Word: peasant
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...record, was this the only time the Brits were ahead of the Yanks. The chrome-plated whiskey bottles and other bibelots that New York's Jeff Koons was doing a few years ago were, as they politely say, "anticipated" in 1966 in a chrome-plated steel cast of a peasant chair by London's Clive Barker...
...seat of federal government is in Bern, a medieval city of arcades, spires and fountains, full of politicians, government officials and farmers, whose open market in front of the gray-green stone parliament building is a reminder of the country's revered peasant past. A world away is Geneva, severe and handsome, with a touch of francophone chic, an international city, where summits are held and diplomatic deals are made. Solid, comfortable Zurich is at once the banking center and, along with Basel, at the bend of the Rhine, the cultural heart for German speakers...
...from 15th century France? Gilles de Rais, a comrade in arms of St. Joan of Arc, was one of the most famous soldiers in the Hundred Years War. But he used his power as a feudal lord to commit multiple murders with impunity. In satanic rites he sacrificed innumerable peasant children to the devil, sodomizing their dying bodies and preserving the heads of the "pretty" ones. In his book The Trial of Gilles de Rais, French historian Georges Bataille noted incredulously that the man given to butchering infants calmly raised a chapel dedicated to the Holy Innocents -- the children slaughtered...
Something has indeed been lost. Only 10 years ago, travelers in Greece or Turkey would have been invited into peasant homes, offered an ouzo or a handful of ripe plums. Even in remote villages now, such hospitality -- the essence of what travel to another culture is about -- is pretty much a thing of the past. Says historian Norwich: "Tourism brutalizes. Self-respect gives way to servility, good manners to surliness, and hospitality to cupidity and suspicion." To try to educate tourists to be more sensitive travelers, the World Wildlife Fund has put out a series of booklets on ways...
Yeltsin has promised to resurrect private farming on a grand scale, making land available to every peasant who wants to till his own fields rather than toil for a collective or state farm. Russia already has a private-property law on the books, though Gorbachev gags at endorsing one for the whole Soviet Union. Yeltsin promises to strengthen it and to bring about the "rebirth of entrepreneurship," promoting the formation and expansion of privately owned companies in "any business." Further, he proposes departizatsiya, or departification, meaning that the ubiquitous Communist Party committees should have nothing to do with running factories...