Word: sane
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Dates: during 1980-1980
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Where Carter has secured a windfall profits tax to finance development of alternative energy sources, Reagan blindly insists that we will simply "produce" more oil and that the free enterprise system, unencumbered by environmental guidelines that Carter has supported, will fill in the gaps. Where Carter has nominated sane, balanced people to guide the country's future in nuclear energy, Reagan would pull out all the stops. Where Carter has taken steps to curb industrial pollution, Reagan thinks pollution comes only from volcanoes and trees...
...hard to imagine Thoreau dumping dirt on his head, just as it is hard to imagine him trying to escape from little eyes. He was sane; he went by himself, as hermits must, with no spouse to hit with the tools. And he went for a day's walk from his home, in a hospitable environment where it never hit 50 below, so he could spend his time rowing around in a boat, picking berries, reading classics, keeping a journal, not buying stoves, and not trekking to town for gasoline. Isolation was a means of gaining solitude...
McPhee, of course, does manage to find a pattern. All his heroes share rationality and expertise, none are geniuses but all are talented. Steering clear of poets, not to mention saints, prostitutes and writers, he concentrates on the sane. His ideals are Jeffersonian-farmers wander in and out of his collections, and inventors rank only below professional canoeists in his pantheon. Meet Richard Eckert, a man given to "gray suits, gray socks, black shoes, white shirts and Paisley ties," who invents the wave-tossed nuke while he is "standing wet, naked and soapy in his shower." This, perhaps, is inspiration...
...Percy's last novel Lancelot, the reader can't be sure whether these ideas are the product of a sane mind, ideas with which the author concurs--or whether they are lunatic ravings. It's a very convenient device for Percy. He can say controversial things about war, about Nazis and Jews, about other sensitive subjects and still leave room for himself to disavow then if a reader gets too offended. But in The Second Coming, Percy introduces a new sort of character--the genuine schizophrenic, not a mouthpiece for his own questionable ideas but a true dysfunctional. Allison...
...Nazis holed up in a Belgian insane asylum recalls the charming ballet of war in King of Hearts. Fuller's use of music and symbols is again heavy-handed and the sequence ends with a madman firing a machine gun with berserk glee and shouting, "I am sane, I am sane," but poetic camera movement and a sense of humor, even about death, make the scene more than just another "Who's-really-insane?" routine...