Word: breakdown
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...anxiety behind the phrase "family values" may derive from an intimation of such breakdown, a flicker of the instant when the moral slippery slope may swivel like a trapdoor to right angles. Americans see the inner Ik all the time these days. They glimpsed it out of the corner of the eye for a moment when an 82-year-old man with Alzheimer's disease was abandoned at the dog track in Post Falls, Idaho, last March. A cautionary scene -- and it turned into a morning talk-show joke: "It's dog-track time for you, doofus!" the host with...
...blues, in paint. Everything seems right about the pattern of Sowing (circa 1940): the fierce orange and yellow stripes, the eccentric placement and displacement of shape, the not quite naive use of repetition and rhyme, even the comic-strip blue cabin and the Looney Tunes mule. And The Breakdown (circa 1940-41), showing a sharecropper's feet protruding from beneath his stalled jalopy while a huge sun sinks and his wife scrapes together a meal by the side of the road, has some of the deep, wry, emblematic pathos of Philip Guston's late work...
Nichols' Pony appropriately annoys the audience with adolescent behavior, interspersed with glimpses of desperate insecurity. His final breakdown is strained and his subsequent apology not contrite enough, but this does not mar his performance...
...immediate cause of the breakdown was the A.N.C.'s indignation over the particularly pitiless slaughter of 42 people in Boipatong, near Johannesburg. Discontent has grown intense in A.N.C. ranks over the ceaseless violence. When Mandela visited Boipatong last week, he and his entourage were taunted by a song that included the lyrics: "While they kill our people, you behave like lambs...
...breakdown had been brewing since May. But the negotiations, known as the Convention for a Democratic South Africa, collapsed altogether when the African National Congress withdrew from the talks after the Boipatong massacre. The A.N.C. also called for South Africa's team to withdraw from the Olympic Games. The Congress accused the government of negotiating while fostering violence and charged supporters of its rival, the Zulu-dominated Inkatha Freedom Party, with carrying out the massacre with the aid of government security forces. President F.W. de Klerk denied both allegations. But late in the week, a black mine-security guard told...