Word: ironization
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...crowning moment at last week's Moscow meeting was the ceremonial toast between George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev. The chosen potable: Summit Cuvee, a California sparkling wine made especially for the occasion. The bubbly blend of Chardonnay and Pinot Noir was made by the Iron Horse Vineyards in Sonoma County, Calif., just west of -- you guessed it -- the Russian River. Gary Walters, chief usher at the White House, serving as First Wine Taster, made the selection. "The Soviets enjoy a little more sugar in their sparkling wines," says Walters. So the White House asked the winery to sweeten three cases...
...psychology bred by this history. Alexei Sergeyev, a political economics professor and a founder of the Communist Initiative Movement, believes that most of his countrymen "don't understand anything in politics." They tend to equate the noise and conflict of a multiparty system with anarchy, which arose whenever the iron fist was relaxed. Though they loathe bureaucrats, ordinary citizens have great faith in the idea of a "benevolent czar" who will keep order. First Gorbachev and then Yeltsin appeared to fill the bill, but Sergeyev believes that within 18 months economic chaos will force the masses to turn back...
These activities do constitute a kind of movement, but it is a spiritual one. The white-haired guru of this transformation is the poet Robert Bly, whose book Iron John has been on the best-seller list for more than seven months. Bly and his fellow wise men believe that since the Industrial Revolution, when fathers left the home to work in offices and factories, boys have been raised by women and co-opted by a female view of masculinity. Later, the women's movement came along, creating an epidemic of what Bly calls "soft males," men who lacked fierceness...
...Germany is one nation again, a people united. The Berlin Wall, once the ugliest scar on a wounded country, has been knocked down, its pieces carted off to a huge depot for resale as art or to be crushed for use as roadway ballast. The border fences marking the Iron Curtain that for so long divided Europe have been dismantled...
Such feelings did not exist, or were not visible, before unification, when all but the iron-minded leaders in the east accepted that the two German states were culturally one nation. "For 40 years we did not talk about differences, only about similarities," says Volker Ronge, a sociologist at the University of Wuppertal. "We were all Germans together, and we thought we would be able to understand each other perfectly. But now we realize that the influence of Western values here, and of Stalinism there, created differences that will last a long time...