Word: present
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...present government, meanwhile, was wrestling with some rare but pressing decisions. Prime Minister Noboru Takeshita, for example, must choose a name for the next imperial era. All official documents except passports are now dated by the era Showa (Enlightened Peace), which began the day Hirohito became Emperor in 1926. Although some critics call the convention a remnant of the dead imperial past, they don't wish to end it, only transfer to the people responsibility for choosing the new name...
...back to Paris from his studies in Rome: The Bellelli Family, that marvelously observed group portrait of his neurotic aunt Laura, her lazy and distracted husband Gennaro and their two daughters. For though it is a tour de force of realist observation -- how much more concrete and present the Bellellis seem to us, surrounded by the furniture and other stuff of their lives, than the people on the neutral brown grounds Manet borrowed from Velazquez! -- it is also an allegory of family continuity under stress. The drawing on the wall behind Laura Bellelli is Degas's grandfather Hilaire...
...cannot fail to associate this with Degas's own working methods, the sense of filiation and descent that would breathe through his work for the rest of his life, the past feeding into the present and then out into the future. Degas, the synthesizer of Ingres and Delacroix, would point -- through the wild color fields and direct manual touch of his later years -- to a modernism that was not yet born...
...debt defaults. American banks have an exposure of close to $100 billion to Third World borrowers; a 50% loss in the market value of these debts, if it were to be officially acknowledged, would require nearly $50 billion of capital support, more than three times the size of the present FDIC fund. Existing loan-loss reserves would provide part of the capital, but not nearly enough to cover the exposure. Estimates on the ultimate cost of rescuing the S and Ls increase almost daily, with some experts predicting $50 billion to $70 billion as the possible charge to the taxpayers...
...South. Dukakis' electoral vote gap is becoming so serious that his newly energized campaign tactics may have little effect on the final numbers, barring a major Bush blunder. Now he must win nearly all the territory still up for grabs, plus some in which Bush leads, while protecting his present turf. Bush need add only one large state to the collection in which he is ahead...