Word: inwards
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...classic. The author's theme is Tocqueville's: the national character formed in a state of fragile liberty by government, commerce, the press and the huge continent itself. Tocqueville found an exuberant nation, at times irritating in its self-satisfaction and its brassy patriotism. Reeves found resignation, inward-turning and irritability, although the social system he saw was in fact working far more efficiently than Tocqueville would have predicted...
...face two choices. They can keep making outlandish appropriations for defense and engaging in global adventures, or they can face up to their internal problems, turning away from military expansionism toward reform of the domestic system. Russia has experienced throughout its history periods when the government had to turn inward to cope with its problems. The idea that the greatness of the country was achieved not on foreign battlefields but by building the society from within has fresh proponents today. But if Brezhnev's successors let the impetus of expansionism carry them forward rather than take the path...
...there is no bomb. Armored personnel carriers, called "pigs" by the children, poke their snouts around corners and lurch out to create sudden roadblocks. The Andersonstown police station, like a fly draped in a web, is barely visible behind what looks like a baseball backstop. The fence is slanted inward at the top, to fend off any rockets...
...meetings. At home, they prayed overtly before Buddhist and Shinto altars, but their real altar became the nan do garni (closet god), innocuous-looking bundles of cloth in which revered Christian statues and medallions were hidden. For 2½ centuries, their fierce faith endured, but it inevitably also turned inward. Because their prayers and rituals had to be transmitted secretly among illiterate peasants, they slowly became garbled. Over the years the words were repeated while the meaning was forgotten, though some prayers retained a discernible Latin antecedent: "Ame Maria karassa binno domisu terikobintsu . . ." obviously derives from "Ave Maria gratia plena...
...what goes on. Perhaps not even Bertolt Brecht, who knew the middle class hates to be reminded that its comfortable life is political, could make it interesting. It is a land characterized by the atmosphere of a San Clemente golf club locker room; golf is a worrier's game, inward, concentrated, a matter of inches, invented by the same people who gave us Presbyterianism. It is a land of Jack Daniels and Vietnamese maids, of luxurious home sprinkler systems, of helicopters which hover over the city to catch purse snatchers making their grabs on the main streets and then disappearing...