Word: trait
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...shape and color of the "sleaze varies, but one thing has been remarkably consistent throughout the Administration's scandals--that is Reagan's steadfast support of his embattled appointees. Loyalty is an admirable trait, but blind loyalty is not--especially in the Chief Executive. Reagan's blanket support for Meese and others is egregious in placing personal loyalties above any regard for the integrity of federal law and the offices these appointees hold...
...helped in many ways to polarize the ingredients. Nevertheless, in their subsequent starry-eyed attempts since then to foster complete racial harmony, many Americans have forgotten a basic fact people will always find irresistable interest in categorizing others on the basis of race, class, beliefs, or some other distinctive trait...
They came from prisons, posh suburbs, lunatic asylums and nursing homes. But they had one common trait: originality. Their art, generously displayed in American Folk Art of the Twentieth Century (Rizzoli; 342 pages; $45) shows astonishing visual power and aesthetic range. Eddie Arning, for example, who spent more than 60 years in a Texas mental institution, contributes eerie, compelling images that resemble Egyptian friezes. Inez Nathaniel Walker began drawing disquietingly grotesque portraits in prison. "There were all those bad girls talking dirty all the time," she recalls, "so I just sit down at a table and draw." All the artists...
...Everyone knows the Beats were rebellious: they drifted around the country in search of "kicks," abandoning all shreds of the traditional male role as husband, father and breadwinner. But how many people connect the Beat form of rebellion with the subsequent reclassification of "responsibility" as an unhealthy, even neurotic trait...
...botched invasion also revealed an attractive trait in Kennedy: an openness and candor, and a freedom from that neurotic, squirming evasiveness, the deflected gaze or outright mendacity, that one came to expect from one or two subsequent occupants of the White House. Kennedy made no effort to escape blame for the folly, to cover it up or excuse it. We made a terrible mistake, he said. Let's go on from here...