Word: paranoid
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...with the Pope in Rome (not the least of the year's astonishments), Gorbachev said, "We need a revolution of the mind." The metaphysics of global power has changed. Markets are now more valuable than territory, information more powerful than military hardware. For many years, the Soviets lived in paranoid isolation, fearful of Western culture (an old Russian tradition) and estranged from it in somewhat the way that Ayatullah Khomeini's Iranians quarantined themselves from the secular poisons of the West. Peasant cultures shrink from foreign contamination...
...Though many top Soviets -- including Yeltsin -- dismiss this scenario, Central Committee members voiced fears of a coup to Marshall Goldman, a leading American Sovietologist, last summer. The coup menace is exacerbated by the growing strength of Russian ultra-nationalist organizations. Extremist groups like Pamyat have targeted Jews (a paranoid Jewish-Masonic conspiracy theory), "intellectuals" and "Russophobes" as scapegoats for national decline. The nationalists are at heart anti-Communist, but their appeal overlaps with a growing blue-collar nostalgia for the despotic simplicities of the Stalinist...
...then neurosis set in. I was once jubilant, but now I'm paranoid. "History is being made, so sit back and enjoy the ride," I want to think. But everybody is in such a good mood it makes me nervous. Every week I use this column to bitch about one thing or another; I'm not used to having something to cheer about. I keep expecting to find a dark cloud inside the silver lining...
Josh Preven plays Hoss, the paranoid lead. Hoss is a man near the top--afraid of those climbing up from behind and determined to unseat those above him. Preven is convincing and forceful as he handles lines that could all too easily have become overacted in the hands of someone less skilled...
...Note: Yale didn't have to really accept you for this ploy to work. Yalies are so paranoid they'll believe anything...