Word: saner
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...fact, fast becoming the quintessential American experience. Medical breakthroughs and saner life-styles have increased life expectancy by a year or two in each recent decade. Today average life expectancy in the U.S. is 75.5 years, up from 47 at the turn of the century. In the past half-decade alone, the 65-and-older crowd has increased 7%--almost twice the growth rate of those under 65--to reach 34 million, or 13% of the U.S. population. Demographers project that after the first baby boomers hit retirement in 2011, the numbers will explode, with people 65 and older numbering...
Much of this trouble, as the Unabomber argues, stems from technology. Suburbs are largely products of the automobile. (In the forthcoming book The Lost City, Alan Ehrenhalt notes the irony of Henry Ford, in his 60s, building a replica of his hometown--gravel roads, gas lamps--to recapture the "saner and sweeter idea of life" he had helped destroy.) And in a thousand little ways--from the telephone to the refrigerator to ready-made microwavable meals-technology has eroded the bonds of neighborly interdependence. Among the Aranda Aborigines of Australia, the anthropologist George Peter Murdock noted early this century...
...adds up to the most radical program of any serious candidate for President. Alexander is well equipped to sell it. He is statesmanlike and disciplined; charming and even tempered-everything, in short, that Perot is not. Republican theorist Bill Kristol calls Alexander "a gentler, saner Perot" who can run against Washington without scaring voters. Alexander too offers what Dole and Gramm cannot: executive experience, as a two-term Governor who improved the schools and roads of his state while attracting huge auto plants that created thousands of high-paying jobs...
...matter what you are, it only matters what people think you are." The principle works for the short run, which is usually the only run that celebrity needs. Jacqueline Kennedy endured in the long run. Even in the earliest days after the Inauguration in 1961, she located the saner and contrary principle in a memo she wrote to her press secretary: "I feel strongly that publicity in this era has gotten completely out of hand -- and you must really protect the privacy of me and my children...
...merriment plays off an apprehension of Midler's public, if not of the star herself, that she is in a slight career trough. A decade ago, she suffered an acrimonious flop film (Jinxed) and a nervous breakdown. She rebounded into a saner life, with a doting husband and an adored daughter, and the movie stardom that had previously eluded her. But her past three films ! have fallen this side of blockbuster. Scenes from a Mall swallowed her and Woody Allen whole; Hocus Pocus was a moderately popular summer farce; she turned down the original Sister Act script to make...