Word: swearing
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Politician, always a swear word in America, has now become a deadly insult -- though it is a little hard to understand why. Are we just learning that politicians say one thing to get elected and do something entirely different once they win? Thomas Jefferson and Franklin Roosevelt both promised to shrink the government's powers when campaigning, and both men expanded those powers as President. The politician is evasive if not duplicitous? The method of choosing candidates is arbitrary if not corrupt? The candidate hides his or her real views while trying to please diverse constituencies? All that has been...
Patrick has opted for an easy life working for an addled travel agency in Cambridge, Mass. "I could flirt with the customers, wear tight pants to work, drink at lunch, and swear on the phone," he notes, but adds, with the grace that saves him, that he wouldn't mind making "a tiny fraction of the world a better place." His lover, Arthur, wants them to buy a house together and settle down for good. But Patrick already knows that he would be "stuck in a passionless domestic relationship...
...Magna Carta by a century. And the Catalans' sense of otherness -- the separation, cultural and institutional, from the rest of Spain -- comes through loud and clear in the oath of allegiance their leaders swore to the Aragonese kings in the 15th century: "We, who are as good as you, swear to you, who are no better than us, to accept you as our king and sovereign lord, provided that you observe all our liberties and laws -- but if not, not." Catalans have always waxed lyrical over their medieval defiance of kingship and railed against "centralism" -- rule by Madrid. Their political...
...other hand, Clinton is a quintessential politician when the very name has become a swear word. He is a man who builds compromises and is accused of being slick. He tries to please, omnidirectionally, and is accused of pandering. I ask if he ever considered being anything but a politician. Yes, he answers, a doctor, because he saw his mother and her fellow nurses deferring to them. Then a musician. At Oxford, when he thought his opposition to the Vietnam War would preclude a political career in the patriotic South, he seriously considered becoming a journalist. "I would at least...
...They say domesticity is the enemy of art, but I don't think it is. I had to make a decision: Am I going to be just a family guy, or should I go up to London three nights a week, hit the nightclubs, occasionally drop my trousers and swear a lot in public? I made my decision, and I feel O.K. with it. Ballads and babies. That's what happened...