Word: paranoid
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...lends itself to demonization, and the air this week is thick with paranoid e-mail to the effect that a second Bush administration will end civilization as we know it. The wretched of America will be turned out in the snow on Christmas eve. Bloated middle-aged white men will ride about the town on the backs of blacks and Hispanics, as if on the backs of burros; back-alley coathangers will return women to the reign of an American Taliban. (In the privacy of their own minds, most conservatives, I suspect, believe that as a matter of practical politics...
...that Hillary was elected by "a very biased media who anointed her queen." When they are not engaging in serious or comic bombast, they and their callers verge on the delusional. It's hard to think of another part of American society that is both so powerful and so paranoid...
...tell you the wrong reasons for it and propose another model, which in turn proves equally unworkable. This is as true of nutty little proposals by discontented geniuses--like the idea of communalist, rural "pantisocracy" put forward by Shelley, Coleridge and others in their youth--as it is of paranoid, pseudo-collectivist systems that take over whole societies and make huge contributions to the sum of human misery, like Stalinism. We flawed animals can be somewhat improved, spottily and with difficulty; but we cannot be perfected, which is what the Utopian project, in its various forms, is all about...
...Light Prince and the Dark Prince. There they were again, under the studio lights of the famous first debate - graceful Jack, loverboy and martyr; and eye-flicking Tricky, unshaven paranoid with sweat on his upper lip. The scene has persisted in the mind like a cave drawing, a cartoon from prehistory...
...mailbox. Sometimes I was given toys with company logos. And everywhere I went on campus, posters promising a wonderful I-banking/consulting life lined the stairwells, covered the entrances to the dining halls and glared at me from every lamppost and tape-able surface imaginable. Maybe I'm just paranoid, but these messages left little room in my mind for misinterpretation: Forget art. I should bank or consult. But I'm stubborn, and so, naively, I ignored the signs thinking that new ones would inevitably appear guiding me along my dream-path to a sun-filled studio. I patiently waited...