Word: hapless
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Indeed, Kennedy did so even after Eisenhower left the hapless French, stuck on the wrong side of history in their bitter little colonial war, to their fate when Dienbienphu fell. To get around these inconvenient facts, Stone uses the passive voice: Kennedy somehow finds himself in this mess. Stone somehow manages not to mention that Kennedy made his bed and then he, and after him Johnson, slept...
Newsweek brings this "lessons of the past" pap to its logical conclusion: "each country's national character is almost a mirror of the other's." National character, you know, the thing that makes everybody in a country alike. Remember, this is why Germans are so nasty, Poles so hapless, and Chinese so shifty...
...most impressive new British play, Hare's Murmuring Judges, starts as a panoramic survey of a criminal-justice system shamefully subverted by careerism and bureaucracy. Gradually the story focuses on a hapless petty burglar, imprisoned almost five years for a first offense. Hare, a left- winger, has a thumb on the scales: his inmate is penitent, as innocent of spirit as Candide. Moreover, the police are widely known to have tainted the evidence, but admitting that would inconvenience powerful people, so injustice prevails. Much of the dialogue is barely digested statistics; the silliest, mouthed by a reformist young black woman...
...story of this game was the Crimson's absolute domination of the hapless Crusaders...
...broader conflagration. For years, Yugoslavia was the acceptable face of communism: estranged from Moscow, a pioneer of peaceful coexistence with the West, a country whose rugged Adriatic coastline attracted tens of thousands of vacationers. But last week that idyllic image was irreparably shattered. After three months of ethnic skirmishing, hapless Yugoslavia erupted in the first full-scale war in Europe since 1945. The fighting between federal forces and breakaway Croatia gave Europe and the world beyond a stark reminder of the region's capacity for violence...