Word: truisms
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...truism that Americans expect and desire their President to have some of the qualities of a king. When noting this phenomenon, observers usually have in mind Air Force One, the Deaverish pomp of presidential events, the Secret Service agents who so resemble a monarch's elite household guard, the convoy of limousines that accompanies the President on his visits, and the other grandiose appurtenances of the presidency. Even Bill Clinton has benefited from this aspect of his office and so appears somewhat more imposing and regal than would the former Governor of Arkansas if he were treated like...
Unlike the Chinese, Americans of the '50s were spared the curse of living in interesting times. Which may be why David Halberstam, prizewinning journalist and best-selling social chronicler, simply calls the period transitional, a truism that could apply to any decade. Likewise, his thesis that events of the '50s set the stage for the '60s, '70s and beyond is as safe as it once was to invest...
That it is the secretaries that run everything is a truism acknowledged by anyone who has ever worked in an office. These days, most secretaries work as the single clerical support for the ten to fifteen workers of a specific section. It is the secretary who knows: how to fix the copier without calling the service person, who to call when the voice mail system goes on the blink, when every flex-time employee will actually be in the building, how to get accounting to reimburse funds even though the receipt is lost and where the copy of a bill...
...golf in the New England spring is hardly conductive to low scoring. Wet fairways and windy, rainy, sub-40 degree conditions that traditionally mar April in Massachusetts are adversaries that bother everyone, but the golfing truism that bad conditions bring the best to the fore underscores another Crimson challenge...
This was a year that disproved the truism that scenes of tragedy all blur together, that photographs of famine in Biafra and Ethiopia, Sudan and then Somalia just pile on in layers, forming a callous around the conscience. Brought face to face one more time with starvation, the world did not just shrug. And pictures gave other conflicts their own unforgettable faces. Some of the video-game visuals from last year's fighting in the Persian Gulf were strangely antiseptic, an invitation to forget that war is the mass production of individual suffering. The photographs from Bosnia-Herzegovina, where...