Word: heedlessly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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While leaders in other Muslim states (Saudi Arabia and Libya, for example) have moderated Western influences, the Shah embraced the West with (as it turned out) a heedless enthusiasm. He set up a secular state, destroying the classic and crucial unity in Islam between church and government. Under the Pahlavis, women were liberated from the traditional chador, permitted to vote and divorce their husbands. The Shah made the mistake of ignoring the mullahs (priests). The U.S., in turn, embraced him, and even had the CIA engineer a coup to restore him to power in 1953. Corruption, dislocations of life...
That's the sort of perverse passion that motivates Deborah Davis's Katherine the Great. While other authors have at least waited until their respective targets were safely settled in their graves before knocking them off their pedestals, Davis spares no such restraint in her heedless rush to profit from the "sins" of Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham. Forget the tales about Graham risking the family newspaper to take on the house that Nixon built. From Davis's perspective, Watergate stemmed not from the dictates of journalistic integrity but from the arrogance of a woman piqued by a presidential spurning...
...condemnation of oppression. Rather, Burger's Daughter is an intensely personal vision of political commitment--and its costs. Through the character of Rosa Burger we sense the emotional toll of living in a country with epic conflicts, a frontier where every action must be extreme: either gutless capitulation or heedless defiance. There is no middle ground in a country where there are still heroes...
Many of Pearson's methods wouldn't be tolerated today. He really went after people. He taught Anderson to look "first for those personal weaknesses ... to cher ish in an adversary: overweening vanity, bumbling pomposity, addiction to creature comforts, a tendency to alcoholic indiscretion, the heedless pursuit of venery." Opponents were destroyed not by reasoned argument but by a recital of their peccadilloes, endlessly repeated. When Ander son objected to such "scraps and chaff," his boss replied: "Once you catch one of these birds at anything, and you're sure of your facts, never worry about doing...
...distinctions between the people and their leaders are ultimately somewhat artificial. They are also recriminatory and divisive in any crisis that calls for the unity of shared sacrifice. Blame for heedless profligacy and bad planning should be addressed to corporate and Government leaders. But the responsibility is also shared by the larger population. Pogo's winsome cliché"We have met the enemy and he is us") is in full operation. Americans are not, after all, mere spectators in the drama of their own lives. They are, in historical terms, the most appallingly wasteful people who have ever lived...