Word: cowboying
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...mind reprogrammed to "uphold the law," hits the streets of the city's crime-ridden districts. A combination of the Terminator, Dirty Harry and a Campbell's soup can, Robocop shoots with pinpoint accuracy, deflects bullets like an armored car, and handles his machine-gun sidearm like a cowboy...
...chokingly sweet carrot butter, which the manufacturer claimed makes men think "they have died and gone to heaven." Also sour-sweet and metallic- tasting salad dressings "designed" by Gloria Vanderbilt and fool-the-eye chocolate Buffalo chicken wings packed with a container of blue-cheese dip. Something called Cowboy Caviar, made in California, was based on an old recipe for a Russian eggplant appetizer; and Le Brut d'Escargot, from France, proved to be ghostly, ghastly white snail's eggs that tasted like salty paregoric...
What happened in the Senate Caucus Room last week was a sort of drama of the moral settlement of America. First there was the frontier, the wild places where savages roamed and life was dangerous and action was survival. The pioneer, the early cowboy, the vigilante all kept guns loaded and shot fast. One did not survive by regulations and laws and merely mental, abstract things. Justice was a rougher business, and even at that ran a distant second to coming out of it alive. "The essential American soul," D.H. Lawrence once extravagantly wrote, "is hard, isolate, stoic...
...congressional committee represents that later stage of the nation's development. North appeals to Americans as a magnetic character in the older style. Americans have a visceral attraction to cowboy morality. It is part of their folklore. When they see that it succeeds -- in the capture of the Achille Lauro hijackers, for example, or even in the invasion of Grenada -- they cheer it on. However, they are intensely wary of that ethic when it is turned loose, unsupervised, in a world made dangerous not just by terrorists but by nuclear weapons...
...Iran, where an incapacity to face hard decisions about hostages led the Administration to contravene its own boycott and sell arms to a terrorist state, thereby subverting the moral and political authority of the President. It is curious that the Reagan Administration, with its weakness for the cowboy ethic, should be so unwilling to face necessary losses, so sentimental about getting hostages home when the price of the rescue might be the collapse of an immense structure of policy -- and would inevitably mean the taking of far more hostages...