Word: mandarin
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Josef Marx, his obos reed seemingly tucked between John L. Lewis eyebrows and a cropped white beard, looks very like a Rabellaisian mandarin one might see displayed (a la jade figurine) in the window of an ancient Chinese antique shoppe. Marx's very presence as a performer, and the natoriety of his unorthodox tone, had steeled many in the audience for an onslaught. As the first few notes burst from the bell of his oboe the remaining faces, already beginning to harden into that controlled boredom of the concert-goer's mask, registered something between discomfort and shock...
...some, Ngo Dinh Can seemed to be the ablest of the ill-fated Ngo brothers. Although he never held an official position in the Diem regime, he was the overlord of central Viet Nam. A rural Rasputin in high-collared mandarin robes who wenched and swindled lustily, he nevertheless ran his fief so effectively that it had less trouble from the Viet Cong than any other area. Can in vain advised his brothers, President Diem and Ngo Dinh Nhu, to ease the measures against the Buddhists-not out of idealism but to avoid rocking the boat...
...song phrase to a growling halt, or let it drift lyrically like a ribbon of smoke. Her lyrics seem not to have been learned by rote, but branded on her heart, and when she sings or dances, some elemental beat of energy and joy sends riffs through her long mandarin fingers, her rocking pelvis, and restless toes...
Magnified Pride. Diem's virtues of honesty, courage and bone-deep anti-Communism remained. But his faults-stubbornness, nepotism, suspicion, a mandarin pride-became magnified. Once his mind was made up, Diem would not budge. His meetings with foreign officials degenerated into monologues-one Western ambassador estimated that he had been able to speak only 500 words in a four-hour interview with Diem...
...much that his regime was repressive, but that it had lost its ability to command the nation. By the unhappy standards of the mid-20th century world, Diem's treatment of the Buddhists may not have been spectacularly cruel, but it was thoughtlessly clumsy. The mandarin in the palace somehow seemed to have lost touch with reality-a reality that included the Buddhist self-immolations, perhaps the grisliest of history's propaganda gestures...