Word: ashli
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...empire in decline and that what the Soviets call "the correlation of forces" is in fact shifting in favor of the West. In a speech to Members of the British Parliament in June 1982, Reagan hailed "the march of freedom and democracy which will leave Marxism-Leninism on the ash heap of history." In January, Secretary of State George Shultz told a Senate committee, "It is the Communist system that looks bankrupt, morally as well as economically; the West is resilient and resurgent...
...Strategic Defense Initiative (S.D.I.) in March 1983, Reagan said that his goal was to make nuclear weapons "impotent and obsolete." The Soviets read this not as a utopian dream but as an ominous threat: it was clearly their nuclear arsenal that Reagan most wanted to consign to the ash heap of history. The effect, as they saw it, would be to neutralize Soviet retaliatory forces and thereby make the U.S.S.R. a tempting target for a first strike...
Mardi Gras, or Fat Tuesday, the day before Ash Wednesday, the commencement of Lent, which means 40 days of penitence, blurred bibulously by last week in preponderantly Roman Catholic Louisiana, where the excesses were so fulsome, the wassail so all embracing, that the effect upon a paragrapher who participated was the loss of the ability to construct a straight sentence, or so it feels...
...searchlights, like a transcendental airplane . . . the amazing apocalyptic sound of the giant cannon . . . A rider at full gallop in the dark . . . Poor pig that I am, I can only live in dreams." War went beyond art and burned out his fantasies. What it left behind was a hard, copious ash of realism, and an unassuageable will to describe what it was to be not just a German but a European, an inhabitant of the Berlin-Naples-Pari s triangle. "Beckmann has been made ill," he sardonically remarked in 1924, "by his indestructible preference for the defective invention called Life...
...down at the snowy earth where my father lies. There are footprints under the maple tree that grows over his grave. People have been here, although the snow around the other graves is untrammeled. It was June when we buried him--the summer solstice. The day I return is Ash Wednesday. He lies there in the cold winter ground. I make a snowball with my hands, pack it firm, and lob it gently at the grave. There doesn't seem anything else to do here...