Word: stiffs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Most of Mitterrand's evenings were spent at small, informal Elysée dinners. Gone was the stiff Giscardian protoco that required the President to be served before his guests. Mitterrand's conversation at these gatherings was often far removed from electoral concerns. Recounts Brother-in-Law Hanin: "We talked about Jean Renoir and his films, theater, trees and tennis." Even as the new President was being helicoptered to his own parliamentary district, at Château-Chinon, to vote in the first round of the legislative balloting, he appeared utterly oblivious to politics, absorbed in a contemporary Japanese novel...
...jaundiced eyes of many businessmen, nationalization seems to be part of a general "policy of revenge"?along with the stiff new surtaxes on expense accounts, four-star hotels, private boats and incomes over $65,000. Says one private banker, with considerable hyperbole: "My family and I are going to be virgins sacrificed on the altar of a Socialist god!" Says an embittered business leader: "The Socialist leveler tide just may succeed where 200 years of recurring French puritanism has failed: to make France colorless and downright boring." As for the shorter workday and higher minimum wage, businessmen insist that...
Getting into these gilded institutions is more than half the battle for success in France. American Psychologist Kenneth Keniston characterizes the time spent in special classes preparing for entrance examinations as a "period spent in the monastery." Each school has its own stiff requirements for an aspiring entrant, which are, says Keniston, "torture and mysterious rites of passage which test his qualifications for membership in the caste of sorcerers. Once they are accepted as full members, the other members will do everything possible to guarantee their success." Family ties also help, but only if the youngster has the brains...
This is the caricature of surrealist kitsch that Lichtenstein invokes in paintings like Reclining Nude, 1977: one figure sporting Swiss-cheese holes à la Henry Moore, another in a stiff suit like a Magritte businessman, a Kandinsky-style squiggle here, an Arpish wiggle there...
...banks, those stately citadels of stability, are going through an upheaval. A few, like New York's Bankers Trust, have virtually gone out of consumer banking and now lend money almost exclusively to businesses. California's Bank of America and others have instituted heavy minimum deposits and stiff fees on small accounts. Still others, like New York's Citibank, are aggressively trying to win new customers through improved services and bank-at-home computer terminals...