Word: shrug
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Many women -- and fur-wearing men too -- are starting to think twice before they shrug on a fur and nip off to the office or the grocery store. Ever since she was called "animal killer" on the street, Susan Singer, a Manhattan executive, has been ambivalent about wearing her fur coat. So is New York department-store employee Suzanne Pandjiris, who still wears her mink but fears attacks by protesters. "It makes me nervous," she says...
...fact, Californians are no different from other Americans when it comes to risk. The national temperament seems to have a fault line all its own. On one side of that psychic divide, Americans shrug off demonstrable threats: they build houses on eroding beaches, speed without wearing seat belts, go hang gliding and expose themselves to the cancer-causing rays of the sun. On the other side, they suffer a bad case of the jitters about the smallest threat to personal well-being. They flee from apples that might bear a trace of Alar and fret about radon, nuclear power...
...Many shrug off quakes but fret about nuclear power and radiation. That kind of paradox has become common among Americans generally. But just what constitutes an acceptable risk? -- After the Bay Area shake-up, Los Angeles could be next. -- On the opposite coast, the sound of rebuilding echoes in the wake of Hurricane Hugo. -- How five U.S. Senators helped save a shaky S&L that will cost taxpayers $2.5 billion...
...such is the depth of bitterness that civil war would be hard to prevent if it did. Azerbaijani nationalists also speak seriously of carrying out their self-proclaimed secession if Moscow continues to govern Nagorno-Karabakh. "There would be a war ((with the Soviet Union))," says Huseynov with a shrug. "But we think Iran and Turkey would help us." Moscow would presumably have something of its own to say about any attempt by Baku to exercise such an option. But so far, Moscow has managed only to alienate both sides in the bitter feud. That is hardly a claim...
...what is the truth of Do the Right Thing? Whose side is Lee on? Is the movie a revolutionary scream or a fatalistic shrug? Lee leaves plenty of hints -- contradictory epigrams from Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, a dedication to families of blacks slain by police, graffiti proclaiming TAWANA ((Brawley)) TOLD THE TRUTH -- but no coherent clues. Lee cagily provides a litmus test for racial attitudes in 1989, but he does so by destroying the integrity of his characters, black and white. They vault from sympathetic to venomous in the wink of a whim. One minute, Sal delivers...