Word: wisdoms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sacred rite of democracy to hail each Administration before it takes office for its wisdom, daring and competence, none of which has yet been demonstrated. It is an equal privilege of those who await the future to lament the inevitable shortcomings that will plague the new team in town. We are joyous participants now in this old ritual, traveling the uproad toward Ronald Reagan's Inauguration. The rocky decline will follow soon. But there are some things that Reagan might do to ease a few of the predictable jolts...
With Mae West, coquettish dissemblance was out; womanly seductiveness was in. Her wisdom to us was that sex is both fun and funny. Her gift to us was the goodness of honesty...
...masterwork, Leaves of Grass. Never before had an American writer captured this relationship between the word and the state, the poem and the nation. Emerson wrote Whitman a few weeks after the publication of Leaves of Grass, saying he found it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet contributed...
...academic skepticism is thick. The Carter people scoff; they tried the same thing and failed. Conventional wisdom suggests that Government is too complex these days for Cabinet officers to have true authority. The problems, say the experts, cut through several departments and agencies and only the White House can arbitrate them. In that environment, Presidents turn to the men nearest them. Aides become, in effect, Cabinet members...
Earthly Powers attempts to do both on a large scale. The book is a high entertainment. It is, at 600 pages, also long enough to display Burgess at his best and second best: the penetrating dramatist of culture clash and the clever animater of received wisdom. His new novel stretches from the Edwardian Age through the 1970s. At the halfway mark, the reader has already had brushes with Freud, T.S. Eliot, Ford Madox Ford, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Havelock Ellis, Mussolini and Heinrich Himmler...