Word: bushing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...festivities began with a tribute to the Declaration of the Rights of Man, attended by President George Bush and 33 other world leaders. Then Mitterrand inaugurated the glittering new $400 million steel-and-marble opera house overlooking the Place de la Bastille. The celebration culminated two days later on July 14, the anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, as fireworks exploded over the Place de la Concorde, once the site of the dreaded guillotine. Attended by a crowd of 500,000 and beamed to a worldwide TV audience of 700 million, the $15 million "opera-ballet" by French advertising...
...George Bush's march across the Continent last week threw into sharp relief two major and intersecting historic trends. His foray into Poland and Hungary highlighted how Eastern Europe, at least in part, is tumbling toward greater independence from its Soviet overlords. His attendance at the Paris summit of industrialized nations at week's end illustrated, less intentionally, how Western Europe similarly continues to become more independent of the U.S. And Bush's skimpy aid offerings in Warsaw and Budapest showed that as the waning of the cold war hastens these shifts in Europe's tectonic plates...
...most important aspect of Bush's visit was its symbolism. "The Iron Curtain has begun to part," the President declared in an eloquent speech at the Karl Marx University in Budapest. In front of Gdansk's Lenin shipyard, he told cheering Poles, "America stands with you." While offering lavish praise for the courage shown by Poland and Hungary, he avoided baiting the Soviet Union, a sensible strategy for dealing with a bear that for the moment seems unusually amiable...
...rescheduling of Poland's debt. Hungarian banker and businessman Sandor Demjan, in a gesture that was at once magnanimous and a bit slighting (as well as rather amazing), told the New York Times that he would match the $25 million in direct U.S. economic aid. The $145 million in Bush's gift bag for easing Poland and Hungary away from Communism was dwarfed last week by the $70 billion the Air Force requested for the Stealth bomber program and by the $43 billion for the Third World that Japan offered at the Paris summit...
...program that puts people in space may indeed have an important role to play in expanding our knowledge of the universe, one that warrants the huge expenditure it will require. But as it stands now, the United States and President Bush appear to be taking the wrong path and for all the wrong reasons...