Word: equilibrium
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Whatever fragile equilibrium the Lebanese managed to recover during the ensuing years was upset by the Israeli invasion of June 1982. The Israelis openly took sides with the Phalange and welcomed the election of Bashir Gemayel, the leader of the Phalangist-dominated Lebanese Forces, as President. When Gemayel was assassinated nine days before his inauguration, his older brother Amin instead took the job following his unanimous election by parliament. With some 38,000 occupation troops in Lebanon, Israel tried to impose a peace treaty on the country. The Lebanese refused, but after U.S. pressure the two countries signed an agreement...
They are still young, although the impertinent encroachments of middle age are beginning to make themselves felt in lungs and limbs. Deskbound by day, they work at fast-track jobs whose rewards and stresses balance in a tenuous equilibrium. Orphans of the "me" decade and survivors of the sexual revolution, many are newly divorced or never married, forlornly sizing up their nubile contemporaries and yearning for a more permanent relationship...
...during their long encapsulation (the late Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution). Rarely has there been an ingestion of foreign influence so smoothly accomplished. The Japanese did something of the same thing after World War II. Military fascism did not work. The entire people switched over with amazing cultural equilibrium to democracy under a constitution partly devised by a group of young lawyers on Douglas MacArthur's staff...
...major miscalculation of his career, claiming he was never gay, bisexual, a transvestite or any selection of the above. Says he: "I was so young then. I was experimenting." He may be more at peace now, but no one is suggesting that complete equanimity comes from perfect equilibrium. Thoroughly tanked one night in Berlin last year, Bowie extinguished a lit cigarette in a fan's ear and woke up the next afternoon in a hippie crash...
This unpremeditated coupling seems natural enough; yet De Vries sets the moral equilibrium of an entire nation teetering in its aftermaths. These include pregnancy, mutual guilt, Tony's frightened vision of what marriage to his teacher might mean ("Would I be allowed to whisper and chew gum in the house?"). Before she goes home to bear his child in Kalamazoo, Miss Doubloon strikes a defiant pose on the balcony of her motel, where she has been exiled in disgrace from the boardinghouse. Like Hawthorne's adulterous heroine, the teacher wears a scarlet letter A on her chest, with...