Word: backdrop
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LAST FRIDAY, THE Vice President of the United States was in town to preach the gospel of free enterprise against a hi-tech backdrop. With 40 reporters and 20 television cameras in tow, George Bush toured the Teradyne Co. plant in South Boston and addressed several hundred employees. The buzzwords of the day were familiar ones--innovation, growth, opportunity and competitiveness. The omissions were just as predictable...
...months the speculation had been building, fed in part by Soviet officials themselves, that the United Nations 40th anniversary session in New York this September would provide the backdrop for an informal meeting between President Reagan and Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev. But last week Armand Hammer, 87, chairman of the Occidental Petroleum Corp.. revealed in Moscow that he had been told by Anatoli Dobrynin, the Soviet Ambassador in Washington, that Gorbachev would not attend the U.N. session. The decision was later confirmed by a U.S. official in Moscow...
Back in the U.S., some worried relatives had learned of the hijacking only hours before they had intended to go to the airport to welcome travelers home. Against a backdrop of yellow ribbons and flickering candles, parishioners of three Catholic churches in the Chicago area spent the day praying, huddling around radios and exchanging bits of information. They were cheered by the news that many of their 24 friends had been released in Beirut or Algiers. "We're waiting, we're praying, we're hoping," said the Rev. Robert Garrity of St. Margaret Mary Church in Algonquin, where parishioners maintained...
...argument for working within the system, though superficially attractive and easy to swallow, is morally vacuous and ultimately disingenuous when viewed against the backdrop of decades of stagnation and movement away from real record in South Africa. A policy like constructive engagement that claims to be working for reform while the system becomes more oppresive, more violent, more abominable, is a policy that has been coopted...
Perhaps the most explicitly and consistently autobiographical of major American dramatists, Williams balanced lyrical language and wistful reverie against a backdrop of barely repressed violence and sex (for him, they were much the same). He sided always with the outcast, and most of his social exiles were reviled, not merely because they belonged to an oppressed group but because there was something deeply askew in their psyches. Williams pursued men sexually but delighted in the company of women and viewed most of his heroines as extensions of himself, valorous but doomed. In Iguana, Summer and Smoke, Suddenly Last Summer...