Word: driftful
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...golden chariot, trailed by miles of elephants, camels and devotees. In 1971 the master's American premies (loved ones) heralded his advent in the U.S. with a press release stating: "He is coming in the clouds with great power and glory, and his silver steed will drift down at 4 p.m. at Los Angeles international airport, TWA Flight 761." That was enough to attract a coterie of guru buffs and various other seekers. In little over a year their number has swelled to some 30,000 youthful followers who man "Divine Light" centers in 45 states...
...machismo: the compensatory swagger of the liberal, the intellectual, to demonstrate he was a Realpolitik he-man by the American code. Here Halberstam simplifies in his zeal to give history a firm story line. He is more thoroughly convincing when he depicts what might be called the debacle of drift...
...solid virtues of The Best and the Brightest is the way Halberstam breaks down the tragedy of Viet Nam policy, showing it in slow motion. In fact, at first it all went deceptively slowly, a careless drift into a game of "counterinsurgency and special forces." To support a policy that was no policy, only a momentum, the Kennedy Administration, Halberstam charges, "invented Diem and his country," then became captive to its own myth. Escalation was only the logical extension of an original departure from reality. Perhaps the most sobering Halberstam homily concludes thus: "The best way for civilians to harness...
...with its eye for color, ERTS has another useful capability. Because of the timing of its polar orbit, the satellite passes over the same spot on earth at almost precisely the same hour every 18 days. Lighting conditions at each site are thus unchanged (except for the slow seasonal drift in the angle of the sun and possibly different cloud cover). As a result, there is little difference in shadows from one picture to the next, and ERTS can quickly spot any changes in terrestrial features since its last visit...
Karnow considers the Cultural Revolution a culmination of the long conflict between Mao's romantic dream of permanent revolution and the Chinese people's natural drift toward realism. Repeatedly, whenever Mao sensed that the bureaucrats seemed to be taking over, he forced a return to basic revolutionary principles, often at chaotic cost to the country. He skirmished with intellectuals, with army professionals who thought that modern weapons were more important than revolutionary élan, with economic planners who thought the Great Leap Forward to instant industrialization was dangerous nonsense (which...