Word: oafish
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...much of the world still honors this middle-aged venture is evident, then. But among some Western nations that designed it, at least, the U.N. today often appears worse than dowdy. To them it looks oafish, overgrown, hypocritical, rife with ineptitude and possibly--as some overwrought Americans insist on seeing it--downright wicked. By this light, the creation of a half-century ago comports with reality now about as much as the cookie-cutter shapes of its East River edifices still evoke an idealized modernity. Budget-strapped, groping for a fresh start, the U.N. seems to slouch toward the millennium...
...Home Alone, are rites of self-reliance. Children face adult obstacles (or rather, superhero torture tests) and in surmounting them become adults (or rather, Hollywood's ideal of adults, as kids with weapons). Real parents are redundant in fables for latchkey kids; all authority figures are oafish, evil or, mostly, absent. The lost child finds his own way home...
...movie producer David O. Selznick had to do it. He was a drug addict (Benzedrine), a compulsive gambler (in 1946 alone he lost $581,621) and an equally compulsive womanizer (no star, secretary or script girl was safe from his lunging, oafish passes). He was often drunk, he never smoked less than three packs a day, and he usually worked deep into the night, wearing out ranks of stenographers as he manically dictated memos, stream-of- consciousness-style, in an attempt to maintain control over every detail of his films and of a business and personal life that yearly grew...
...recommend) the easy and popular course, even -- Lord help us! -- the incidentally-I-have-negotiated- with-Khrushchev bit. Some of the old class resentment and malice toward foes linger too. Doubtless Nixon genuinely believes Boris Yeltsin to be like Khrushchev in concealing a razor-sharp intelligence behind a somewhat oafish exterior. But when he scorns the American "foreign policy elite" for sniffing at Yeltsin because the Russian might not know which fork to use at a state banquet, he is rather obviously settling some old personal scores, and when he calls Mikhail Gorbachev "a Soviet version of Adlai Stevenson...
...Gang of Eight was caught between the feud and the change. Its coup looked like Stalin's ruthlessness written on the fifth carbon, a smudgy, illegible piece of work. It was fitting that stupidity should be a prevailing theme. An oafish brainlessness has for decades hung over the Soviet communist venture like one of Nikita Khrushchev's suits. Its secret has never been intelligence but rather ruthlessness. The cardinal rule of coupmaking, says Edward Luttwak of Washington's Center for Strategic and International Studies, is "to seize control of all the centers of power in one fell swoop, to paralyze...