Word: excepts
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Nuclear weapons deter their own use. Arguably that is all they are good for. But tactical nukes, because they frighten allies whom they are supposed to protect, are good for even less. In fact, these weapons are good for nothing except as bargaining leverage to remove similar Soviet missiles in Eastern Europe. Thus the current furor is surprising only in that it took so long, and so much pressure from the left, for a West German Chancellor to adopt Kohl's present position...
...French painter "Toujours Lautrec," asking some fellow schemers to "include me out" of a deal -- gained Samuel Goldwyn a perverse fame as the archetypal Hollywood immigrant mogul, crude and semiliterate. But as A. Scott Berg demonstrates in this readable, richly researched biography, Goldwyn was never an archetypal anything, except in his poor Jewish origins in Eastern Europe. Unlike the Mayers and Warners, he made relatively few films, and he never built a mighty empire with a huge star roster and an immense distribution network. He was the ultimate independent producer, with a compulsive need for autonomy and control ("I made...
John L. Lewis, the late great boss of the United Mine Workers, would rub his shaggy eyebrows in disbelief if he could see a coal miners' strike nowadays. ( No goons with clubs. No beatings. No gunfire (except for an occasional harmless lapse). Instead, in a remote corner of southwestern Virginia, 1,400 striking miners -- and even their wives and kids -- were all decked out in jungle fatigues. A public relations firm was pumping out pamphlets excoriating the bosses. Strike leaders with beepers, walkie-talkies and cellular telephones were blasting orders, tuning in scanners to chart the movements of the state...
...YWCA choir, the Boy Scouts, the 4-H club, the church-sponsored floats, even the pom-pom girls strutting their stuff to the strains of Happy Days Are Here Again. It could, really, be any All-American small town putting on an Independence Day parade on any village green. Except that this truly is, in the strict anthropological sense, a village, and the green here is really, really green. And the girls are dressed in grass skirts, and so too are many of the boys, with sashes of flowers across their oiled chests and woven tree bark around their ankles...
...American Samoa is not quite American and not quite Samoa: it sends a Congressman to Washington, but he is not allowed to vote; its 38,000 people are counted as "U.S. nationals" but cannot cast ballots for anything except island leaders. In the early 1960s, the Federal Government started pouring planeloads of money into its castaway dependency, partly in the spirit of idealism, and partly with an eye to its unmatched, and strategically useful, harbor (last year, Washington sent $45 million in direct aid to a community with one-sixth as many people as Mesa, Ariz...