Word: grimness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...announced not once but twice that he was cutting short his California holiday-first by two days, then by three-as his determination to confer personally with the National Security Council in Washington grew more urgent. Just before boarding Air Force One for the trip back to Washington, a grim Reagan mounted an outdoor podium and read an extraordinary statement. Calling the Soviet attack a "barbaric act," the President implied that it reflected baser motives than even the 1979 U.S.S.R. invasion of Afghanistan. "While events in Afghanistan and elsewhere have left few illusions about the willingness of the Soviet Union...
...somebody understood to be a guardian (husband, father, mother, uncle, babysitter), is a special betrayal. And once brawling becomes routine in a household, or primal taboos are cracked, there is often no stopping the spread of viciousness. Richard Gelles, a sociologist at the University of Rhode Island, describes the grim ecology of a violent family: "The husband will beat the wife. The wife may then learn to beat the children. The bigger siblings learn it's O.K. to hit the little ones, and the family pet may be the ultimate recipient of violence...
While alarmed by those trends, most analysts see a glimmer of hope in the grim statistics...
...bonnie banks of the River Dee at Balmoral was idyllic, but Prince Charles' choice of summer reading decidedly was not. On a recent afternoon during the royal family's annual holiday at their Scottish castle, Charles was snapped as he pored over Victims of Yalta, a grim account by Nikolai Tolstoy (Leo's grandnephew) of the forced repatriation of 2 million Soviet P.O.W.s by Britain and the U.S. after World War II. One Fleet Street scribe joked that between the covers the book might really be The Thousand and One Lusty Nights of Fifi...
...scheduled European deployment of U.S. medium-range nuclear missiles, the day was a triumph. The Frankfurter Rundschau (circ. 200,000) contended, "American soldiers on German soil were randomly beating, arresting and handcuffing demonstrators like criminals." The influential newsweekly Der Spiegel (circ. 970,000) said, "Soldiers, armed with bats and grim expressions, took the demonstrators, who did not put up any resistance, and threw them like cargo into army trucks...