Word: potemkin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Thus the Potemkin democrats of the islands idolized Jefferson but patterned themselves after the master manipulators of the time. Chief among them: the autocratic American darling, Manuel Quezon, the first President of the Philippines, and his prominent partner, Douglas MacArthur, perhaps the archetypal American for all Filipinos. These influences helped produce the quintessential Philippine politician of the later 20th century: Ferdinand Marcos...
...expect some 21st century director to filch a scene from Little Vera the way David Lean, Brian De Palma and others have quoted the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein's Potemkin. For one thing, critical realism, the style of most glasnost films, eschews the bold editing effects and pristine iconography of the Soviet silents. But style is subordinate to message just now: the priority is journalism, not art. To U.S. eyes, the rebels without a cause in an alienated-teen drama like Valeri Ogorodnikov's The Burglar are a sight as nostalgic as Hula-Hoops. But in the U.S.S.R. these...
...street near the American ambassador's residence, where Ronald Reagan will be staying, has been repaved. Buildings opposite the Kremlin have been repainted in pastel colors. Even the grassy boulevard in front of a home Nancy Reagan may visit has been replanted. Like a latter-day Potemkin village, Moscow last week was being spruced up for next week's summit meeting between Reagan and Soviet Leader Mikhail Gorbachev. But the most noteworthy preparation for the superpower sit-down was in progress about 2,000 miles from the Kremlin on the dusty, sunbaked plateaus of northern Afghanistan. There a convoy...
...perfectly capable of trying to prescribe penicillin to fix a broken window. All it could do was rigidly test the applicability of various rules to pieces of data. This led critics like Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor of computer science at M.I.T., to dismiss expert systems like Mycin as "Potemkin villages. You move a little to the left, and you see it's all a facade...
...dubious about the prospects for turning them into weapons. Moreover, they may never be tested in space because of restrictions imposed by international arms agreements. The aluminum-foil- covered model that Reagan so proudly inspected is, in the words of John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists, a "Potemkin village" -- a hollow shell...