Word: potemkinism
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...strong backing the U.S. has given him. At one level, Clinton's tough-love advice to "play by the rules" of free-market democracy is sound advice, but it may well be ignored. To citizens around the world anxiously weighing the turbulent course of events, the summit looked like Potemkin leadership...
...public, that means the meticulous maintenance of the Potemkin presidency, in which every appearance suggests that nothing is wrong. It was a week of crusades for gun control and Native American economic development, unity meetings with Democrats on the Hill, relentless Rose Garden ceremonies that at some point were painful to watch, as when Clinton cued the Marine Band to drown out reporters' questions. Deputy spokesman Barry Toiv, last week's sacrificial lamb, could even joke about it with the rumbling White House press corps. "Hey, I am sorry," he said on arriving almost an hour late for the Wednesday...
...burned last month. Coming through the town earlier, the convoy passed deserted buildings, but in the town's center, two dozen people sat at an open-air cafe sipping coffee and sodas. As Holbrooke drives back through the center, the cafe is empty: Serb security agents had staged a Potemkin-like show of normality. Holbrooke instructs a staff member to cable Washington, "We have just seen The Truman Show in Decane...
...process, the editor may also make art. Any cinephile's collection of favorite movie moments will include the Odessa Steps sequence from Eisenstein's Potemkin, the Citizen Kane dinner-table scene, the shower murder in Psycho, the final killings in Bonnie and Clyde--all of which were created not so much on the set as on the editing table. Try to imagine these scenes in single long takes, and you start to appreciate editing's vital contribution: it gives films the collision of images that creates a collision of emotions. It has been the primary technical touchstone for great directors...
...harshest of these attacks are true, SoftRAM 95 isn't just one more computer product that fails to live up to its hype; it's a hollow piece of Potemkin programming, devoid of the advanced, patent-pending compression technology touted in its packaging. In short, says Mark Russinovich, a University of Oregon computer scientist, "the thing is a fraud...