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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.
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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]
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