Word: reinvention
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Unlike Japan, which succeeds because its strict hierarchical system matches its cultural demands for order, America is at its best when it allows its people to reinvent themselves and create new opportunities, Fallows writes. Disorder makes America great, and great Americans are the ones who aren't constrained by stagnant societal customs. Those who really contribute to American strength are the entrepreneurs like Steve Wozniak and Steven Jobs, not to mention the grunts who take jobs in the oil fields when their factories close, confident that they can start their lives anew...
...example, in The Great Railway Bazaar, his 1975 best-selling account of rattling through Asia, Theroux concluded that "the difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows." He added wistfully, "How sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction...
Gorbachev's economic reforms, while radical, are nonetheless carefully circumscribed. He is not marching headlong to capitalism but is attempting to reinvent Marxism by creating socialist markets, socialist competition and cooperative ventures. Private ownership of the means of production (land, factories) is still prohibited. Individuals cannot hire workers with a view to profiting from their labor but rather must form cooperative arrangements. There is a noncompetitive banking system, and no stock market for financing private ventures. Most important of all, there is no rational price system: thousands of prices are still set by state fiat rather than supply and demand...
...with Stroessner casts doubt on his claims. His style of high living is attributed to heavy involvement in Paraguay's large-scale smuggling and drug trade. As a U.S. intelligence analyst put it, "He's been a 30-year intimate of the old man. He's not going to reinvent the wheel...
...even harshly, that won't simply be tossed off as too conservative. There can be no forgiveness, no compassion for the criminal who kills. He should face a barren and hopeless life of incarceration. Perhaps the 50 states should, together, build a giant maximum- security prison in the desert. Reinvent Dante's Inferno. Let its inhabitants languish and be forgotten by all Americans. Just don't kill them for me. I don't want to be a murderer. Ted Bundy is dead. Would that he were sitting in an empty cell contemplating his crimes for the next 40 years...