Word: abjectly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...cycle of revenge and counterrevenge should be broken, but not by the abject submission of Americans in an Iranian psychodrama. In the first place, American meekness invites contempt not only in Iran but elsewhere in the world. Without acting with the pathological ferocity of revenge, Americans might want to administer a little of what psychologists call negative the when the time is right, something like the message that a hot stove delivers to someone who tries to sit on it. Both sides should remember, if they can, the Persian prov erb: "Blood cannot be washed away with blood." Revenge...
...unavailable to the casual eye. What come through most sharply in the photographs is an immediacy and potency of detail, an aura of enchanted concreteness radiating from the most ordinary places and things--the raw blue color of gravel, a shallow driveway, the symmetrical vacancies of parking lots, the abject curve in the necks of street lamps...
...Tehran, an apparent move toward the possible release of the hostages held by militants at the U.S. embassy came just as a special U.N. commission was ready to give up in abject failure. The militants, who have occupied the embassy for more than four months, prepared to turn over their 50 prisoners to Iran's ruling Revolutionary Council, but at week's end were still arguing with Iranian government officials as to when the transfer might actually take place...
However the Soviets react, the U.S. has no alternative but to boycott the Moscow Games, even if it does so in the company of only a few other countries. If the U.S. were to participate in the Games, the Kremlin would take it as an abject confession of American weakness, of an absence of will. The Soviets would read it as supine acquiescence. American responses to Soviet military adventurism are now limited; to decline to exercise the powerful option of an Olympic boycott would be an act of diplomatic negligence...
...limits of its power and resources. The unprecedented defeat of American arms in Viet Nam coincided with other descending trends: the shrinking of the dollar (gold went from $36 per oz. in 1970 to a record high of nearly $520 per oz. last week), the nation's abject dependence on an imperious OPEC for two-thirds of its oil, a failure in the nerves and muscles that used to make friends and enemies docile...