Word: paranoias
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...South Africa, though, the government's constituency consists in reality of a fraction of the population: South African whites. This constituency has no desire for change; in fact, its fear or reform borders on paranoia. More important still, whites in South Africa perceive the system of separation they have set up to be divinely ordained--the will of God. White South Africans are a deeply religious people: an overwhelming majority attend church regularly. And the notion of the separation of church and state is unknown. Religious--and hence ideological--beliefs are passed down in the schools...
...South African mess does exist. Power sharing with a gradual evolution toward majority rule would allow Blacks to learn the skills necessary to run a country and perhaps build up a modicum of trust between Blacks and whites that would ease the latter's paranoia. Realistically, though, such a change is simply not forthcoming. The situation is already too polarized to allow a meeting of interests on a common ground. And the West is left with the choice between two singularly unattractive policy options...
...band set-up is clearly the harsher of the two, as Epps paranoia for offensive segments has gone to ridiculous extremes. Although millions of theatergoers over the past 300 years have been exposed to the line in Shakespeare's Macbeth by the pricking of my thumbs," the dean felt the phrase too risqué for the football crowd. He asked the band to change the line, originally a direct quote in the Cornell script, to "by the twitching of my thumbs...
...said that it regarded the shooting down of KAL Flight 007 as an act the Soviets would never knowingly commit, that it was an unfortunate tragedy. This approach would have presented some chance of eliciting an apology and compensation. The line our Government took only fueled the Soviets' paranoia...
...truculence of the official Soviet response (Andrei Gromyko assured the world that the Soviet Union was quite prepared to shoot down the next violator of its airspace) led to a rounding up of the usual suspects: Soviet feelings of inferiority, hypersensitivity, paranoia, suspiciousness, what have you. These explanations do not satisfy. For what was so stunning about the Soviet reponse was its lack of feeling. What sent a chill through the world (as even more ruthless Soviet behavior like the invasion of Afghanistan had not) was the undertone of stony incomprehension in the Soviet response to pleas for some acknowledgment...