Word: avoidance
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Such is the impression created by America's all-purpose early alert system. Day after day the air bleats and print blinks with warnings and alarms. Cancer alerts have become almost as commonplace as weather reports. Strictures on how to avoid heart attacks pop up everywhere. Preventive campaigns stir up a constant din of sermons against careless driving, against starting fires, against getting too fat. It is like the continual murmur of doom's own voice...
What will you do? What will you do? As things stand now, how can you avoid naming the Ayatullah Khomeini Man of the Year...
...classes within the Islamic countries themselves. With that wealth came a widening gap between rich and poor, a dangerous ambivalence of rising expectations and an anxiety that old ways might be endangered. The resentment of modernization is not anything so simply and piously self-abnegating as a wish to avoid luxury; it is also a bitterness at being forced to live adjacent to a wealth one cannot possess...
Though some of its oil competitors criticized Getty for giving in too easily, President Sidney Petersen signed the consent decree at least partly to avoid long litigation and a public relations black eye. Still hanging over the company are more DOE claims of at least $160 million for other alleged instances of overpricing oil and natural gas. This time Getty appears ready to go to court because executives are convinced they can prove to a judge that DOE is engaged in retroactive rule making...
What's worst about this jingoist response is that it obscures the one valuable lesson America might glean from the events in Iran. Air-mobile divisions wouldn't have helped avoid the taking of the hostages; but a more open-minded appraisal of the domestic dynamics of Third World nations, instead, coupled with a more visible reluctance to support repressive dictatorships, surely would. No amount of money spent on flexible military capabilities will protect our "vital interests"--like Middle East oil--as effectively as a wholehearted effort to understand cultural forces like Islam...