Word: tolstoys
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Most of all, Carter's position has been improving because of his relentless attack on what his aides call the Tolstoy (i.e., war and peace) issue. When the President set out several weeks ago to slam home the fear that Reagan lacked the will and judgment to keep the U.S. out of war, the attack seemed a risky exercise that might backfire. But whatever may be thought of the fairness of the strategy, it has turned out that Carter's instincts, and the advice of Pollster Patrick Caddell, were politically sound: fear of nuclear war is indeed...
While conceding that the President's words were "an overstatement," Presidential Spokesman Jody Powell was not about to sound retreat. As the presidential entourage prepared to leave California for Oregon, Powell boarded the press plane. "Any questions?" he asked. "War and peace!" someone shouted. "Tolstoy," Powell retorted. But then, with careful calculation, he proceeded to pour a little water on the fire with one hand, while adding fuel with the other. Said he: "We have absolutely no apologies to make for raising that issue and for asking Governor Reagan to explain the numerous occasions over the past several years...
...Tragedy (his step son's death by drowning) blows by with a sort of offhanded inevitability. The Dynamo moves from New Canaan to Fair Haven. But the action is entirely within the well-furnished brain of antic and sorrowing Albert. One day he tells his psychiatrist: "You know, Tolstoy said that playing the accordion diverts men from realizing the falsity of their goals." Replies Dr. Nederlander: "You want me to turn on the Yankee game...
...Secrets and Surprises (1979). Beattie, 32, writes with quiet wit and subdued sympathy about the states of mind that have become the clichés of middle-class malaise. One need not elaborate, except to say that after 30 years of postwar fiction, American writers appear to have reversed Tolstoy's happy-family dictum. It now appears that all unhappy families are alike...
Patriotism has often had a terrible reputation. Samuel Johnson called it "the last refuge of a scoundrel." Tolstoy thundered: "There never has been a combined act of violence by one set of people upon another set of people that has not been perpetrated in the name of patriotism." Patriotism is both indispensable and extremely dangerous, involving always the hazards of the self being ceded to the larger purposes of the fatherland. Hitler had a sinister little instinct for patriotic sentiment. Patriotism, or a debased form of it, raucous with jingo and the bully's knuckles...