Word: jerks
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...have succumbed to the same shortsightedness, triviality and impossible hypotheses that make calorie counters, exercise manuals and sex menus only marginally worthwhile. As he prescribes proper habits for today's would-be centenarians, Georgakas vigorously attacks America's carcinogenic and achievement-oriented society. That society's herky-jerk lifestyle, Georgakas argues, prevents people from attaining the relaxed routines that characterize his beloved oldsters...
...laws since 1970. The new laws, enacted to placate a public demanding tough sentences, often make little distinction among crimes; for example, judges are forced to lock up shoplifters and forgers along with murderers and armed robbers. Contends Norman Carlson, director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons: "The knee-jerk response of many legislators in passing harsher sentencing statutes threatens to overwhelm our corrections system...
John's characteristic reaction to recognition for all this is evasive, self-effacing and joking. The soft-spoken Religion concentrator calls the Ames Prize, for which he was nominated this year, "a reward for drowning do-gooders." His good works, however, spring not from a knee-jerk urgency but a deeply spiritual and thoughtful analysis...
...P.C.F. was almost destroyed in 1939 following its knee-jerk endorsement of the Hitler-Stalin nonaggression pact. The German invasion of the Soviet Union in 1941 quickly changed that, and many Communists, like 1969 Presidential Candidate Jacques Duclos, were a key force in the French Resistance. The party was thus strong enough to earn a place in Charles de Gaulle's first postwar Cabinet-the first and only time that the P.C.F. has taken part in the French government...
...still the goony kid from the '50s, talking while eating a doughnut, parading in drag, leading a children's crusade through a Florida shopping mall. Hardly Working has grossed $10 million at the box office, in part because parents are taking tots to see "the original Jerk." They find themselves attending not a revival but a requiem...