Word: paranoid
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Ostensibly governmental checks and balances work to guard against the zealous efforts of paranoid cold warriors--however, in this case the system worked only by accident. Shared authority in government is rooted in the premise that the judgment of one branch of government--or balance--the views of another; such control is worthless if a given lunacy pervades all government organs...
...characteristic of Berger to endow some of his most unappealing characters with vitality and strength. Rev is a paranoid crank but the only person in the book to take heroic action. To keep matters consistently bizarre, Berger describes the codger's funeral through the eyes of Junior, the teen-age lout: "As he watched the bronze box being lowered into the grave he could not help thinking of that little ditty that went: Your eyes fall in/ Your teeth fall out/ The worms crawl over/ Your nose and mouth. Dying was a lousy thing, and he intended to avoid...
...becomes an apologist for the real Stalinists, the Communist Party USA. In fact, it is Anderson's own popular-front politics ("Just tell them what they want to hear") that are Stalinist, not to mention dangerous for all the struggles of the oppressed. If he didn't seem so paranoid that the Spartacist League "has got to be some right-wing front," perhaps he would be interested in discussing more important political differences...
Anderson cannot argue politics, so he is reduced to ridiculous slander, lies about "physical attacks on leftist rallies." The Spartacists are so "ultra-left," he says, that they must be under the control of the right. This sort of stuff is cheap and sensational. Anderson is either incredibly paranoid or just a plain liar. Dean Wareham...
What white voters, in cities like Chicago, who entertain racist phobia toward Afro-American candidates fail to recognize is that their paranoid style political preferences are not fixed habits for all white voters and can be checkmuted when Blacks are galvanized to turnout in larger numbers than whites. These conditions happily obtained in Chicago's April 12th mayoral election, gave Harold Washington a more than 42,000 vote edge over Republican Bernard Epton, out of more than 1,3 million votes cast. Upper middle-class and professional whites in the Lakefront wards kept their own racial feelings in check enough...