Word: bandit
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Throw up our hands-an interesting idiom. The modern day bandit operates in the realm of jet airplanes. But blow up a plane? Preposterous. At least that was the reaction of the sixty passengers on United's flight 249 from Denver to Portland. The threat seemed very distant until the FBI men spoke: "Do any of you know any reason why someone would want to kill you? Can you think of any reason in your private lives to make someone want to do this?" The bomb scare was a dramatic event and the passengers tended to be detached, to view...
...Bold talk for a one-eyed fat man," the bandit leader sneers...
...legal boundary to crime has not been crossed, the banditry is bloodless, the insult to the spirit is in the bandit leer of those grinning lips, the brazen talk, the courting, pawing, smoking, spitting-two paces away from the Passion of Christ. The insult is the triumphantly contemptuous expression with which the snotty brats have come to watch their grandfathers re-enact their forefathers' rites...
...slogans in the Mexico City student revolt only last summer. (Womack is not sure Zapata ever said it, and the students attributed the remark to Father Hidalgo, the fervent but inept tocsin-sounder of the Revolution of 1810.) To the old regime in Zapata's time, he was a bandit of a new Attila; to the ruling class today, he remains the ominous symbol for the dark forces within the dispossessed which could still be stirred up at an moment. For those of us who like our history epic and our heroes simple and romantic, Zapata is Marlon Brando schmarfing...
...press facilities to extract a little something extra. A businessman, bank or civic organization that coughed up the cash for a work he had his eye on, could count on being eulogized in his publications. Anyone who balked might find himself attacked (as was one industrialist) as "a bandit, pachyderm, hippopotamus, Berber filibuster, Barbary pirate...