Word: seem
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...past the Deng government has been able to suppress student unrest with a minimum of violence by using the worst threat at its disposal: assignment upon graduation to an uninteresting job in a remote location. But as the last month's events have suggested, some seem willing to risk even a promising future. "Somebody has to do it," says a recent Peking University graduate. "The fate of the country is at stake." The demonstrations, he added, "will eventually be viewed as a boon to history because they are keeping our leaders on their toes, forcing them to speed...
...sharp, bright faces as you hoist us into your life, superior as cats to your primitive elders. Quaint, are we not? Beware of superior feelings. The message in this bottle may turn out to be as much a warning as an artifact. We are not as dead as we seem...
...long-gone countrymen are attacked in their sleep by emphatic music played on clocks and radios that are yoked together. They run a mile or two to ward off heart disease, chomp high-fiber cereals to ward off cancer, and dress in the fashions of the times, which may seem starchy to you but in fact have never been looser. They proceed then to offices populated with machines designed to give them back the free time they have nearly forgotten how to use. En route they pass some people with telephones in their cars, dealing with those they cannot reach...
...expected, as if the world were at once in supreme command of itself and superstitious: "I knew that something like this would happen." Perhaps the fact that we are relatively new to the prospect of nuclear war gives us both solid and shaky ground. That fear of annihilation must seem preposterous to you, who either have neutralized it or live with weapons that make our missiles seem like Gatling guns, or both. Congratulations...
...village of common thought, which theoretically ought to enhance a people's power to govern their own destinies. But the ability of other people, specialized people, to control those thoughts has grown with the inventions. Political campaigns are managed not by the candidates but by media experts, who indeed seem expert in determining how the majority thinks and votes. A huge business these days is called public relations, which in fact is concerned with the most private relations of well- trained people with information on social patterns. That enterprise has taken the expansiveness of democracy and honed...