Word: contracting
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Because Vice President Al Gore is basically a decent and well-intentioned man, you find yourself constantly wanting to rush up to him on the presidential campaign trail and save him from himself. He is a sharp guy, but he knows next to nothing about the social contract between humans, probably because it is not written down anywhere and cannot be downloaded into the Palm V organizer he keeps strapped to his belt at all times...
Then Gore took the microphone, which is like being the guy who bats right after Mark McGwire. It would help if somebody would grab that Palm V when Gore isn't looking and type in Social Contract Rule No. 1: don't enunciate every syllable while feigning an intimacy that doesn't exist because it looks as if you think you're speaking to morons...
While we expand, we also contract. America Inc. has become a term for describing the unending mergers of vast companies--multibillion-dollar mergers, real money today. Oil companies, car companies, food companies, banks; everything comes together. Media companies become telephone companies. Telephone companies become software companies. Book-publishing companies are swallowed whole by companies that make music, movies and magazines. Nothing is wrong with these adhesions in principle, but some "products," like books, suffer. Not long ago, the large book publishers would take on a number of excellent but unprofitable manuscripts as a kind of intellectual duty, pro bono work...