Word: truisms
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Toward the end of a war, a simple truism applies: it is better to negotiate a surrender than to fight to the death for a losing cause. Though environmentalists may be loath to admit it, this is their choice in the battle over genetically modified foods. Despite the best attempts by European activists to seal off the Continent from what they call Frankenfoods, the new science of farming is here to stay. So if environmentalists want to help shape the future of agriculture, it's time to raise the white flag and ask the world's bioengineers for a seat...
...Lighten up, I hear some of you saying. I say it myself. I fret I'm in danger of living out a haunting truism: that a conservative is just a liberal who has finally grown old or grown up. But I don't think I'm wrong here. I think the easy, sleazy PG-13 rating makes truly adult movies an endangered species. If even our most powerful filmmakers are afraid to make an R-rated film, how will American movies ever mature? And what will the preteens raised on Austin Powers have to watch - or want to watch - when...
...truism about American directors: you become who you were. Coppola, the former theater director and son of a classical musician, took the arty road, making operatic, actor-centric films that sometimes (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) found large audiences. Lucas, who had written a third-grade theme that began, "Once upon a time in the land of Zoom..." and loved to tinker with cars, replayed his Modesto, Calif., adolescence in American Graffiti. Then he reworked the beloved comic books and B-movie serials of his youth into Star Wars, a film as stylized and sterile as a piece of abstract animation...
...past 11 or so presidents, it has been a truism that American leaders ignore the Middle East at their peril. So why did Bush think he could get away with paying so little attention to the place? As with so many questions about the Middle East, there is an answer to fit every neighborhood. Many Democrats and Republicans believe that Bush checked out of the story early in his presidency in part because he came to Washington with a reflexive desire to do the opposite of whatever his predecessor did. It is true that Bill Clinton had his hands deep...
...some New Yorkers, desperate for some shred of comfort, started playing a new version of the old game - I don't work on Wall Street, we told ourselves, I'm not in a tall enough building, and so on. In the media, our inoculation of choice was an old truism: terrorists don't kill their publicists...