Word: cowboyed
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...slow waltz or high-stepping to the beat of La Bamba. But when the crush of couples on the polished concrete floor of the store's veranda became too great on a recent Friday night, a score or more of folks took to dancing in the street anyway. Scuffed cowboy boots and battered sneakers kicked up dust and occasionally sent crushed aluminum beer / cans skittering across the gravel surface. The excited yelps of dancers wafted off into the desert toward arid mountain ranges swathed in the pale light of a distant moon, keeping silent watch over the U.S.-Mexican border...
...which faith and good works reinforce each other, Anglo pragmatism rubs shoulders with Latino magic, and John Wayne might peacefully coexist with Gabriel Garcia Marquez. The spirits may stir up a gust of wind, a kind of Milagro airlift, to bring the good word to town. And a cowboy (James Gammon) with a forbidding face -- you figure him to be the Jack Palance villain from Shane -- may up and save your life. Nobody will get hurt, except in the pride. Finally, the village will erupt into an alfresco fiesta, and the bad cop (Christopher Walken) will smile conspiratorily...
...moment, the cowboys are simply trying to shoot straight. "Cowboy four," Captain Anderson, an earnest young Florida-born pilot whose dentist father talked him past a water-skiing career by providing flying lessons at 16, is up. Circling a mile high around the mountains, Anderson suddenly dives to 200 feet to avoid "enemy" radar and screams at 600 m.p.h. toward the intended victim, an Army surplus M-47 tank having a bad day. The desert is a Jackson Pollock abstract, and Anderson is so low that when he is just four miles away, he can't see the tank...
...briefing rooms, close their doors and punch up video tapes of the day's run. Maybe one pilot stayed too long over the target, jamming the next man. Somebody probably flew too low, or too high. "The R.O.E. ((rules of engagement)) in a debriefing is no rank," says Cowboy Dulaney. "A lieutenant can tell a colonel what he did wrong -- with a little tact...
Gore is a combination of St. Alban's polish and down-home charm, Harvard intellectualism and backwoods shrewdness. He is almost as at home wearing pointy cowboy boots as clunky wing tips, drinking Corona beer in a rowdy bar as sipping Chablis in a Georgetown salon. But not quite. Now, in an effort to reposition himself, Gore the cerebral technocrat is coming on like a fiery champion of "working men and women." His problem is making the transformation credible. On the stump, he attempts to heighten emotions simply by raising the volume of his voice. Though he has fought...