Word: trait
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...ultimate example of technocracy gone wild. The men at the top-first Kennedy then Johnson and Nixon--had a vision of Vietnam that existed in spite of reality. The men below them, from defense secretaries to platform commanders, had to provide Upstairs with what it wanted to hear. The trait of deceit and cover-up that publicly emerged with Johnson's "credibility gap" and continued through the Pentagon Papers and Watergate to its most recent chapter revealed in the CBS documentary "The Uncounted Enemy: A Vietnam Deception" was not the result of an imbedded American evil, but rather the outcome...
...always, Gurney has a keen eye and ear for the revealing trait: the parents so in love with their young children that they wake them in mid-evening, just to be with them some more; the long-married woman who reflexively takes on the opposite mood to whatever her husband is feeling; the house salesman who comes close to true rapture in envisioning domestic bliss for all his customers. When Kitty, the best-sketched figure, loses her second husband to another man, the reader can guess the precise tone in which she describes her rival to divert sympathy...
Because the Quad Houses and Mather typically are not chosen by many freshman lottery entrants, they wind up with a random group whose only common trait is their lack of success in the lottery process...
This crisis of participation, a chief trait of the Orwellian world, has not occurred as a result of the natural, uninhibited growth of the state. It has been carefully engineered by the ruling minority of our society. The last lines of 1984 shows an approximation of our own situation: "He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother." There is only one major difference between Oceanin and the U.S. The techniques of government self-perpetuation are different. Our leaders don't torture U.S. citizens, although they explicitly support torture of innocent citizens in many other countries. There...
With her style and presence, Geraldine Ferraro was by far the liveliest of the four nominees. Intense, good-humored, always listening (a rare trait in a politician), she surprised Americans with her fast-mouthed New Yorker's style. Still, although Ferraro was a first-class campaigner, it was not she but Walter Mondale who made the decision to put her on a national ticket...