Word: blunts
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Dong Dang. Lang Son. Blunt yet musical Vietnamese place names, redolent of history, blood and death. At the railhead city of Dong Dang, a 30-ft. yellow gate marks Japan's invasion of Indochina in 1940, which prompted President Franklin Roosevelt's perhaps apocryphal vow that "we will not go to war over any damn Ding Dong." At Lang Son, a crowded market town nine miles to the southeast, a nipple-crested mountain that colonial troops named the "baroness's breast" overlooks the ruins of a fort demolished even before the Viet Minh's war against the French...
Despite Hanoi's superiority in experience, weaponry and logistics, low morale in the Vietnamese forces could blunt their advantages. Heavy casualties in Cambodia have severely impaired some Vietnamese soldiers' will to fight. Recruits have bribed their officers to let them return home. The AWOL rate is so high that the army command has announced a two-year reorganization plan that will better integrate the demoralized southern troops into a more aggressive fighting force. Mao Tse-tung may have been right when he said, "Weapons are an important factor in war but not the decisive factor; it is people...
...TIMES, too, the symbolism is too blunt. One theme that runs through the movie is Dave's disgust with the outmoded, conniving ways of the gypsies. If he has any mission it is to "bring the gypsies into the twentieth century." Fittingly he is the only gypsy with an American name other than Sharon. Dave, Tita, Rosa (their mother), and Groffo fit the older brother, younger sister, mother- and-father pattern of the ideal American family, despite their infighting...
Faceless men in black robes, judges speak a tongue that laymen find baffling. They are beholden only to higher judges, which means the Supreme Court is beholden to no one at all. Said blunt-spoken New Yorker Robert Jackson, a Supreme Court Justice in the Roosevelt and Truman years: "We are not final because we are infallible, but we are infallible because we are final...
...historical allusions in this corporate style (and there were plenty of them) were seriously trotted forth as an antidote to International Style purity. But they tended to escape the architects' control. Buildings mean things; sometimes they convey meaning in highly complicated ways, but they can also be very blunt, and unconsciously so. The silliness of many of the biggest recent official architectural projects in America flows from this. No doubt when Gordon Bunshaft and Skidmore, Owings & Merrill designed the vast concrete drum of the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington they had in mind the "ideal," unbuilt funerary monuments to heroes dreamed...