Word: brasses
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...soldiers have come back angry from war. And they have had problems. In Elizabethan England, a disbandment of armies automatically meant a major increase in the number of thieves and highwaymen preying on civilians. In fact, veterans are almost always treated badly after a war, even if the brass bands do turn out for a ceremonial welcome home. During the '20s, the windows of the nation's pawnshops were filled with soldiers' medals for heroism from the Great War. Catiline, Hitler and Mussolini constructed their sinister power bases upon the grievances of veterans...
Despite their Renaissance garb, the Vatican's famous Swiss Guards are not entirely decorative. They carry halberds, but submachine guns are never far away. At the bronze door of St. Peter's they are stashed in a brass umbrella stand, unnoticed by tourists who click away at the guards' fanciful uniforms. Vatican security is, in fact, a mixture of modern and medieval. Plainclothes Swiss Guards and men from the papal gendarmes hustle alongside the Pope's car when he appears for audiences, just as the Secret Service does for the President...
With those defiant words, issued at his union's 1976 convention in Las Vegas, Teamster Boss Frank E. Fitzsimmons underscored the brass-knuckles philosophy of union management that ruled supreme during his decade-long tenure as president of the U.S.'s largest trade union. Fitzsimmons' death last week in La Jolla, Calif, of lung cancer at age 73 makes room at the top of the 78-year-old International Brotherhood of Teamsters; the succession is not clear. But there seems little prospect that the union will change very much from what it was under the bluff...
...overwhelming feeling seems to be loss of control in every facet of life. Certainly, the brass was not in charge. The stories of incompetence at the front are almost as excruciating to read as to live through--the deaths of 1000 Americans by "friendly fire" in Vietnam seem more than understandable after reading this book. Perhaps even worse, however, was the real leadership of the war in Washington, which comes across as genuinely evil, pathologically, maybe even intentionally inept, driven by what it wanted to see and not what was there. We didn't understand Asian society--not its structure...
Reading these books can be an exercise in abject fascination: matters of morality are disturbingly outflanked by questions of sanity. Hollywood has attempted this effect with Defense Department-size budgets, celebrity brass and vast pretensions. The results have been a parody of the wastefulness of war itself. The truth of a holocaust is not apocalyptic; it comes slowly, relentlessly, word by word. -ByR.Z. Sheppard...