Word: policemanly
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...agreement held as long as the Shah lived. Though Baghdad never forgot its Shatt al Arab concession, though it resented the Shah's self-appointed role as the policeman of the gulf and worried about Iran's steadily growing military strength, it reaped instant benefit from the accord. Without the Shah's support, the Kurdish rebellion fizzled, allowing Iraq to concentrate its oil resources on fast-paced economic development and to emerge as a military power. But the squabble was renewed with the Shah's demise, the Iranian revolution and the advent of the Khomeini...
Miguel Cortez, a middle-aged Cuban refugee, recalls the early days of Castro. When Terkel asks him if he could bribe a policeman after the revolution, Cortez encapsulates an entire mind of state: "No, because everybody a cop." Cortez's dream is simply to rise upon his failures-a vision not substantially different from Ted Turner's: "I never was valedictorian. I couldn't make the football team, I couldn't make the baseball team . . . That's kinda how I got into sailing...
There is not much to protect the innocent. Laws permit searching without warrants, jailing without bail, trying without defense, and condemning without trial. If you look suspicious, associate with 'subversives,' or don't appeal to your neighborhood policeman, you can be seized without explanation. During one of many arbitrary street document checks, a young man was ordered by a guardsman to shave his beard. "He told me that I looked like a revolutionary, and that he'd jail me if I didn't remove it. So I shaved it--these guys are irrational but serious...
...chores to watch. One woman clown clad in green and white greeted a bemused bystander with a blue balloon and a smacking kiss on the cheek. Another clown in a striped T shirt and psychedelic wig paused from time to time to give lawnmowers, car windshields, even a motorcycle policeman's helmet a few flicks with his bright red feather duster. Along the way, the clowns stopped off at two hospitals, a mental institution and a nursing home, where they dispensed balloons and hugs to sad-eyed children and old people...
...nagging problems. Small towns, just like the cities, struggle constantly with tight budgets and pressing needs that keep rising faster than revenues. "In little bitty towns," says Frederic Cooper, program manager of the Mississippi Institute for Small Towns, "the entire budget might go to pay the policeman and the light bill at the town hall." Downtown decay is common place in small town America, as are shortages of housing, medical service, diversions for the young and suitable settings for the lonely aged. It is a rare small town that is not afflicted by poverty; 38% of the black inhabitants...