Word: lawlessness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...want to hear somebody asking them why/ They can be counted on to tell us who our enemies are/ But they're never the ones to fight or to die." This is angry, aggressive songwriting, too deft ever to be dogmatic, too melodic ever to turn strident. Lawless Avenues, co-written with Jorge Calderon and driven home hard by Jim Keltner's full-torque drumming, is the album's centerpiece, a contemporary street epic set in a Southern California barrio, where none of the characters get a chance to dream or a clear shot at a fair shake...
...secret locations around the U.S. The result, told largely in Hill's words, has the sound and horror of authenticity, The Godfather minus the glamour. There is no rich, family feeling here, no accretion of loyalties and vendettas. There is only the nostalgia of a successful sociopath for a lawless past. "Truckloads of swag. Fur coats, televisions, clothes--all for the asking," the thug recalls. "When I was broke I just went out and robbed some more. We ran everything. We paid the lawyers. We paid the cops. Everybody had their hands out. We walked out laughing...
...their signature tunes." Sheila, his daughter from a marriage that failed long ago, is approaching 40 and has become an author of trendy, feminist nonfiction. Taking a taxi to visit her, Grey marvels at the rudeness of his driver and at the deteriorating London landscape: "It looked a lawless country. The blocks of workers' flats were dirtier, more sprawled and raggedy, than those of Accra and Dar Es Salaam; there was more trash blowing in the streets than there was in Lagos. Everywhere there were slogans, spraygunned on walls, signboards, standing sheets of corrugated iron...
...each stop, none of the leaders was able to effect a quick resolution. Washington moved military forces, including elements of the Army's elite Delta Force, into the region. "Our hope was that the plane would never leave Algeria," says a State Department official. Washington feared that in lawless Beirut, the hijackers would find reinforcements. The only time that a military operation was seriously considered was on Day Two, while the plane was in Algiers. But Chadli's government forbade the U.S. to use force in Algeria, preferring diplomatic means that got nowhere. Perhaps because the hijackers had heard reports...
Both Republican and Democratic supporters of the aid package believe there is an analogy between the emerging U.S. policy in Nicaragua and Washington's experience in El Salvador several years ago. By backing away from a lawless right wing in El Salvador and embracing Centrist Jose Napoleon Duarte, wrote Oklahoma's McCurdy in a Washington Post op-ed article, the U.S. ended up "on the side of democracy and helped weaken both extremes, setting El Salvador on the road to a political settlement." Crossing the centrist "threshold" in Nicaragua, says Fortier, "could create a dynamic of its own, just...