Word: sanding
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Television brought Vietnam into America's living rooms only when the fighting was well under way. This time, Americans are watching the preparations in the sand on television every night: an instant, electronic diary. "We are being told how many casualties we can expect on the first day, on the second day," says Alan Chartock, a political scientist at the New Paltz campus of the State University of New York. "The enemy is talking to us, giving us nightly forecasts of doom...
...imponderables range from the nitty and literally gritty (how badly will the fine desert sand foul the gears of tanks and the breeches of rifles?) to the conceptual (could U.S. troops bypass the dug-in Iraqi forces in Kuwait with a flanking attack?). They include questions of psychology: Is the Iraqi army battle hardened from eight years of war against Iran, or battle weary? Would the troops on the front line, many of whom are thought to be ill-trained draftees who know they are cannon fodder, fight hard or give up quickly? For that matter, how battle ready...
...Great Auction Wave in contemporary art, which rose amid the financial euphoria of 1982 and crested in late 1989, is now over, vanished into the sand. Just as one of its signs was the auction-room applause that greeted some new price level -- $17 million for a Jasper Johns, $20.7 million for a De Kooning -- so its end was marked by another kind of applause...
...except in Tamashek, the language of the Tuareg nomads, with whom Kit hitches a fateful ride. But there are many profound images of the desert in all its pitiless grandeur, courtesy of Bertolucci and his peerless cinematographer, Vittorio Storaro. The wind sculpts mountains and minarets out of the shifting sand. On a rocky spot where Port and Kit have just made desperate love, the setting sun alights for a moment as if in benediction...
...creature whose bravado consists in allowing chance to work its will on him, at first believes he will enjoy feeling stranger in a strange land. North Africa, he thinks, will offer escape into adventure, exotic peril, the seductions of oblivion. He is wrong. The desert demands his surrender. The sand is quicksand; it will swallow him whole...