Word: raisons
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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People have remarked that for me conversation is largely an excuse to quote "The Simpsons". Those who make it past this paragraph might conclude that this column has no other raison d'tre. And yet I assure the reader that for me, quoting from the show has always been a means...
...power walking across the churchyard with the cameramen jousting and stumbling behind. After a brief stop at the bank, he leads us to the edge of a vast, weed-choked parcel that for 100 years was home to a plate glass factory, Crystal City's economic raison d'etre. The plant's 1990 closing sapped the town's strength, so another politician might use the moment to rail against Corporations That Turn Their Backs on Our Communities. Bradley looks for poetry instead. The missing landmark "tells me life has unknown terms and change is all around us," he says...
...Massachusetts by Howard Deering Johnson, and by the mid-1960s its sales exceeded that of Burger King, Kentucky Fried Chicken and McDonald's combined. There would be more than 1,000 Howard Johnson restaurants and 500 motor lodges. Yet after Johnson's death in 1972, the company lost its raison d'etre. The restaurants became obsolete; the food quality deteriorated. You underestimate the clientele at your peril. The late restaurateur Joe Baum used to say, "There is no victory over a customer...
...action and a basis for hope." Fanon, who published his treatise in 1961, intended his words to apply to Third World artists struggling to shatter the psychological and metaphysical shackles of European domination. How could he have predicted that, 37 years later, his writings would succinctly summarize the raison d'etre of a new musical movement...
...greatest of this century -- are best remembered in action. If you've been clicking or flipping around since you heard the news, you've probably heard it all already. CP has written it already. So let us not croon overlong in this space, and deliver what is CP's raison d'etre...