Word: birthright
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...narrator is the relentlessly randy Danny Smiricky -- also the hero of Skvorecky's critically praised The Engineer of Human Souls (1984) -- who habitually casts a jaundiced eye on the weird world of his birthright: a subjugated land where peasants bump elbows with intellectuals and the new dogma of communism has declared war on old Roman Catholic beliefs. Consigned in 1948 to teach the wisdom of Stalin at a vocational school in the rural Czechoslovak village of Hronov, Danny fights off a venereal disease contracted earlier and, rather unsuccessfully, the temptations of his female students. While he attends Mass with Vixi...
Make no mistake, not even the most credulous couch potato believes that, say, 16-year-old Doogie Howser, M.D., is for real. But the easy affluence that is the birthright of Doogie's family might seem representative enough, especially when on the following ABC show (The Marshall Chronicles) the TV father was dressed in a tuxedo for an evening of Manhattan night life. Despite the pseudo-lower-middle- class realism of Roseanne and Married with Children, the implicit message in much of prime time remains almost effortless economic entitlement. For while most of the nation resides in what bicoastal types...
...debut as a director. Still, it makes him itch that his recent roles have earned him a Hunk-of-the-Month label. "I have the same problem with stardom that I have with royalty," he says. "They're judged not by the quality of their ideas but by their birthright. I didn't set out to be a star. If you do, you engage in manipulation. You do stuff to be liked. I didn't want to be endorsed; I wanted to be listened to. I had ideas about things...
Shamir believes that Israel has a historic birthright to the lands it seized from Jordan in the 1967 War. After 21 years of Israeli rule and settlements in the West Bank, Palestinian Arabs still outnumber Jews there 16 to 1. For demographic reasons alone, it is hard to see how "Greater" Israel can remain a Jewish state and still be a true democracy. Nor is an Israel whose soldiers are ordered to break teenagers' bones the "light unto the nations" that its Zionist founders wanted...
...state's vast aqueduct system, there is room for both sides to benefit from resale of unneeded irrigation allotments. The idea had two minor drawbacks: many California farmers would sooner spread salt on their fields than surrender an acre-foot of the water they regard as their birthright, and second, Willey's employer, the Environmental Defense Fund, has a reputation for fighting the new water projects coveted by a lot of farmers. But Willey and E.D.F. offered to find farmers willing to sell, and the Mono Lake litigants agreed to pay for the search...