Word: paranoias
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Parallel with the story is a secondary plot that focuses on Stalin and his actions. Rybakov, relying on both fact and imagination, attempts to enter Stalin's mind and to understand the process of cunning and paranoia that led him to terrorize an entire nation. In lengthy internal soliloquies that some ^ readers of the manuscript have found deeply disturbing, Stalin coldly ruminates on what Rybakov calls the "technology of power." At one point the tyrant says, "A state apparatus that is a reliable executor of the supreme will must be kept in a state of fear. That fear will then...
...hope. "If these results turn out to be valid and replicable, this would be a major advance," says Neuroscientist William Freed of the National Institute of Mental Health. Current treatments for Parkinson's are far from ideal. Levodopa, which is chemically related to dopamine, can cause irregular heartbeats, paranoia and depression, and ceases to be effective after prolonged use. Freed and others are eager to see if the new technique will work in older patients (most Parkinson's victims are over 50), and if its benefits will last. If so, says Freed, "the procedure could eventually have implications for treating...
This kind of caustic paranoia provides the atmosphere of Pete Davies' The Last Election, in which the government is subsidizing national death and decay. What's really frightening about Davies' 1980s 1984 is that there's no inconceivable, highly organized superplot behind the government funded oppression. His 1984 is formed merely of little pieces of filth from our own culture twisted to their most dangerous extremes...
...have Americans allowed themselves to be subjected to this mass paranoia? Frankly, I don't know. I tuned out of domestic politics after Watergate, thinking the worst was over. It turns out it had just begun. The radicals of the '60s, instead of toppling the establishment, just entrenched...
...point is that Stephen King is an Authentic American Writer. He taps into America as deeply as Elvis Presley did. But where Elvis embodied rollicking good-times sexuality, King sinks his literary teeth into all the insecurity and paranoia of growing up in a world of high school dances and Watergate. Elvis was pop culture; King is its brooding observer: the wallflower with a rapacious imagination. They are different products of the same world--and that same ferocious popular energy has shredded King the way it did Elvis, who sagged into the same commercial black hole Stephen King is edging...