Word: dispell
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...writers -- eventually become self-mockingly funny. But the jokes seem to go over the heads of much of the audience; instead of laughing, many spectators stare deadpan as if trying to catch up. Later sequences offer conventional, tell-me-a-story pleasures: a mother with a toothache tries to dispel it through elaborate religious ritual; a drunken father comes home and dies in a poignant scene made all the more impressive by the fact that moments before, the actor had stepped out of character to label his role unplayable...
...Americanism displayed during the hostage crisis of 1979-81, and the Administration's early explanations of the rationale and methodology of the shipments convinced hardly anyone. Briefings of the Senate and House intelligence committees by Poindexter, CIA Director William Casey and other officials on Friday, Nov. 21, failed to dispel congressional feelings that the full story had still not come out. The Congressmen did not know that Meese shared their opinion. The day before the briefings, Meese called his assistant, Charles Cooper, into his office for a long review of legal issues that Congressmen might raise. The more they studied...
...North Koreans over loudspeakers along the 151-mile Demilitarized Zone that divides the two countries. The same rumors popped up independently in Peking, Hanoi and Tokyo, apparently before officials in Seoul began spreading the word. Until Kim's ceremonial airport appearance, the North Koreans did nothing either to dispel or confirm the story. Little could be made of their unresponsiveness: in one of the world's most hermetically sealed societies, official silence is the rule rather than the exception...
...National Gallery of Art in Washington has filled it, persuasively, radiantly and definitively, with a show of 171 paintings done by Matisse in his early Nice years, assembled by Art Historians Jack Cowart and Dominique Fourcade. It should dispel any lingering suspicion that between 1916 and 1930, even average Matisses got as complacent as most Renoirs. Indeed, some of Matisse's greatest work was done in those years. Why was this acknowledged so grudgingly, or not at all? For "ideological reasons," Co-Curator Fourcade argues, springing from a "modernist obsession" with Matisse's largely posthumous role as prophet of Paris...
Another reason for dissatisfaction with the Zakharov/Daniloff arrangement is that it does nothing to dispel the suspicion that U.S. reporters may be spies. In Moscow on Saturday, a Soviet Foreign Ministry spokesman insisted again that Daniloff was a CIA agent who has been spying for years and that proof of this had been furnished to the U.S. Yet in 1977 the CIA adopted a directive forbidding the employment of journalists (or clergymen or academics) as agents or giving journalistic "cover" to real agents. It is still in force. Though no one can say flatly that journalists never...