Word: kowtow
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...Ronald Reagan as "the prototype of the new mythological American...who will probably someday be President." One year earlier he noticed that Richard Nixon was indestructible, "a vengeful Zero with nine lives." Thompson, in fact, was that loneliest of creatures, an idealist without illusions, ready to kowtow to no one and as contemptuous of beatniks and hippies as of the "rotarians" they rebelled against. Surveying the 1960s like a clenched Kerouac, he lamented the death of John Kennedy, in the terms of his beloved Scott Fitzgerald, as "the death of hope...
...Midwest, they don't kowtow to people who would be big shots," Brokaw says. "If you began to outgrow your britches, my father would be the first to know. And if he didn't know, the people on Main Street would...
...eager to display. It seemed to extend forever. Aid to Families with Dependent Children was one entry; food stamps was another. In all, it contained 335 items, each a federal program. To Engler and his gubernatorial colleagues, each also represented a different federal bureaucracy to which he had to kowtow; a different process in which he had no say; and a specific amount of money he had to pay out of his state's treasury, whether he liked it or not. It was a Governor's nightmare list...
...Bush was U.S. envoy to China, yet he still seems to suffer from the clientitis that sometimes afflicts ambassadors who represent the views of their host governments too well. Three weeks after Tiananmen, the President dispatched National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft and Deputy Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger to kowtow in secret to Deng, then sent them back several months later to toast him in public...
...good news is that at least some of this music is innovative, not just a kowtow to the blues progressions of 70s rock nor an insipid imitation of punk. If we are confronted with a smorgasbord of styles, it may be because Rock peaked in the seventies and frayed in the eighties in the face of gum-snapping pop mall music from hell. Rock is resurfacing in the 90s like a groundhog scared of its own shadow, and many musicians claim they'd rather be dead (or unsigned) than be imitators of their predecessors or of each other...