Word: blusterous
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Arab journalist put it: "It doesn't matter if the Israelis eventually counterattack and drive us back. What matters is that the world now no longer will laugh at us when we threaten to fight. No longer will it dismiss our threats as a lot of bluff and bluster. It will have to take us seriously." Arabs round the world last week felt that they had finally shed their image as a people who could not and would not fight, an image that had grown out of the dismal defeats at the hands of Israel over the past...
...zany creature that the public saw, all that campy, trivial bluster, was real enough in its way, it was far from the substance of her deeper glow," writes Myra Friedman in Buried Alive (Morrow; $7.95). "The hysteria, the extravagance, and the foolish noise were a barren fuss embraced by barren hearts, and it was a lost child who would kick up such rubbish to gain entrance into rooms so empty." Written with a sympathetic intelligence, at times fiercely lyrical, Buried Alive is an honest book about Joplin the idol and Joplin the victim in the frantic, manic disarray of rock...
...Bluster aside, Nixon has a point: the U.S. does face discriminatory trade practices abroad. Tariffs are not the most serious problem; on finished goods, they average 8.5% in Japan and 8% in the Common Market v. 8.4% in the U.S. But the Common Market lavishes on its farmers subsidies that are generous even by U.S. standards, encouraging them to grow food that could be imported more cheaply from the U.S. Beyond that, it maintains a system of variable import taxes that can be adjusted upward to keep the price of American foodstuffs as high as they were before dollar devaluation...
Galy's transformation is thrust upon hits because the soldiers fear annihilation by their brutish sergeant, Bloody Five, whom pleasure is in others' punishment. Though his bluster and machismo parody his he-man style, Bloody Five is in truth as cruel as his nickname. His power overwhelms everyone but the camp follower, Widow Begbick. She knows the weakness intrinsic to all men especially strong ones, and eventually triggers Five's disgrace. Bloody Five's bravura balances Galy's passive foolishness. As surely as the latter metamorphoses into the army beast, the former weakens and falls. It's grim stuff...
...integration of local hospitals in the mid-'60s, Hobson one day walked into an all-white ward in the Washington Hospital Center and calmly climbed into an empty bed. That stunt won him a brief stint in jail-but also the eventual integration of the hospital. If his bluster was good, his bluff was even better. Perhaps Hobson's most famous episode was the great rat scare. To dramatize the rodent problem in ghetto housing, he threatened almost daily to release hundreds of rats in fashionable Georgetown. He drove through Washington's black ghetto with a cage...