Word: primal
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...first. Other than one of those dogs that has a skateboard in place of its hind legs, there is nothing sadder than seeing someone who peaks too early. It’s hard to believe now, but no one will remember if your penis looked big at your first Primal Scream. Everyone loves an underdog, and underdogs never start on top. This begs just one question: Is a skateboard-legs dog an “underdog?...
...package he designed is offering big tax cuts. No, the government won't have to borrow to pay for them. "Sure someone might be $50 better off per week, but at the end of the day we are trying to appeal to something more primal - to reach into the heart of people's beliefs and ideas...
...become invisible, to move through the world unseen: it is a primal, universal fantasy. Most people who indulge it probably imagine the advantages that H.G. Wells' The Invisible Man expected from it, "the mystery, the power, the freedom." But novelists, those eternal spoilsports, keep pointing out the fantasy's downside. Wells' protagonist eventually despaired of himself as a "helpless absurdity" before being hunted down and beaten to death. Now two contemporary writers, an artful veteran and a clever newcomer, offer variations on the theme that are hardly more optimistic. Their central characters, while not quite killed, lose virtually everything else...
...around keeping him away from unfriendly audiences. His campaign rallies were carefully screened and so are his policy events where he chews the fat about issues like Social Security. But that instinct surely can't be serving him well at a time when the country feels like a collective primal scream over seeing their countrymen left suffering...
...Foolish reactions are inevitable in moments of disaster. But in the primal enormity of the Gulf Coast tragedy, these two risible and annoying responses almost seemed to have a purpose. They were a reminder of our vestigial selves, of how humankind has rationalized catastrophe through most of its history. The whims of nature were either God's will or our fault. Happily, the two institutions that arose from these explanations-religion and government-proved to be civilizing impulses. Religion provided the moral basis for human interaction; government provided the forum for common action against external threats...