Word: utopians
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...read Gibbs' wonderful prose on this historic election, I felt the same surge of emotion, now bittersweet, that I experienced at age 10 on hearing Martin Luther King's thrilling "I Have a Dream" speech or Robert F. Kennedy's powerful utopian oratory. It dawned on me that Americans in our hearts are idealists who truly believe that we are all equal. We have waited decades for a leader to touch our hearts the way that King and Kennedy did. Obama has galvanized the American electorate by reminding us who we really are as a people, by touching our hearts...
...crowded. The book tells a five-part story, à la Shakespeare, but it’s clear that the author neglected to borrow from the literary greats the necessary ingredients of creativity, sophistication, and substance. Reading the book means slogging through a wearing morass of self-aggrandizing anecdotes, utopian musings, and kitschy catchphrases, none used more liberally than “hot, flat, and crowded,” which appears in Friedman’s sermon so many times that it could give John McCain’s “maverick” a run for its money...
...bathroom visits. So one Costco-size pack of toilet paper overarms the eager customer with enough toilet paper to absorb more than 1000 bathroom visits. That, says Steven Stoll, is just plain excessive. In “The Great Delusion: A Mad Inventor, Death in the Tropics, and the Utopian Origins of Economic Growth,” Stoll beseeches his readers to be more economical with their toilet paper use—or something to that effect. Costco, he tells us in the book’s introduction, is a Grand Canyon of superabundance. According to Stoll...
...Surely, this could be called a reactionary’s utopian fantasy (I prefer to think of it as an anarchist’s utopian fantasy). It may also be objected that what I am actually recommending is the country’s dissolution. I recall Einstein’s story of a colleague who, in response to the sage scientist’s fervent pleas for nuclear disarmament, quipped: “Why are you so deeply opposed to the disappearance of the human race?” I’ll never plunge into such depths of misanthropic...
...book The Audacity of Hope, Senator Barack Obama advances a thesis that can seem, perhaps true to form, rather utopian. He holds that—in spite of the cultural schism of the 1960s and the end of bipartisan pragmatism—Americans are not so different, and that a combination of their shared values might be enough to unite a sweeping new majority. In so doing, he engages in a little willful bifurcation, implying that ‘ordinary Americans’ are the victims, not the agents, of a climate of red-vs.-blue rancor, taking Michaels Moore...