, who dominates the book, as Reston paints a complex portrait of a flawed but fascinating administrator a bit too taken with his own public image. Still, Reston indulges in too much quotation...
There is something irredeemably sad about a world so fearful of food, and so heedless of flavor, that the proverb will soon read, "You can't make an omelet without pouring some pasteurized eggs...