Word: assertion
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Back in Washington both the Air Force, with its Thunderbirds flying team, and the Navy, with its Blue Angels, were quick to assert that a Ramstein-type catastrophe could not happen in the U.S. and to defend such demonstration flights. "I don't know that the risk is too high," said Secretary of Defense Frank Carlucci. "We have crashes in training every day." In all, 22 Blue Angels have been killed in crashes since 1946, and 19 Thunderbirds since 1953. But with thousands of air shows since World War II, no spectators have died in accidents involving military teams...
BURN IT. Incinerators can reduce garbage weight 70%, as well as produce heat that can be sold to generate electricity, thus reducing garbage-disposal costs. In addition, incinerator builders assert that new technology has removed many of the pollutants that escaped from chimneys in the 1960s and 1970s. So it is not surprising that a new generation of incinerators is developing. But NIMBY operates here too: some Minneapolis residents have mounted strong protests against a burner under construction near the downtown area. Like anti-landfill sentiment, opposition to incinerators has a reasoned basis. Environmentalist Barry Commoner insists that incinerators actually...
Landau aside, no one else in the cast gets a similar opportunity to assert any complexity; Joan Allen as Tucker's wife Vera particularly suffers in this regard. But that is a small defect in a movie of large virtue. Preston Tucker failed to attain what we are pleased to think of as the American Dream of success: his factory produced only a few dozen cars before it closed. But there is another more common, more potent American Dream, which involves not the invention of products but the invention of self. And this movie, genial and fierce, is proof...
...downplay differences, particularly when it comes to questions of class. Historians have shown that while the movement for temperance was framed as a national moral problem, it was in many ways a class phenomenon. And the resulting temperance laws amounted to an effort by the middle class to assert its hegemony...
...lingering question, however, is whether Dukakis can adapt his orderly and idealistic view to the grubby challenges that the U.S. often faces. Would he assert U.S. interests even in those cases where it meant overriding the % sensibilities of neighbors or allies? "Dukakis wouldn't sit twiddling his thumbs if he couldn't get a 14th vote in the Organization of American States for something that was necessary to do," insists Nye. "The guy is really a pragmatic politician...