Word: fig
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...President Reagan's program of CIA support for the Nicaraguan contras, who are not fighting foreign occupation, broke post-Viet Nam precedent. At first, and for three long years, that new policy was given the flimsiest of justifications: interdicting supplies to the Salvadoran guerrillas. The Reagan Doctrine drops the fig leaf. It is intended to establish a new, firmer--a doctrinal--foundation for such support by declaring equally worthy all armed resistance to Communism, whether foreign or indigenously imposed...
...advised crossings. The first is school prayer, and particularly the President's recent handling of the issue. The constitutional amendment on school prayer is about as close as one can come, in the American political context, to advocating state imposition of religious practice. Proponents deny this. One fig leaf is that school prayer will be voluntary. But in the universe of the eight-year-old, and certainly in his school life, very little is voluntary: not homework, nor discipline, nor even attendance...
...Another fig leaf is that neither the state nor any of its officers, including teachers, are to write the prayer. Well then, how will the toddlers know what to say? It appears there is to be some kind of rotalional system whereby the Catholic will bring in his prayer one day, the Baptist the next, then the Jew, and so on. This is an exercise not in religion but in anthropology. If public prayer means anything, it means the joining together of individuals in common devotion. This ecclesiastical musical chairs, however, both trivializes religion and offends it, by asking children...
...time to build his record, and for weakening the party by ignoring its provincial roots. Asked what he thought of Turner's campaign, Trudeau blithely replied, "I don't really know. I've been on vacation." Said a top Liberal strategist: "Trudeau did not give a fig about the party. It was hard to escape the feeling that he was delighted at the trouble Turner was having...
...world's short memory by newer and more fashionable tragedies. Though the author takes scrupulous pains to acknowledge the genuine accomplishments of the international agencies, he concludes that throughout one of the largest relief efforts in history nearly all the governments involved "used humanitarianism as a fig leaf for either the poverty or the ruthlessness of their politics." Founded on a basis of meticulous research, his book is, in the end, an elegy to good intentions ill directed and a cry of conscience on behalf of the 240,000 Kampuchean refugees who continue to haunt the limbo...