Word: givens
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Whenever the military moves to shutter a base, the member of Congress in whose district it is located rises in righteous indignation. Given the you- scratch-my-back-and-I'll-scratch-yours philosophy that reigns on Capitol Hill, even such an anachronism as Virginia's moat-encircled Fort Monroe -- built for the War of 1812 -- has been spared, although it costs $186 million a year and serves no useful military purpose...
...down Iran Air Flight 655 with 290 civilians aboard, the mullahs who run Iran sought to make the most of their morbid propaganda windfall. Public memorial services took place in at least four cities. At Bandar Abbas, the coastal town from which the doomed jet took off, reporters were given a look at some of the bloated and mutilated bodies of the victims, about 170 of whom had been dragged from the Persian Gulf by week...
This is not to say that Carver is predictable. In almost every story, the given is a couple, either recently married or recently divorced, but against that given, Carver works a magic of great variation. He can hop from the first person wife ("So Much Water So Close To Home") to the first person husband ("Feathers") or the third person couple ("A Small, Good Thing"). There are blind men, peacocks, euthanasia, horny adolescents and psychopathic politicians...
This much tragedy, in the hands of a less capable author, could easily become bathos. But Carver's characters cling to what they have so earnestly that no reader can dismiss them. They are up against the wall, but they haven't given up. They are still hoping for some transcendence, some moment of connection, even if the connection has to cross 20 years of failed marriage and distrust...
Aristocratic Cuban exiles puzzle over the unfamiliar foods given to them as charity by some Dallas Presbyterians. A Southwest farm worker becomes obsessed with breeding the perfect fighting cock. A Manhattan drug dealer demands that his son stay off drugs -- or, if he must get high, that he do it in his father's company, at home. A Chicano woman struggles to bring to justice the Texas police chief who murdered her common-law husband...