Word: inertia
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...lend her the capital she needs to open up a tea shop and "get back on the map," Zindel would like to brand Darwinian America as the villain, but in spite of himself all the dramatic evidence points to Beatrice herself. She pits a tough exterior against ghetto inertia, but Zindel is noncommital about the reasons for her vulnerability. She does deserve some sympathy, but his drooling pathos has taken the bite out of Beatrice's stiff upper lip and made it soggy...
Slowly, However, we do gain compassion. The Daniel who narrates the book is a married Columbia graduate student, guilt-ridden, sick of his bourgeois complacency; his tensions surface in offbeat sexual acts and professional inertia. His sister feels she keeps the political flame of the Isaacsons alive by participating in Radcliffe radicalism; she acts with confident reflex, but she lacks a real family and when her brother and certain radical friends do not co-operate to form a revolutionary foundation with an Isaacson trust fund, she begins to crack. Her attempt at suicide in a Howard Johnson's wash room...
...only to discover that nothing happened. Insulated by layers of officialdom and protected by an almost biological instinct for self-perpetuation, the bureaucratic organism stubbornly resists change. But the votes indicating his huge re-election landslide were barely counted when Richard Nixon took a mighty swipe at this governmental inertia. He demanded that some 2,000 of his politically appointed men in sensitive spots throughout Washington submit their resignations. He would decide who should stay and who should...
...some Faculty members, the vote simply signalled a shift in arenas. After all, they feel, what are administrations for if not to find ways to circumvent a Faculty decision. Anyone who spent time trying to get the Faculty to action on the idea of the Department knows that inertia is on the side of those who have access to the Administration. The drop by drop wearing away of support for the Department and the "squandering of the creative drive" within the Department in its "dogged" survival efforts is essentially a bureaucratic phenomenon. On the whole it has not been successful...
...rather than its mere technocratic husk that are important and that have to be affirmed. If we look upon our Presidents as colorless managers and develop alternative systems for cultural regeneration, then I think we have ways of creating new institutions that aren't weighed down with institutional inertia. So the attempt to create a Club of Rome is useful, but it's such an imperial model. First it's a club, and it's also the idea of Rome again: the old Roman imperial model of the center of civilization sending its structures out into...