Word: suspicions
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...memories of how small and not-so-small ineptitudes can accumulate, until one day the balance unexpectedly tips against a man. Lyndon Johnson through budget deficits and Viet Nam setbacks was forgiven a host of petty exaggerations, but he ultimately was standing in the credibility gap. Some vague suspicion about Jimmy Carter's competence hardened the day he embraced his troubled friend and Budget Director, Bert Lance. Carter's presidency was never quite the same after that...
...interagency task force has been set up to coordinate the case, and the House Intelligence Committee will begin public hearings by the end of the year. The result may be a fuller understanding of the old-boy dealings between present and former intelligence agents. There is a growing suspicion, as well, that close scrutiny of Wilson's affairs will turn up embarrassing connections with high officials, both in the U.S. and abroad, who may have participated in business deals with the entrepreneur in Tripoli...
...such stories survive, even flourish, in an age of science and cynicism? Many of them, says Brunvand, serve as cautionary tales, sermonettes on the evils of, say, parking in deserted lanes or buying cheap imported goods. Others are inspired by suspicion of change-of microwave ovens or fast-food restaurants. Writes Brunvand: "Whatever is new and puzzling or scary, but which eventually becomes familiar, may turn up in modern folklore...
...easier to believe. His ideas are similarly impossible to prove. There lies Sowell's problem. Imploring readers to set aside prejudice, to look honestly at causes and effects, makes little sense when those "causes" must travel thousands of miles with the immigrants that populated America. The Italian suspicion of education and the feudal Japanese work ethic may have survived both their ocean voyages and their integration into the larger American society...
Gossip goes in for the negative, not the positive. It is no doubt meanspirited. "If gossip favors, even enjoys, dirt (the failings of character)," wrote the critic John Leonard, "it is because we suspect ourselves, and the suspicion is a shrewd one." Yet, oddly, people do not seem to object to being gossiped about as much as they once did. After all, as macrogossip has instructed, any gossip is a form of attention, a sort of evanescent celebrity. Even gossip works to keep away what Saul Bellow called "the wolf of insignificance." Privacy is not the highest priority...