Word: smashup
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...that was the exact opposite of Roosevelt's politically shrewd distancing of himself from his discredited predecessor, Herbert Hoover. Obama could have scored cheap political points by leaving such criminally mismanaged enterprises as AIG and GM to their fate. Of course, he might also have touched off an economic smashup. In pursuing what he believed to be the responsible course, Obama echoed George W. Bush's fourth-quarter abandonment of free-market gospel. For both men, survival trumped ideology. In the process, however, the candidate of change became the President of continuity, a politically perilous position he has since reinforced...
...Warsaw's Communist leaders were ready to respond with a declared state of emergency and possibly an armed crackdown, a move that could provoke a violent civil conflict. But both sides in Poland's labor-government showdown hit the brakes at the last moment and averted a smashup by inches...
...message is clear: "With inflation, we have in effect been raped by Government. Federal borrowing is the pervert that did it, and inflation is the weapon of coercion." Inflation, he warns, will get totally out of control and lead to an economic smashup. "The juggernaut is headed for the precipice," he declares in his book. When it reaches the brink, he says, the banks will collapse, Social Security will be worthless, the machinery of Government will break down, and the cities will become chaotic...
Yates can make reading about humdrum pathos - the slow smashup of befuddled lives - invigorating and even gripping. He knows how to pace his material for maximum interest - when to summarize, when to show a scene in full. The dialogue is artful enough to sound natural. In his descriptive prose every word works quietly to inspire the illusion that things are happening by themselves. Even Emily's walk-on lovers are able to stand - as characters - on their own two legs...
...countrymen at will. He has mocked the "heterosexual dictatorship" in the U.S., championed the rights and pleasures of homosexuals, and called for a legal curb on human breeding. He has castigated America as "the land of the dull and the home of the literal" and repeatedly predicted the "smashup" of the "last empire on earth." Like many a gadfly before him, from Twain to Mencken, Vidal has won fame and wealth by biting the land that feeds...