link to news zone link to document abstracts link to short briefings documents        news archive links at abelard.org news resources at abelard.org interesting site links at abelard's news and comment zone orientation at abelard's news and comment zone
site map Energy - beyond fossil fuelsChildren and television violence     technology zone at abelard.org: how to survive and thrive on the web economics and money zone at abelard.org - government swindles and how to transfer money on the net visit abelard's gallery

back to abelard's front page

news archives
politics

article archives at abelard's news and comment zonepolitics archives 1 2 3 4 5
III-2004: 10 18 22 25 27 31 IV-2004: 09 13 15 26
V-2004:
03 03-2 07 13 18 19
New translation, the Magna Carta
 
You are here: politics news for 19.05.2004 < News < Home

 

thank god for american optimism in the face of tired european defeatism

This is why the USA leads the world, while old Europe remains sclerotic. [1]

“ American history sometimes seems to be the same story repeated over and over again. Some group of big-dreaming but foolhardy adventurers head out to eradicate some evil and to realize some golden future. They get halfway along their journey and find they are unprepared for the harsh reality they suddenly face. It's too late to turn back, so they reinvent their mission. They toss out illusions and adopt an almost desperate pragmatism. They never do realize the utopia they initially dreamed about, but they do build something better than what came before.”

“The emerging responsible faction has no time now for the witless applause lines [of] jeering jackdaws on left and right....”

They never ever had.

related link
us politics and press attitudes

 

end notes:
1 sclerotic (figurative)
Unmoving, unchanging, rigid.
1965 Listener 20 May 737/2 Why is it, I asked myself, that so many theatre people in Russia call the Moscow Arts old-fashioned and sclerotic?
1968 Daily Tel. (Colour Suppl.) 13 Dec. 61/1 The sidewalks of New York seem to get harder year by year, the skyscrapers more inhumanly overbearing, the traffic more sclerotic.
1979 Washington Star 8 May a15/7 She [sc. Margaret Thatcher] has to deal with tacky little things like the secondary boycotts, repealing sclerotic tax laws, [etc.].
[From OED]

advertising
disclaimer

advertising
disclaimer


latest abstracts briefings information   archives resources interesting orientation

email abelard email email_abelard [at] abelard.org

© abelard, 2004, 19 may
all rights reserved

the address for this document is https://www.abelard.org/news/politics040519.asp

variable words
prints as 1 A4 pages (on my printer and set-up)