Word: useless
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Predictions were limited to dates before November 4. "Any hostage release after then was deemed useless," Born continued, dispelling the rumor that Jordan planned to keep his winnings to himself. "There's no question that Ham will split the pot with Richard Queen. After all, Queen did the time for this caper...
...realignments the way the past alters under the gaze of new generations. Children raised on the stultifying history textbooks of the past-especially those of the '40s and '50s-are apt to think of the past as a mass of impermeable and indigestible facts: a huge and useless object, as lifeless and impassive as a moonscape. But the past actually teems with an almost irrepressible life, especially in a nation as widely literate and elaborately documented as the U.S. The past constantly achieves renewals and transmogrifications as political symbol and polemical weapon. The present and the past...
Americans no longer learn much from either their history or their myth. Mussolini said: "It is not impossible to govern Italians. It is merely useless." The same thing may eventually be true of Americans. They have too much freedom; without discipline, without a sense of being responsible and useful in the world, their angers spill and slop like battery acids. They have no more justification for their endless social license than the breezes of their appetites, the whims in the glands. The psychological sense of sudden boundaries, all bets off, new rules to be made, stirs old American questions. LaFeber...
Also being tested in national park rest rooms is a new gravel-impregnated wall paint, designed to break a lipstick, crayon or pencil at the first stroke. But such anti-lipstick measures are useless against the girls who like to add their smears to ancient Indian carvings in rock so porous that the lipstick sinks in and becomes indelible...
European reluctance about sanctions against Iran is defensible; they are clearly not only useless but downright dangerous. Not so economic sanctions against the Soviet Union, which could have had considerable impact. The same goes for the Olympic boycott; symbols do matter, especially to the Soviets. Americans understand why Europe seeks to avoid the economic costs and political risks of stronger measures, but such calculations are dangerously shortrange. The widely heard European argument that one must not isolate the Russians is a half policy at best; where is the other half...