Word: runge
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...goodies are hawked on television shopping channels. And credit is sinfully easy. Declares Damon: "Credit cards are to a shopaholic what a bottle is to an alcoholic." But buying provides only a short-lived high. Splurgers are assailed by anxiety and guilt, sometimes as the latest acquisitions are being rung up. Even as she handed her credit card to a salesclerk, recalls Judith, 40, a New York advertising executive, "my stomach would churn in knots." At home, items often go straight to the closet in their boxes, and clothing hangs untouched with price tags attached...
...these issues, the rhetoric of Michael Dukakis and George Bush is virtually interchangeable. Both candidates shun the word Underclass; neither accepts the word's implication that there are Americans who cannot even reach the first rung of the economic ladder. Such linguistic prissiness and ideological timidity make addressing the problem even more difficult. As for solutions, the candidates echo each other. Bush: "A job in the private sector is the best antipoverty program that has ever been invented." Dukakis: "Full employment is the most important human-services program we have...
...make a job for me. I can do it on my own, and I think other people can too." Yet she is uneasy. "But if we're going to be better off," she says, "something will have to happen." Something to ensure that the middle rung of America's ladder to success does not shrink too fast...
...Ragu again!' " About his run for the presidency, he says, "It just wasn't my time. Thank God, because it saved my life." He wakes up each morning to "my second chance in life," looking back at how far he has come instead of grasping for the next rung on the ladder, satisfied, grateful, to be a U.S. Senator. "I'm alive. I'm well. My family is happy. I do something I love." More than enough for anyone...
...many at Brookline High, Harvard was the next rung on the striver's cursus honorum. Joe Kennedy, the President's father, who had moved to Brookline to launch his banking career, went to Harvard for its social benefits, and sent his sons there for the same reason. Academic matters were secondary. The social benefits of Harvard were a reason for Michael Dukakis not to go there. He believes deeply in meritocratic distinctions, which are blurred (if not reversed) by social influence. He went, instead, to the Quaker school Swarthmore, where his love for discipline would be rewarded. The school also...