Word: randomly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Here's a work of fiction--no, scratch that, a testament of bitter truth--that answers a question unasked since the dawn of literature: What is a mortgage bond? The answer in Bombardiers (Random House; 319 pages; $22) seems to be: That which the selling of makes your teeth itch. The first sentence of Po Bronson's desperate, funny, booklong rant at bucket-shop marketing of financial chaos neatly pelletizes his entire volume: "It was a filthy profession, but the money was addicting, and one addiction led to another, and they were all going to hell...
...character development. Ah, but character disintegration, character vaporized and sucked away by the office air conditioning, that's another matter. Bronson describes a sales floor where twitchy, sweating wretches are flogged back to their cubicles by a demented sales manager when they sprint for the rest rooms. They pluck random, cooked statistics from their Quotrons, bark hopeless lies into speed-dial phones, fill impossible quotas by selling federal Resolution Trust bonds back to the very failed savings and loans into which the government is trying to pump life-giving formaldehyde...
...events in Tokyo were a clear warning to the world. Terrorism has taken a step across a threshold that security experts have been anticipating with dread for decades. It has been known that there are groups out there that are willing to kill at random. There is proof that they are able to use chemical weapons, and possibly biological and radioactive ones as well, that can destroy far more people than conventional bombs and bullets. Now that nerve gas has been used on ordinary citizens, it may possibly happen again: the fact that terrorists are copycats and hungry for publicity...
...handful of Middle Eastern or leftist political movements, sponsored and protected by governments, bent on achieving their well-advertised ideological goals through death and intimidation. The next generation of terrorists is more obscure, an assemblage of disparate fanatics pursuing unique or mysterious agendas, with only the capacity for random violence in common. While governments have them under fairly good control and international terrorist incidents are relatively few (321 last year, down from 432 in 1933), it looks to the experts as if the 1990s rise of apocalyptic sects and Islamic extremism has merged with the increasingly easy availability of chemical...
...triggered an explosion of ethnic conflicts, with racial and religious hatreds mixed in, giving fresh scope to terrorist free-lancers. Much of the violence committed today in the name of Islam is the work of small, loosely organized cells who emerge for little more than a single act of random vengeance. Sections of Pakistan are ungovernable safe havens for the remnants of 20,000 zealous volunteers from Muslim countries all over the world who went to join the Afghan mujahedin in their holy war against the Soviets. An estimated 1,000 fundamentalist fighters still gather in the country's lawless...