Word: babylons
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...Viet Nam in 1967, recalls Robert Sutton, a ship's gunner, "I inhaled the fumes of the foliage that had been killed by Agent Orange." Before long, he says, he began suffering from diarrhea, vomiting and headaches, and in 1969 was given an honorable discharge. Back in West Babylon, N.Y., the veteran's health deteriorated rapidly; today the unemployed steam fitter's ailments include brain lesions and degenerative joint disease...
...debate about Coolidge will go on. The verbal sketches in William Allen White's 1938 biography A Puritan in Babylon still loom large in public memory: "Flinty-faced, sugar-cured and hickory-smoked, the wordless Yankee joss sitting cross-legged in the, cosmos"; the world was "running madly extravagant"; Coolidge "stood, blinking at the tidal forces he could not fathom." If Reagan's economics fail, historians may say the same about him. If supply-side succeeds in some fashion, Reagan will not only give himself a boost in history but win a few more years of White House...
...themes of Steely Dan songs remain unclear. "Babylon Sisters" opens the album, a psalm to menages a trois. But not to worry, the Dan says, "The kid will live and learn, as he watches his bridges burn from the point of no return." Wow--three cliches strung together in an entirely new fashion! Music has never been so coolly banal...
...production also succeeds in recreating the detail of Brecht's fanciful vision of America as a Babylon on wheels. Sordid vulgarity falls from the garish costumes, the trashy props, and the giant neon arch--inscribed with the names of the seven sins lighting up in succession like a stage-wide slot machine that lands on whichever sins is being acted out below. In this world, beauty becomes a painted go-go dancer, so it's no wonder lust, pride and anger should seem more virtuous than the alternatives of self-denial, hypocrisy and quiescence...
Anthony Hans Klotz Babylon...