Word: punctilio
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...which he made up as he went along--as America's anti-President: a psalm-singing global circuit rider and moral interventionist who behaved, in a surreal and often effective way, as if the election of 1980 had been only some kind of ghastly mistake, a technicality of democratic punctilio. And so, for nearly 20 years, Anti-President Carter has circled the world embodying hyperactive paradox: insufferable self-absorption and self-righteousness in the service of admirably selfless causes...
...event leaves the rest of us in a state of unease and vulnerability. The flight attendant still instructs us to fasten our seat belts and to bring our seat backs and tray tables to an upright position before takeoff--all the irritating in-flight punctilio, with its bloodless ritual language--but as we strap ourselves in, our minds are projecting fireballs, and calculating odds, and trying to calm themselves more urgently than before. The worst part of jet travel is our eggs-in-a-carton passivity: inert flesh encapsulated for a leap of faith that may be (we tell ourselves...
...political punctilio was preserved, but what will happen to American jobs and incomes? The latest figures show that the economy was slowing dramatically as 1995 wore to a close. Christmas sales were even more dismal than first thought; December retail totals rose a mere 0.3% above November's. Year-end inventories of unsold cars were high enough to cause General Motors, Ford and Chrysler to cut some assemblies in January. Consumer confidence, as measured by the Conference Board, a business-research group, fell to a two-year...
Ollie North's world is still a frontier (Latin America, the Middle East) where savages and terrorists wander. Something in Americans sympathizes with that view of the world, with a bit of Teddy Roosevelt roughriding and a distaste for legal punctilio. In Texas lore there is a defense for homicide that goes like this: "He needed killing." Case dismissed...
...ceremonies were done with crisp military punctilio-which was not the way that Viet Nam went at all. The men in the honor guard wore dress uniforms and skinhead haircuts and composed their young faces into masks of abstracted obedience. Like robots suffering an obscure sorrow, they carried the casket of the new Unknown Soldier, the one from Viet Nam. They laid him to rest last week at Arlington National Cemetery beside those from the two World Wars and Korea...