Word: beirutization
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...fight another Crip group up the street, for Blood to fight Blood. There were 462 gang-related murders in 1988, 107 of them in South Central, a 43-sq.-mi. stretch of ghetto with a population of 500,000. Though the murder rate does not approach the carnage of Beirut or El Salvador on a per capita basis, it is higher than that of Belfast or Burma. The U.S. Army has begun sending doctors to train in the emergency room of Martin Luther King Jr. General Hospital in Watts, because there they can get 24-hour-a-day experience treating...
...waiting rooms, hallways and even closets. Staffers eat large meals before going on duty, since there will be no breaks once they start. They treat wounds they hoped never to see outside a war zone: it is to Los Angeles, which had more automatic-weapons victims than Beirut last year, that the U.S. Army sends its physicians for combat training, at Martin Luther King Jr./Drew Medical Center. "What gives out is not patient care," says Dr. Elisabeth Rosenthal of New York Hospital, "but our sanity...
Charles Glass, an American journalist with Lebanese roots, watched the U.S. Navy off Beirut in 1983 and concluded that, like the Genoese and Pisan fleets aiding the Crusaders eight centuries earlier, it would soon sail home in ignorance and frustration. Lebanon and neighboring Syria, Israel, Jordan and Iraq, he argues, are "tribes with flags" rather than nations. Try as big powers might to control them with armies, navies and imported ideologies, the ties of "family, village, tribe and sect" have been much tougher...
...desolation" of the land, Glass set out from Alexandretta, now in southern Turkey, to Aqaba in Jordan, following the invasion path used by Alexander the Great and the Crusaders. His odyssey ended abruptly when a peculiarly modern kind of tribe, the Hizballah, kidnaped and held him hostage in Beirut for two months until his escape. The trip is the framework for this book. He describes it as a "literary and spiritual ramble through the history of a troubled land." It is really a travelogue, letting us see through Glass's omnivorous eye for detail what the author-wanderer experienced each...
Wasn't the South Lawn ceremony with Polhill a hero's welcome for a man who disregarded U.S. warnings against staying in Beirut? And didn't Polhill's secret message to Bush suggest to terrorists that this was a way to communicate with the President? "I don't worry so much as to the message," said Bush. "What I do worry about is if anybody perceives that we're putting a higher price on some human being by all of this . . . I sorted it out and did my best...