Word: paranoia
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...painful change in the short stories he sent out: he stripped them of all traces of ethnic identity. "What I'd do is write in the first person about somebody like myself, but I wouldn't identify him as Chinese American," he says. "I was trying to satisfy my paranoia about what people wanted to read or what editors thought people wanted to read. And I didn't see anything out there to tell me differently...
...beyond our distaste for their timing and our disgust for their explicit support of sodomy laws, the posters reinforce a ridiculous paranoia: No one--not officials from the admissions office, not leaders of gay groups on campus--has ever claimed that sexual orientation is or should be an advantage in the admissions process...
Within 48 hours or so, Elkin puts his hero through permutations of paranoia. No matter how his language prattles, jokes, howls, sings, the commissioner cannot quite divert himself from the knowledge that "life goes on." Whatever his other failings, Bobbo, like the best of Elkin's past characters, triumphs in the end as a world-class monologist...
...measure of the degree of tension, not to say the depths of paranoia bedeviling the country. When they arrived at the federal parliament in Belgrade last week, two Croatian Deputies and their bodyguards were obliged to check their handguns at the door. The gun toters all went home later in one piece, but that was more than could be said for the state of the nation. As of last week, leaders of Yugoslavia's six contentious republics had held four fruitless rounds of talks in an effort to resolve a fateful drive toward secession, and the roiling crisis is tearing...
...frequent allusions in the West to Saddam's "paranoia" thus make his behavior seem more complicated than it really is. He does not have to fantasize enemies; he has inherited and made enough to last several lifetimes. His invasion of Iran in 1980 is often cited as a headstrong blunder. True, Saddam could not have foreseen the initial defeats and the debilitating eight- year war that would follow. But hindsight suggests that he would probably have provoked Iran into battle even if he had known all the consequences at the outset. From his point of view, the alternative was worse...