Word: productive
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...omission of a sweeping vision on the disinclinations of this particular batch of candidates, but the whole expectation of a national vision may be misplaced, as Charles Krauthammer suggested in a recent column, and it is worth considering why. Of use in certain industries is the phrase "mature product," customarily employed by a realist to deflate an optimist. The optimist will say that such-and-such commodity, although long on the market with a steady rate of buyers, still has a growth capacity in the millions. The realist will counter that the commodity is in fact a "mature product...
...America in 1988 a mature product? That is: Has it reached certain stations of progress to which dreamy visions are simply inapplicable? I am far from suggesting that the country has arrived at perfection, only that its most serious problems have attained stages of growth where no single comprehensive view may intelligently embrace them. Vision these days may be the modern equivalent of the prairie; it is what an empire looks for when it wishes to recall the thrill of expansion, and yet has no place to expand...
Even in terms of temperament, the country shows signs of becoming a more mature product. The tawdry antics of the TV evangelists last year helped to encourage the faithful to discriminate between superficial and serious religion. Movies such as Broadcast News urge the triumph of substance over shadow, as does the popular television series L.A. Law, which has recently turned its hand to social-action stories and away from money, its founding muse. Tom Wolfe, who has forged a career out of the superficialities of the times, now produces a novel about vanity, sensing that people may be ready...
...particularly the Marvin Kalb interviews, several of the candidates appear more capable now than they looked originally, but none seems about to play choirmaster to the nation, and by expecting too much of them we diminish our capacity to appreciate their true worth. If America is becoming a mature product, then it may be time for the mature idea that the possible is the desirable...
...object--i.e. man-made form, shaped, that is, through the predeliction of intrinsic motivation, internal, not external to that which can be termed 'the whole'--is, in my opinion--keeping in mind that `my', syntactically defined, is a product of the environment as all thought must of course first be intimated in a priori ontological social funtions--a darn good painting...