Word: moralizes
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...parsimony means miserliness, but the qualities are exactly the same. A dogged middle-classedness; a passion for education; a faith in individual enterprise; a near hysterical sense of family; a driving impulse toward nationalism and security; a belief in individual rights and expression, in reason, in the rule of moral law; a lust for self-celebration; a boisterous embracing of life, underlain by a fearful morbidity; a sentimentality grounded in iron. Of such things is America made, and so are Jews. Above all, Jewish and American tradition delight in looking at oneself critically. If there are any tribes in history...
America does not always have such a hot record when it comes to dealing with foreign governments of which, on moral grounds, it should loudly disapprove. The rationale is familiar: at least they're our sons of bitches. Israel has never been in that category. It is a nation that America should and does applaud, making any moments of dissatisfaction exceptions that prove the rule. Half a world away lives a remarkable civilization born of a moral issue, suffused with moral questions, most of whose people know perfectly well when their government is right and when it is wrong...
...populism can keep itself in motion without the prods of rancor. Even the villains of his moral fables -- the barracudas who devour little fish of all sorts ("barracudas swim very deep, where it's very dark; they can't even tell whether they are swallowing white fish or black fish") -- are not so much evil in their own waters, but mainly when they swim back at us from Taiwan. GE is attacked for selling goods made overseas with jobs the company took from America in the first place. Jackson's solution is to keep GE at home with a combination...
...cool and thoughtful calibration. His passions are more intellectual than ideological: he is more comfortable dealing with the abstractions and technicalities of arms control or the greenhouse effect than he is leading ideological battles. Whereas the father often demonstrated a kind of moderate rage on moral issues, the son describes himself as a "raging moderate." The oxymoron is appropriate, because Al Gore is a mixture of opposite, sometimes contradictory elements...
...love with a show called Gilligan's Island, I'll turn the Tanners' backyard into a lagoon. If I don't like the President's policy on nuclear arms, I'll phone him on Air Force One and explain how we incinerated Melmac. Still the same old me: no moral compass, no sense of proportion, no fear. I still break things a lot too. I learned the hard way that you can't smoke fish in a toaster, puree a rock in a blender or light an oven an hour after you turn on the gas. I even accidentally scared...