Word: backwards
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Among the first Western visitors were 33 Italians who paid $2,000 apiece in December for a nine-day tour of Tehran and major archaeological sites. Elda Chiaraviglio, a Turin travel agent who helped organize the group, called the visit "a leap backward into medieval Islam, but fascinating." While many Iranians remain hostile to the U.S., she noted, the American dollar was the only foreign currency that Iranian black marketeers would accept...
...military machine may still look formidable from 22,000 miles up, the altitude from which American spy satellites snap pictures of armored columns on maneuver. But at ground level, the Soviet army looks more like a lot of bewildered 17-year-olds, many of them far from their backward, non- Russian homelands, bouncing around in the back of clunky trucks on potholed roads leading nowhere useful to their country's devastated economy. Yet they are counted under the ominous rubric of 4.25 million men under arms in the Warsaw Pact. So are over a million troops, most of them draftees...
...Gorbachev phenomenon is the result of Soviet pride and Soviet shame. For more than a generation, the citizens of the U.S.S.R. have lived with that contradiction. They have had the satisfaction of knowing their country was a superpower -- and the frustration of living in a backward economy. They made their homes in crowded, decrepit dwellings. Shopping for necessities was a daily despair. Citizenship itself was often an insult and sometimes an injury. Their government would not let them express their thoughts or travel abroad. For years they could explain it all away: the hardship was the aftermath of the Great...
...were at a cathedral organ with all the stops out. Each scene, whether it means to elegize or horrify, is unrelenting, unmodulated, rabid with its own righteousness. And yet, frequently, the crazy machine works because of its voluptuous imagery. When Ron is wounded in Viet Nam, he collapses backward, and from his mouth a stream of blood spurts like the fountain of lost youth. The hospital sequence is an insider's tour of hell, and the Mexican brothel is an endless emotional purgatory...
...Nathanael West. As the tycoon (Rene Auberjonois) lays down the law (no social criticism, no politics, no hint of kinky sex), the moneystruck young writer (Gregg Edelman) peevishly retypes his scenes -- and, in an inspired bit of playfulness, that action causes his characters to move and speak jerkily backward, as if a film were being rewound, until they are back in position to perform the new bowdlerized version...