Word: notionalism
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...rhetorical emptiness at its most pristine. Why does Hart do it? It's not as if he has nothing to say. He has a host of important ideas. Whether or not they are new is irrelevant. A good idea is a good idea: military reform, national service, a notion of sacrificial patriotism, as opposed to the superficial I-Love-Miss-Liberty kind now in vogue. (Though, unfortunately, even here Hart cannot resist defining patriotism as "more than slogans celebrating past achievements. It's an opportunity to draw a blueprint for our future...
Still, even an empty notion can be pressed into political service. A liberal talking about the future is perhaps trying to distinguish himself from old-line, constituency-centered liberalism, what Kevin Phillips contemptuously calls "reactionary liberalism." That might have served some purpose in 1984. But what is the point now? Carter and Mondale are no more. Kennedy is gone, and even he supports Gramm-Rudman. We are all--Biden, Bradley, Babbitt, Gephardt and Robb--neoliberals now. There are no paleoliberals left, unless Mario Cuomo's principled disinclination to issue ostentatious rejections of the "past" tempts some to make the charge...
...meant to be shared and, until now, the Bears have embodied most of them. No outsider is as wary of freezing conditions as a Chicagoan is proprietary of frostbite. Any Sunbelt slur is returned with a blast of icy superiority. "Bear weather," they call it. A Midwesterner's notion of comfort is plainly more profound than climate, and it is his wisdom that few towns are as provincial as the ones that fancy themselves cosmopolitan. Chicago has no problem with newspaper headlines as dispassionate as GO BEARS...
...Sportswriter is an appreciation of the mystery of things as they are, a somewhat subversive notion because the book's action takes place over a long Easter weekend. By design or coincidence, there are 13 chapters plus a section called "The End," suggesting an ironic play on the 14 Stations of the Cross. The first chapter is a stunner. At dawn on a Good Friday in the Princeton-like community of Haddam, N.J., Bascombe and X meet at Ralph's grave to mark the boy's birthday. They talk more honestly than they ever could as husband and wife...
...outlines of a miniature continent. The newest of America's 14 aircraft carriers, the 1,092-ft-long Carl Vinson, is the most powerful and expensive conventional weapon of war ever built. It is a symbol of the Reagan Administration's new globalism, in which the 19th century notion of gunboat diplomacy has been transformed into one of aircraft-carrier diplomacy. It is the pre-eminent weapon of an age in which America can no longer depend automatically on its 40-year-old system of alliances to project its power overseas. And it is at the heart of a heated...