Word: hiccuping
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Thatcherism in England was called less a revolution than a hiccup, in a recent issue of the Times Literary Supplement. Will the same be said of Reaganism? Certainly Reagan's reputation, like Thatcher's, is in eclipse at the moment. But Reagan's decline may be an extreme reaction, prompted by this year's mysteriously sour mood. Ending the cold war has left Americans adrift. Anticommunism imposed an ordinating principle on the government's many scattered activities. Without that principle, the country seems disoriented. The nation's problems are evident, but Reagan's denigration of government (for all uses...
None of that is causing more than a hiccup here and there. There is no better example than the way France has shrugged off any doubts about the $110 billion nuclear program. Since 1977, the state-owned public utility has built 53 pressurized-water reactors to become the most densely seeded generator of nuclear power on earth. France has quintupled its production of electricity, cut its dependence on imported oil 40%, and made power so cheap that domestic rates are 20% to 30% below the European Community average...
...goes by the name of the Pine Grove Elementary School, a stark clapboard affair the size of a mobile home, some 40 miles of gravel road from Jordan, a hiccup of a town on the plains of eastern Montana. Pine Grove is one of 640 one-room public schoolhouses left in the U.S., a good example of a vanishing breed that occupies a hallowed place in American mythology. And the formula still works. Montana alone has more than 100 one-room schools in operation, and the state ranks third nationally in achievement tests...
This is an exaggeration, but not too far from the truth. Government has grown huge, and a presidential hiccup can still panic the stock market, but Washington has far less impact on the direction of America and the world than it did a generation...
...from Edward Steichen's famous gray-silhouetted photo of that structure, made almost three-quarters of a century before; Thinker begins with another moody Steichen photograph. But because the shape of the Flatiron Building is so close in value to its background, black on black, it induces a perceptual hiccup, like stepping off a step that is not there; for a moment you do not know whether you are looking at something abstract or not, and even when you have seen the building, the abstractness remains...