Word: southern
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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With long, lordly wo-o-ofs, cheery B-flat chirps and an occasional deep commanding harrumph, the glistening silver serpent curls through a land its ancestors helped define. It may not inhabit the terrain much longer. Like the Furbish lousewort and the snail darter, the Southern Crescent is an endangered species. The aging Crescent is the nation's last lavish, privately run, long-haul passenger train. But its owner, the highly profitable and efficient Southern Railway System, claims to have lost $6.7 million last year on the Crescent's Washington-New Orleans...
However that may be, no funeral vapors suffuse Platform 14 at New York City's Penn Station, from which the Crescent pulls out each day at 2:45 p.m. under Amtrak's auspices. (Southern takes over at Washington.) Rather, for the passenger embarking on the 1,378-mile, 28-hour trip to New Orleans, the Crescent City, there is the comforting scent of soap and polish, the promise of solicitude, of pride and punctuality. Not to mention a rockaby sleep, punctuated by the occasional hissing stop, and a glimpse of some dimly lit Southern station in the dark...
After the train's first leg from New York, Southern puts its premier cru seal on the train at Washington by attaching a kitchen-dining car and installing its own crew. The train now has 13 cars, including four coaches, five sleepers and a lounge car with a master suite that boasts the only permanent rolling shower bath on American rails. In Atlanta in the morning, the overnight diner is replaced with a clean car, another crew, and a whole new cast of Pullman porters...
...Soviets have consistently been on the right side: they supported the black nationalist movements against Portuguese colonialism; they backed MPLA, the only genuine nationalist movement in Angola, against invasions by Zaire and South Africa; they support black liberation throughout southern Africa. Meanwhile, as one black South African told Harvard students this year, "The U.S. is not just on the wrong side, the U.S. is the wrong side"--with its corporate interests in South Africa, its military aid to dictators such as Mobutu, and its consistent support of the status quo in southern Africa...
...French and Belgians have shown their willingness to intervene in southern Africa to protect their interests--interests in Zaire's copper mines that are run by French and Belgians, interests in propping up the shaky regime of a "safe" pro-Western-exploitation dictator, Mobutu. The future looks grim for the people of Zaire: Mobutu has wiped out all possible opposition, except for the Katangans; the worldwide recession and drop in copper prices has left Zaire's economy in a shambles; and the International Monetary Fund is imposing "austerity" on Zaire. We can be sure, however, it will not mean austerity...