Word: bitter
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Nadezhda Mandelstam, the brilliant, bitter memoirist of the Stalin era, wrote in the early '70s: "Evil has great momentum, but the forces of good are inert. The masses . . . have no fight in them, and will acquiesce in whatever happens." Until last week the Russian character was judged to be politically passive, even receptive to brutal rule. At first the coup seemed to confirm the norm. The news administered a dark shock, followed immediately by a depressed sense of resignation: of course, of course, the Russians must revert to their essential selves, to their own history. Gorbachev and glasnost were...
...political gambit, the method is tried and true. If you are an unpopular Vice President, refurbish your image by deriding an occupational group with an even lower approval rating than your own. Spiro Agnew popularized the ploy back in 1969 with his bitter denunciations of the news media. Following the same playbook, Vice President Dan Quayle -- a lawyer -- wangled an invitation to the American Bar Association convention in Atlanta and last week used the forum to mount a blistering attack on the legal profession...
Hong Kong's nervous depositors were hardly alone. The shutdown also froze some $400 million of deposits belonging to Beijing-controlled companies, giving China a bitter taste of the risks of capitalism. In Egypt the government fired the board of the country's B.C.C.I. affiliate and sought to recover $400 million in frozen assets. In Nigeria officials said they would provide $16 million to cover now worthless letters of credit from B.C.C.I. The shutdown even torpedoed shipping around the world. The Wall Street Journal reported that $85 million worth of freight sat stranded on some 1,000 ships because...
Some of them wrested the wheel from Rafsanjani last week. In recent months Rafsanjani has pursued better relations with Paris, seeing France as his gateway to the West. The U.S. is still perceived by many Iranians as the Great Satan, and bitter feelings linger from the feud with Britain over the safety of novelist Salman Rushdie, who was condemned to death in 1989 by the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini for his book The Satanic Verses. But France has been in a position to deal openly with Tehran since April 1990, when its last hostage was freed. Last month Paris agreed...
...terribly wrong with Jeffrey Dahmer. His stepmother, Shari Dahmer, who was interviewed last week by the Cleveland Plain Dealer before clamming up to the press, said that "when he was young, he liked to use acid to scrape the meat off dead animals." At 18, Jeffrey witnessed the bitter divorce of his parents and lived with his mother in Bath Township, Ohio. But one day, said Shari Dahmer, his mother disappeared with his younger brother, leaving Jeffrey with nothing. Often Dahmer attempted to sedate himself with alcohol. "He was a gentle person, but when he got drunk it would take...