Word: reflexively
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...sentiment that fit an earlier moment of AIDS, meaning all the years when death was at the end of every struggle, are unsuited to this one, when nothing is a foregone conclusion. Something powerful is happening. The new prospects for effective treatment insist that despair is an outmoded psychological reflex. Yet among people who live with AIDS, optimism is a suspicious character. Too many bright hopes of the past didn't pan out. So this is a moment in which, for anyone with feeling and judgment, feeling and judgment are unsettled...
...edge. The era of Saturday Night Live that dished out Dennis Miller's "I'm outta here" and Dana Carvey's "Isn't that special?" fed a hunger for a renewable supply of ironic put-downs. But what may have started as a boomer/Xer shtick has now become a reflex common to all ages, from Bob Dole to Macaulay Culkin (who gave I don't think so its big push by uttering it twice in the top box-office hit of 1990, Home Alone). The militia code name for a possible counterattack on the feds? "Project Worst Nightmare." The would...
Russian policymakers, especially those still inclined to see their country's relationship with the U.S. as intrinsically a rivalry, may fall into the trap of defining what is in their national interest as anything that annoys the U.S. or causes us problems. If the reflex to score points in a zero-sum game becomes a default feature in the software of Russian foreign policy, it will only generate mistrust on our side. That kind of vicious cycle, so familiar during the cold war, would be bad for everyone, but particularly for the Russians. They would risk repeating many...
Some counterstrike was practically a political reflex: Clinton would have to do something militarily or suffer damaging charges that he was too weak to stand up to the Iraqi tyrant. In this, the electoral imperative meshed perfectly with the opinions of his policy advisers. Whatever the legal niceties, it was clear to everyone in Washington that Saddam had violated Iraq's postwar rules of the road and had to be slapped down...
Elements of social satire outweigh any serious intent Begley might have to air the subject of genteel anti-Semitism. Schmidt, like most people, has an active Them-and-Us reflex, and his real biases are generational. He grouses dolefully about the slide in professional standards, the decline of civility and the thoughtlessness of youth. In what could be called a novel of bad manners, Begley again demonstrates that he can reveal the complexities of society and personality with a clear eye and graceful style. Schmidt may not live up to today's strict standards of political correctness, but he more...