Word: nesses
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...WALKED A DIFFICULT beat, one that lies at the heart of American ambivalence. Largely through historic accident, the agency acquired responsibility for regulating three of the nation's most popular yet dangerous products: booze, cigarettes and guns. Its forebears include the "revenuers" who hunted moonshiners and enforced Prohibition. Eliot Ness remains the bureau's chief institutional hero. Today large framed posters from the 1987 movie The Untouchables hang in many ATF offices...
Still, the politically correct cliches at the heart of the piece are a crippling obstacle. They aren't even consistent. For if Mike, the much maligned cop (Michael Ness), is a repressed homosexual who finally realizes his true nature in the quake's aftermath, shouldn't that make him a Good Guy? Is David (Jesse Means II), the priapic minister, really a symbol of black male virility or a sexual predator? Is Dewain (Harold Perrineau Jr.), the gang leader who is arrested for stealing two bottles of beer, an avatar of resistance or merely a common thief...
...waited in lines at the department of motor vehicles; why are some of us so eager to ignore experience and ascribe to government a kind of Herculean can-do-ness? Here's one theory: if you're squeaking by on the minimum wage, it's probably more satisfying to focus your resentments on a coven of fbi Trilateralists than it is to curse abstractions like economic restructuring or low Filipino wages (no one's much interested in divining corporate conspiracies...
...optimism that is a couterpart to the first side's confusion and depression. Interspersed between naive lines like, "With the power of soul, anything is possible," Hendrix' sincere guitar seems to be screaming, "Believe! Believe!" One line from "Power to Love" seems to summarize the sense of blissful stoned-ness coupled with agonized consciousness that characterized Hendrix' artistic quest. After some psychedelic nonsense about a jellyfish, Hendrix suddenly shines with one of his frequent moments of poetic lucidity...
...their part, the CIA and other U.S. agencies are slowly discovering that the Internet can be a valuable source of intelligence. "Open-ness has come," says Robert Steele, a former intelligence officer who heads Open Source Solutions Inc. in Oakton, Virginia. He estimates that "40% of the total intelligence product that goes to the President comes from public sources," such as cnn, unclassified foreign- government documents and business reports. The Russian government, which once classified crop yields and factory output as state secrets, now routinely publishes those figures on the Internet to entice Western investors. Resistance groups in countries like...