Word: neutralize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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There was no massive attack by regular units across a well-defined boundary in Indochina, but the seeping-in of hostile forces across trackless jungles. These forces were supplied from neutral countries that wanted only to be left alone. The Ho Chi Minh Trail ran through Laos; North Vietnamese sanctuaries were established in Cambodia. By a weird inversion of logic, whenever we reacted by seeking to intercept the totally illegal supply lines, it was we who were accused of violating the neutrality of Cambodia and Laos...
Cheever, 69, has sensibly not tried to top himself. Oh What a Paradise It Seems stakes out neutral territory. Too long to be a story and too short to be a novel, it seems instead a coda to other works, a spontaneous riff on some people, places and things that have appeared elsewhere in Cheever's fiction. The hero could be (but is not) one of those stubborn old Yankee Wapshots. The settings range from New York City to a declining country village, with the hint of suburban Bullet Parks and Shady Hills sprawling in between. And the plot...
...Primitive" is a bedeviling word, hard to shake. In the past few decades it has lost most of its racist overtones, but has nonetheless retained an air of condescension. Its most neutral usage, suggested by Newton, is "the art of those peoples who have remained until recent times at an early technological level, who have been oriented toward the use of tools but not machines." The key phrase is "until recent times"-without it, most European culture up to about 1600 could fairly be called primitive. Above all, the word cannot mean crude or inarticulate. Few European medieval ivory carvings...
Amidst this chaos, Wallenberg--sent by the otherwise largely inactive and neutral Swedes to help evacuate Jews from Hungary--struggled frantically to save those he could. Working through official channels when possible, and sometimes going under cover, Wallenberg managed to distribute phony Swedish passports to thousands of Jews. Often this meant putting his own life on the line. In a scene that might be taken from an Errol Flynn movie, Wallenberg once stood up to a German officer attempting to round up Jews for a march, saying, "If you want to take them, you will have to shoot me first...
...losing the heights in the first place. Syria responded by declaring that Israel's move amounted to an "act of war." As if to give real meaning to that charge, Begin sent additional Israeli tanks rumbling into the heights area, which is separated from the Syrians by a neutral zone occupied by a 1,250-man United Nations peace-keeping force...