Word: desertion
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...electronics and the glint of fortunes in transit. Its protagonist could only be Howard Hughes, 67, the archetypal, anchoritic billionaire brooding over one of the world's great pools of wealth. He has always been an elusive, somehow haunted presence, sending out his commands from a bewildering entombment in desert or tropical hotels. Obsessively shy, devoted to intrigue, suspicious almost to the point of paranoia, Hughes last week had begun an emergence that was at least as strange as his radical withdrawal from the public world more than a decade...
Hughes' present sanctuary at the Britannia, like his old penthouse at the Desert Inn in Las Vegas, is something from a James Bond movie set. Hughes occupies the western end of the Britannia's ninth floor, attended 24 hours a day by the Mormon Mafia. His suite is decorated with the usual hotel furniture, plus a humming array of several hundred thousand dollars worth of electronic equipment, including a radio-telephone hookup to the U.S. mainland and telephone scramblers to prevent his phone conversations from being bugged. The roof bristles with antennas. At night all eleven of Hughes' balconies...
...Wild Bunch, when gunslinger Pike Bishop tries to save Mexican rebel Angel from the torture of the Federales--only to be slaughtered in a suicidal attack both epic and glorious. It becomes muted, perhaps sadder, in The Ballad of Cable Hogue: Hogue's woman leaves him and his desert home, and returns too late to share his life. She brings back San Francisco finery, and the circa 1910 auto that kills...
Clearly seething with rage, Mujib described his life "in a condemned cell in a desert area in the scorching heat," for nine months without news of his family or the outside world. He was ready to be executed, he said. "And a man who is ready to die, nobody can kill." He knew of the war, he said, because "army planes were moving, and there was the blackout." Only after his first meeting with Bhutto did he know that Bangladesh had formed its own government. Of the Pakistani army's slaughter of East Bengalis, Mujib declared: "If Hitler could...
...each man must find them for himself. Some, in fact, are following mythological paths today, unconsciously and without design. The hippie who leaves society and goes off to a commune, for example, is being guided by a mythological map of withdrawal and adventure laid down by Christ in the desert, the Buddha at Bodh-Gaya, and Mohammed in his cave of meditation at Mount Hira...