Word: lessing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Lesser Seattle, an antibooster organization that seeks to "keep the bastards out" by exaggerating the city's negative characteristics, such as its notorious rainfall. The organization's slogan: "Have a Nice Day -- Somewhere Else!" Watson insists that his crusade is tongue in cheek, but many newly arrived Californians take less satirical slurs to heart. "Our very first day the Welcome Wagon lady called on us and told us that people here think Californians fail to recycle, pollute the air, ruin natural resources, litter, and bring smog, congestion and overgrowth," a transplanted housewife recalls. "Some welcome...
...seeing the future of the TV talk show, and it is, well, funky. The Arsenio Hall Show, a weeknightly joyride on 167 stations nationwide, is less a talk show than a televised party: hip, hyperkinetic and hot. The host can't sit still, and the crowd can't get enough of him. At any moment, Hall might race into the studio audience in response to a shouting fan, or sidle over to his five-piece house band ("my posse") for some impromptu jamming. Meanwhile, as late-night's first successful black talk host, he has turned his guest couch into...
BESIDE HERSELF. If you were an off-Broadway producer who had hired movie star William Hurt, would you cast him as a crude, subliterate UPS deliveryman who has little to do, and less to say, in a fantasy piece centered on a pathetic and prematurely old widow? If so, you would disappoint audiences as keenly as New York City's Circle Repertory is doing...
...dialogue is an S.J. Perelmanesque stream -- debased, obfuscatory and unconsciously self- condemning. Samples: "I wonder if I might ask the Senator to stop raking over dead horses"; "What did the President know, and does he have any idea that he knew it?" The lesson of recent scandals is both less and more alarming. If the bums are not thrown out, it is because an overly forgiving, or morally inert, American people allows them to stay...
Even the Soviet Union, perhaps the most obsessed of all by historical security considerations, has fewer options than it used to in dealing with reunification. But the Soviet leader may be less worried about losing East Germany as an ally than anyone thinks if, in giving it up, he manages to pry the U.S. out of Europe. Ever since Stalin, the U.S.S.R. has aimed at the domination of Europe and the maintenance of a security zone around the Soviet heartland. For most of the postwar period, the Soviets pursued those goals by raw military power and ideological control. Both have...