Word: viets
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...first time debated on television, and politics began an almost metaphysical transformation: the external world was miraculously reconvened as powdered images upon America's internal screen. Electrons fetched out of the air poured the circus directly into the living room, into the bloodstream -- just as they would inject Viet Nam into the center of American consciousness...
...Americans, or of remembered innocence. The candidates, youngish veterans, connected them to the days of their last good war. The election of 1960 was the end of America's postwar political order and the beginning (starting 1,110 days later) of a long, tumbling historical free fall (assassinations, riots, Viet Nam, Watergate, oil embargoes, hostages in Iran, the economic rise of the Pacific Rim nations, on and on -- glasnost, China) that has created an utterly new world and left America searching for its place therein...
...nation is no longer moated -- economically, militarily -- by the Atlantic and Pacific. As Viet Nam instructed, what America touches does not necessarily become sacred -- an end of the Wilsonian illusion. America, which once cherished the conviction that God had endowed its national idea, began feeling lost in what might be called the Brownian motions of history -- Brownian movement being the term for molecules that fly about with no discernible pattern or reason. The American pre-eminence in manufacturing is gone. A thousand hypodermic needles are punching through the nation's borders...
Politically Sontag describes herself as a social democrat. But in the 1960s, amid the revulsion aroused by the Viet Nam War, she traveled to Havana and Hanoi and wrote about both places sympathetically, though not without misgivings. Read today, the mismatch in those essays between her complex inquiries and the nostrums of Communism is palpable. Her lingering reputation as a leftist, however, explains the fire storm she set off with a brief speech six years ago at a New York City forum to voice support for Poland's Solidarity labor union. Though the session had been organized by a coalition...
...fill a vacant Senate seat. Expectably, Karnes was challenged in the G.O.P. primary this year; unexpectedly, he won. But since advocating "fewer farmers" during a debate, he seems to have lost momentum. He is likely to be beaten by Bob Kerrey, a former Governor, former Debra Winger boyfriend and Viet Nam veteran...