Word: icons
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...This icon of freedom is burnished by a new national confidence--but its metal skin is less than an inch thick. The inside of Lady Liberty is dark and hollow...
...trail he produces one of the best MacGuffins of recent popular fiction. (MacGuffin was Alfred Hitchcock's name for the object or secret that sets the plot churning.) The time is 1966, and Soviet Chairman Leonid Brezhnev, no less, is trying desperately to find a famous icon spirited away from the Winter Palace in the last days of the Czar. It passed through the hands of the Luftwaffe chief Hermann Goring, who gave it to Scott's father, his jailer after World War II. The late Scott Sr., in turn, confided its whereabouts...
...icon itself, though valuable, is merely the box that contains the MacGuffin, an astonishing and unsuspected 19th century document. It seems that in 1867, when the world thought that Russia had sold a certain large piece of real estate to a young Western power for $7 million, what was really signed (and nicknamed Seward's folly) was only a 99-year lease. A crucial clause allows the Soviet Union to reclaim its property by paying a large sum in gold before the lease expires. Brezhnev, a stonehearted landlord, rubs his hands and plots eviction. Will Scott and the female bass...
...Statue of Liberty is a sculpted symbol of freedom, an icon of democracy clothed in copper and iron. But the idea of Liberty Weekend for most people was simply to have fun, to watch ships passing under the sun and fireworks blossoming under the stars, to feel good about themselves because they felt good about their country, to feel proud of being proud...
...statuary, Lady Liberty is absurdly huge, unnecessarily literal, a giant trinket as vulgar as a sign on the Las Vegas strip. It is hardly an ancient monument. Except for Richard Morris Hunt's pedestal, the thing was not even Made in America. (Perfect protectionist irony: an imported patriotic icon...