Word: pretended
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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What if the spirit doesn't hit? We can't afford to wait if we want to survive. While we are waiting for this sea change of attitude, we could pretend -- a notion that sounds more whimsical than it is. Scientists have found that certain actions have a feedback effect on the actor. Smilers actually feel happier; debaters become enamored of their own arguments; a good salesman sells himself first. You become what you pretend to be. We can pretend to be unselfish and connected to the earth. We can pretend that 30- ft.-long, black-tinted-glass, air-conditioned...
...side of the street to the other. "You see that?" he says. "That's what it is all about. Is the street really clean? Of course not. But she is making it look clean, right? That's the important thing in China. Everything here is appearance. Everything here is pretend...
...silence? Not baseball players. (Ask Kirk Gibson about his World Series home run.) Not basketball players. (Nobody shut up for Rumeal Robinson's Final Four-winning foul shots.) Not football players (Although the NFL now penalizes crowds that reach three-digit decibel levels, as well as quarterbacks who pretend they can't call signals when the decibel level is only 99.) What's that? No, golfers aren't really athletes. Just look at Craig "The Walrus" Stadler...
...imagine drug gangsters murdering both Attorney General Dick Thornburgh and his predecessor, Edwin Meese. Next, pretend that drug triggermen and guerrilla allies rub out almost half the Supreme Court -- say, Justices William Brennan, Byron White, Antonin Scalia and Sandra Day O'Connor -- along with hundreds of lower-ranking but still prominent jurists. Expand the list of victims to include Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and Los Angeles police chief Daryl Gates, both slain, and Amy Carter, kidnaped and held briefly as a warning to authorities who might get tough with the narco-barons. And then the grand climax...
Hypothesizing about what might have happened if the situation were different really is irrelevant. It is naive to think that race and sex and anything else just should not matter. It is artificial and destructive to pretend that they can be ignored...