Word: raison
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...Brother could have been alive or dead, a man or a god, an ex-socialist or an ex-capitalist. The main thing is, the society Orwell portrays has no real politics; it is just a system of lies and terror which has lost any raison d'etre besides self-perpetuation. And this situation is not all that dissimilar from what we say last year all over the globe and here at home...
...that posed by the President--are you better off than you were--but will we, as a nation, be better off in the future by the policies being debated. In saying so, he disavowed the repellent selfishness underlying the Republican appeal and at long last articulated a compelling raison d'etre for the Democratic ticket...
Vanessa Redgrave rises to the challenges of her role, decidedly a difficult one. She portrays Olive-essentially an unattractive, narrows-minded, selfish character--without condescension. There is genuine pathos about Olive's obsessiveness, as it is evident that Verena is her sole emotional focus: suffragism her only raison d'etre. But even her idealism is problematic--talking about women's suffrage, she sounds more like a mystic than a social reformer...
...disappointing as a blueprint for action by one of the country's most promising liberal pols. If one manages to wade through pages of irrelevant detail--lots of short, simple sentences, topped off by the gee-whiz exclamation point--one will find a clearer definition of the Democratic raison d'etre than any offered up by milquetoast Walter F. Mondale...
...course, contrary to common sense to assume that any trend will keep on advancing until it triumphs all along the line. A trend postulates a countertrend, a force to be overcome, and if that latter has any raison d'etre to begin with, it will eventually reassert itself, and turn things around. The Hegelian triad of thesis-antithesis-synthesis has much to recommend it as a scheme of change...