Word: paranoia
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When Stalin died in 1953, he was far gone in paranoia, convinced that a cabal of Jewish doctors was trying to poison him. Only after shooting Stalin's reptilian police chief, Lavrenty Beria, did the Kremlin survivors, notably the new Communist Party Secretary, Nikita Khrushchev, try to shift to a new policy known as "the thaw." In a four-hour speech before the 20th Party Congress, supposedly secret but widely leaked, Khrushchev described to the faithful for the first time the full range of Stalin's crimes. ("But where were you during all those years?" one listener asked Khrushchev, according...
These details establish the absolutely typical Pynchon plot. An evil, well- organized and immensely powerful enemy sows "the merciless spores of paranoia" among a shaggy, lost group of drifting souls who find the real world threatening under the best of circumstances. The intended victims, not all of whom think too clearly anymore, have other problems as well, including the task of making sense out of what is happening to them while knowing that sense, strictly defined, is a weapon of the other side. Caught between these opposing, mismatched factions is a child, Prairie, who would dearly love to find...
...about to expire. To oil the cogs of a restructured economic machine, he would have to inspire productivity and reclaim for the consumer sector much of the vast resources and brainpower that had been commandeered by the military. And to do that he had to overcome traditional Bolshevik paranoia and reappraise the threat to the Soviet Union from the West. "Security," he wrote in 1987, "can no longer be ensured by military means...
...film ends with a great shot. Blaze walks out of the state house where Earl's corpse lies, and the camera ascends to take in Long's old domain. Randy Newman's poignant song Louisiana 1927 -- a cracker's lament about a devastating flood -- reaches its apogee of symphonic paranoia with the line "They're tryin' to wash us away." Just then, the camera discovers the Mississippi roaring past, washing away Earl and his wily, wild, pre-TV tradition of Southern politics. What has happened down there is that the wind has changed, and for its last three minutes Blaze...
...defenders will claim that the average citizen can't understand the necessity of these seemingly trivial investigations. The motive for beginning this long and costly investigation, however, was not a legitimate security concern, but J. Edgar Hoover's paranoia. The FBI had no probable cause and no evidence that librarians were tools of a Soviet conspiracy. Even more disturbing, Sessions still doesn't believe that FBI was doing anything out of the ordinary...