Word: poofs
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...xenophobia of a regime that had to lock its people in lest they be tempted by another, freer life -- the Berlin Wall, that hideous, 28-mile-long scar through the heart of a once proud European capital, not to mention the soul of a people. And then -- poof! -- it was gone. Not physically, at least yet, but gone as an effective barrier between East and West, opened in one unthinkable, stunning stroke to people it had kept apart for more than a generation. It was one of those rare times when the tectonic plates of history shift beneath...
...post"-anything is, by definition, confused and dangerously overextended, like Wile E. Coyote after he has left the cartoon plane of solid rock and freezes in thin air, then tries to tiptoe back along a line of space before gravity notices and takes him down to a little poof! in the canyon far below...
...Poof! I woke up. It was just a dream. Relieved, I ran to my desk and pulled out my wallet, checking its contents. Yep. Just enough for a big chicken salad jumbo...
...natural disaster. Deliberate book burning seems not only criminal but evil. Why? Is it worse to destroy a book by burning it than to throw it into the trash compactor? Or to shred it? Not in effect. But somehow the irrevocable reduction of words to smoke and, poof!, into nonentity haunts the imagination. In Hitler's bonfires in 1933, the works of Kafka, Freud, Einstein, Zola and Proust were incinerated -- their smoke a prefigurement of the terrible clouds that came from the Nazi chimneys later...
...each other's gleaming indignation. Not a molecule of coherent information emerged from the encounter -- except the encounter itself. The medium is the message, in Marshall McLuhan's famous dictum. Bush afterward compared the exchange to combat, but if so, it was the combat of Saturday morning cartoons: Bang! -- Poof! Boom! -- Poof! Language disintegrated on impact. When Bush slugged Rather with the line about Rather's once walking off the set of the CBS Evening News, the anchorman looked for an instant like Wile E. Coyote when, gimlet-eyed, he understands he is about to plummet into the abyss...