Word: americana
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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DIED. CLEMENT CONGER, 91, White House and State Department curator who restored diplomatic reception rooms to their grandeur in the late 19th century; in Delray Beach, Fla. Known in Washington as "the Grand Acquisitor," he amassed an Americana collection of antiques and fine art worth more than $100 million, one of the largest in the world...
...December 55), a Playboy employee whose name stayed on the masthead for a decade or so as readers? liaison. She cued the notion of the Playmate as hometown houri: not a showgirl or call girl but the girl next door (or next-office), the succulent embodiment of ordinary Americana. The job of posing for a girlie magazine was now not a shame for a young woman but a kind of honor, like being chosen Homecoming Queen. What John Skow wrote of the Playboy Club Bunny - that she was ?half geisha and half double-malted? - applied even more to the Playmate...
Thus were born the new American services, which since 1990 have fought five wars--in Kuwait, Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq--with outstanding success. Even a superpower, however, is only as good as the forces through which it exercises that power. But Pax Americana, like Pax Britannica, is guaranteed by a body of servicemen and -women who have no equal elsewhere on the globe...
This writing gig, this is my Neighborhood of Make-Believe, where it is easy to be bold and honest and confrontational. But in my real life, I have always been shy and wussy, and Mr. Rogers' gentle-Americana Buddhism made me feel as if that was good. He knew that the only reassurance in the face of the Sendakian horrors of childhood--the uncertainty, the lack of control--is acceptance. His neighborhood wasn't a utopia--he lived alone in a small apartment with a fish tank--but a community where every type of person was nice to him because...
...BACK-PAX AMERICANA: Historian John Keegan on the soldier as U.S. ambassador...