Word: manichaean
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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More than anywhere else, Jackson's Manichaean analysis crashes in its appraisal of entry barriers in the operating systems market. They are not nearly as high as he believes. Given the lightning speed with which information technology today is generating novelty, recent developments threaten not just to lower purported barriers but shatter them entirely. Java, a universal language being developed by Sun, should drastically decrease dependence on Windows. Internet servers that allow surfers to bypass Windows are also on the rise. As one venture capitalist at Accel Partners puts it, "in the past six months, we have not seen...
...issues can sometimes resemble the way he boxed while at the Naval Academy. "McCain would charge to the center of the ring and throw punches until someone went down," writes Robert Timberg in his account of McCain and four other notable academy grads of the Vietnam era. McCain's Manichaean take on the world may be effective in war, but it doesn't always work well on subtle issues like health care or tax cuts. "If you are against him, he sees you as evil or paid for or corrupt," says a colleague who has tangled with McCain but nevertheless...
...elegy for the past. As I sit here, on the brink of the fin de millennium, I'm already misty-eyed with nostalgia. I'll miss the 20th century. I really liked it. I liked the abstract art, the 12-tone music, the absurdist theater, the austere furniture, the Manichaean bipolar geopolitics. And so, given my longing for an irretrievable past, I think insularity and exile are the ambient notes to strive for this year, as opposed to your mindless, self-annulling, Leni Riefenstahl-style euphoria. Here's my provisional itinerary...
International crime will probably never attract the sort of headlines and public anxieties that were expended on the Manichaean struggle between the West and the U.S.S.R. Compared with the prospect of nuclear annihilation, hoodlums smuggling things across borders strike most people as an inevitable and tolerable fact of life. But John le Carre, the most artful chronicler of fictionalized cold war espionage (The Spy Who Came in from the Cold; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), takes a less sanguine view of the outlaw capitalism that only intensified after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the breakup of the old world...
...confusing moment. In the campaign of 1996, Bob Dole became almost an irrelevance. The real struggle was between the two versions, almost Manichaean, of Bill Clinton: the President bound for Rushmore, or the incipient felon. Both scenarios are speculations about the future, as all elections are. For the present, the American voter found a way between the two extremes (best hope, worst fear) by acquiescing to what seemed, on balance, the least unsatisfactory of the candidates...