Word: saber
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Rattled Noncoms. Last month the austere ballroom of Rio de Janeiro's Military Club shook with saber-rattling debate as officers protested the chaos and inflation around them and issued a two-week ultimatum for a 100% pay increase. Unless they got higher pay, shouted one officer, "it will not be the fall of the Bastille, but of Brasilia." Such talk annoyed the noncommissioned officers, a more left-wing bunch, who tend to consider Goulart something of a kindred spirit. From Rio's Sergeants' Club came accusations that the generals wanted to overthrow the President. A pair...
Vinson is an autocratic chairman, can fell a tiresome or haughty witness with a single saber slash ("What did you say your name was, General?"). Once when a witness started off by saying he had nothing to add to previous testimony, Vinson cut him off with a curt "Thank you. Next witness!" To friends who ask him why he is not Secretary of Defense, his stock reply is: "I'd rather run the Pentagon from up here...
...politics in 1944, immediately won a seat in the federal assembly, and soon set his sights on the presidency. With fiery speeches and expansive promises, he came within 110,000 votes of beating Manuel Prado in 1956, and he has been campaigning ever since. In 1957, he fought a saber duel with a Congressman who called him a "demagogue and a conscious liar" (both men were slightly wounded). Two years later, he was imprisoned on an offshore island for defying a presidential ban on political rallies during a general strike, and staged an exciting prison break, attempting to swim...
Possessing what coach Edo Marion has called "one of the strongest saber teams in the Ivy League," the Crimson swordsmen took a commanding 13 to 8 lead midway through the match. The five point margin was made possible by double victories in the saber by captain, John Kennedy, Roger Barzun, and Paul Zygas...
...fight, she vaguely realizes, began when she stole her brother's World War I cavalry saber. "I took his sword and humbled it," she muses, "scraped muck from mouldings, rust from behind benches, dug holes for my plants. It was too awkward for peeling potatoes." Her rebellion comes when she tries to thrust herself into the freight cars full of Jews bound for Auschwitz-to call them to the attention of fellow townsfolk, who have chosen to ignore what is going on. Böll's point: in an insane world, sanity is madness. Duly confined...