Word: seriousness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...solid antidrug record. As Governor he created the Alliance Against Drugs in 1984; he claims that drug use among high school seniors in Massachusetts subsequently declined twice as fast as the national average. In Westchester County, Dukakis told a well-heeled gathering of party activists that the "most serious threat to our national security is not the Sandinistas, but the avalanche of drugs flowing into this country." The line echoes one of Jackson's; when Dukakis used it at a debate, it provoked a wry smile from the author. The normally reserved Dukakis also seeks to personalize his interest...
...Florida Task Force and National Narcotics Border Interdiction System, both designed to promote cooperation among law-enforcement agencies in stanching the inflow of drugs. Yet that is precisely what makes him vulnerable: polls show that a majority of Americans believe that the Reagan Administration has failed to make a serious effort to stem the drug traffic...
...occurred to me, driving toward what was now my third interview with Nixon, at his home in Saddle River, N.J. (I had been there once before at a dinner last spring), that in fact I had always thought of Nixon as a comic character, a dark and serious American comic character, like someone out of Twain. Comic in the Checkers speech. Comic in the "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore" farewell following his defeat in the California gubernatorial election in 1962. In the clownish 5 o'clock shadow of the first Nixon-Kennedy television debate...
...conclude that he actually won the TV debate with Jack Kennedy; and he was a crook. So there. With Nixon, every circumstance eventually turns out to be funnier than he is. The nation he has trod these 75 years, the framework for his antics, is itself a dark and serious comedy, simultaneously rejecting and accepting everything in its midst; a riot, a scream. Sometimes (rarely) Nixon laughs aloud. The gunshot laugh, the "Ha!" It is what Beckett designated as the risus purus: the laugh laughing at itself in the abysmal farce, in which every part is deadly ridiculous, every line...
...dark and serious comedy. The graceless, awkward, stiff, stumbling character trips about in a world occupied by natural athletes and virtuoso statesmen, though once he commanded that world. Preposterous contrasts are always good for a laugh. Alone onstage in Saddle River, the comedian raises himself to the company of heroes, soliloquizing that "it is necessary to struggle, to be embattled, to be knocked down and to have to get up." Look at history's great leaders, he says. They have all trod the wilderness at times. Churchill, De Gaulle, Adenauer. If the audience thinks such comparisons absurd, clearly the comedian...