Word: assert
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Saddam's power grab is a bold reminder of the role brute force will always play in the history of nations. Without the threat of escalation to superpower conflict, countries with sophisticated weapons and thuggish rulers will try to take advantage of the shifting international climate to assert their will. The ( threat to U.S. interests is not some distant danger. It is very real, and not only because of the region's oil reserves. Does America really want to let the Saddams of the world shape the new global power structure...
Essayists on the American mind usually find it impossible to go much longer than two or three paragraphs before making some reference to Calvinism. But it takes guts for a playwright to make John Calvin, the 16th century theologian, an actual character onstage. Scholars of popular culture frequently assert that the national soul is mirrored in the game of baseball. Yet it takes great faith -- not only in his own intelligence but also in the audience's -- for a dramatist to depict the making of the American imperium through the life of centerfielder Ty Cobb. The nation's theater...
...Harry Hogge, and he is played by the redoubtable Robert Duvall. Harry is, naturally, stern but forgiving, all business on the track, a free and playful spirit away from it -- as much a fantasy as Cruise's neostud. But Duvall finds an odd shyness in Harry; he doesn't assert goodness, he just kind of, you know, behaves it. Duvall not only grounds his character in reality; he almost succeeds in grounding the whole picture in it as well. Anyway, he gives those grownups who happen to wander in where they are not wanted something to think about...
...loggers or environmentalists have ever seen the elusive spotted owl. They know it as either a costly subject of litigation or a rare distillation of the forest spirit. But on the summit of a steep ravine in Douglas County, a pair of spotted owls assert themselves, as if to prove they are more than a mere abstraction. Nesting in the cavity of a broken-topped fir, they scan for prey and ponder the rare two-legged observer far below. Their gentle mewing ! gives way to a distinctive four-note hoot: "who-who, who-who." The male drops down...
...storm. It's difficult to see what will emerge in the end. I'm convinced that the radical changes in Central and Eastern Europe in no way signal "the collapse of socialism." Genuine socialist values will not sink into oblivion. Even in the present environment of turbulent change they assert their right to exist...