Word: prunes
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...around. Walter Schulze was assigned to fly the news that the Great War was over to units east of the Rhine; on the way home, his plane crashed and he was killed. Art Bonifas, near the end of his tour, took a group out one day in 1976 to prune a poplar in the DMZ; the North Koreans set upon them and killed him. In Vietnam, Ron Zinn, twice an Olympic race walker, went out on patrol ahead of his unit and stepped on a mine. Bob Fuellhart was advising a Vietnamese battalion; while word was being sent up from...
...line knows. And they are enticing. More than once, I have glanced covertly and shame-facedly at their headlines, trying to look nonchalant as I read as much of the front page as I can before the old lady in front of me finishes paying for her Metamucil and prune juice. Inevitably, I move forward embarrassed for having been pulled in, dying to know if Princess Di really is having an affair with her ex-husband's butler. Even as I mock the papers whose lead stories deal with aliens almost as often as they write about us human types...
...Frontier"; we speak of lowering the deficit. Kennedy set goals and started programs that everyone in the country could feel a part of directly or indirectly, like the space program and the Peace Corps; we scale back such programs and look around for more to prune. Most important, Kennedy, in his famous "ask not" quotation and elsewhere, asked the American people to participate in the governing of their country and to make sacrifices for the good of the nation; our politicians believe they must bribe the voters to get elected...
...parties have survived long term by accommodating reality. You don't hear Dole repeating his gaffe of a few months ago, reminding voters that he opposed Medicare back in 1965. Republicans have made their peace with Social Security, the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and so on. Any attempts to prune or reform these programs, however justifiable, are urgently identified as efforts to "save" them. Similarly, Clinton won election, and seems to be winning re-election, by leading his party's adjustment to the political landscape created by Reagan. Republicans have the delicate challenge of arguing simultaneously that Clinton has stolen...
...Last week a confused Dole official hunted for a positive explanation. "It's like they want to prove they're all thumbs so they won't upstage the big guy," he said. That could be it. It could also be that this plum is looking more like a prune...