Word: idealizations
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...Democratic nations should forge a consensus around the most powerful political ideal in the world today--the right of people to freely choose their government," she said...
Lawn is the curse of suburban man, his bizarre fetish, the great green god he sprays to. Lawn must be barbered to the satisfaction of one's neighbors, or it earns their dirty looks and, in some tightly strung communities, a summons from city hall. The ideal lawn is featureless, a living imitation of Astroturf. Striving to achieve it soaks up water, money and weekend goof-off time in fantastic quantities...
This was the ideal, anyway. But Big Science costs big bucks and breeds a more mundane and calculating kind of outlook. It takes hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to run a modern biological laboratory, with its electron microscopes, ultracentrifuges, amino-acid analyzers, Ph.D.s and technicians. The big bucks tend to go to big shots, like Baltimore, whose machines and underlings must grind out "results" in massive volume. In the past two decades, as federal funding for basic research has ebbed, the pressure to produce has risen to dangerous levels. At the same time, the worldly rewards of success...
...every societal ill imaginable has been laid at television's door. Some people blame TV for all of the problems with educating America's youth. They often hold up the Japanese system as the ideal. Of course, they neglect the fact that Japanese children watch more TV than American kids and that Japanese TV is often more inane than the American fare. Why engage in complex soul-searching to find the roots of the breakdown in American education when you can pin it on the TV bogeyman...
Working conditions are not ideal. The U.N.'s relief operations in Iraq are drastically underfunded; a plea to members for $578 million in start-up money for the region produced only $105 million. The organization must operate in a country that has been bombed back to a "preindustrial age," as a U.N. report described the situation. And the world body is caught between the conflicting demands of the allies and Iraq. "We're overwhelmed," says Staffan Bodemar, the chief of mission in Baghdad for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees...