Word: transition
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...justifications abound: The current administration believes (and, indeed, the last administration believed, though to a lesser extent) in funding for defense research and not for mass transit research, not for nutrition research, not for housing research, and not for pure science. There is little but lasers and graphic displays and the like that they will find; it is no wonder that scientists structure grant proposals to appeal to generals...
...Leave car in parking lot at periphery of population center. Upgrade and use free public transit. Traffic jams are outmoded...
Perhaps DSOC wanted to insure an exclusive gathering in order to prevent any opposition to its plan for a debate between David Stockman and liberal Congressman Barney Frank. Some debate. Stockman is Reagan's notorious budget slasher and Frank is infamous for blaming Boston's transit workers for the ills of the MBTA. This is the alternative of the DSOC "socialists" to the massive cutbacks, layoffs and anti-Soviet warmongering of the Reagan Administration: a return to the Democratic Party. "If they don't like jellybeans, let them eat peanuts...
Fundamentally, the MX is a preposterous idea, a "mass transit system for missiles" that would use resources on an unprecedented scale and destroy vast areas of the desert. But more disturbingly, the need for a mobile missile is based on an unsound premise. That the Soviet Union can destroy all our Minuteman silos in a first strike is a highly suspect assumption, based on as-yet unproven theories of missile trajectory and accuracy. (Neither the United States nor the Soviet Union has ever test-fired a missile on a North-South route, similar to that which both countries' bombs would...
...story is not resolved in violent, dramatic action but in a quiet balancing of sorrow and hope. It is a difficult act, and it is not faultless. The dazzling characterizations and sense of American place in the first part of the novel tend to get scuffed in transit...