Word: prophet
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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After leaving office, Lamm abandoned politics to teach and write, returning to the stage for a brief and ignominious Senate race in 1992, in which he lost in the primary to Ben Nighthorse Campbell. Since then he has been a prophet with marginal honor in his own land, lecturing earnestly about the shame he feels at being part of the first generation that will not pay its own way. "We've got to stop bullshitting the public," he told TIME. "The economy of the '90s can't support the dreams...
...decade later, the prophet stands at the sixth-floor balcony outside his office at the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games (A.C.O.G.), surveying his sweltering promised land. To the north lie the new Olympic Village dorms and the aquatic center; right below him to the west is Centennial Olympic Park, swarming with scores of road-paving, tent-erecting workers frantically engaged in the last-second realization of his vision...
...horizon from the CNN Center-dominated southwest skyline up north past the big red Nike swoosh and into the northwest wasteland, that crumbling welter of faded-brick buildings and crack-vial sidewalks whose putative renewal could turn out to be these Games' most enduring local legacy. "This," the prophet says with unfathomable certitude, "is where it's all going to grow...
...thing to remember about Payne is that until a prophet proves himself, he pretty much comes off as a blowhard. An obscure real estate lawyer winning the Olympics for Atlanta? The city laughed--until he pulled it off. Build the largest urban park America has seen in decades, thereby changing Atlanta history? The city hasn't stopped laughing at that...
...sense, Payne obviates the distinction between prophet and blowhard, for a blowhard isn't necessarily wrong, and most prophets are willing to cut corners in the service of their vision's greater glory...