Word: sword
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Today's jaded youth hardly needs to be taught this lesson; sword-and-sorcery movies usually go belly up at the box office. So the trick for any modern would-be Grimm is to blend the warring moods of fantasy and cynicism. The story must create a land of outsize heroes and villains yet comment ironically on the unhappy state of a land that needs them. The tone must be grandly facetious to accommodate believers as well as skeptics. William Goldman tried all this in his 1973 novel The Princess Bride. His narrative had all the proper ingredients...
Poindexter testified that he had never heard of any scapegoat plan. But some thought the admiral was indeed falling on his sword for the sake of Ronald Reagan. "This man will never say anything that reflects adversely on his Commander in Chief," said Senate Counsel Arthur Liman. "How do we know he's not still protecting the President...
...charm, guile and unbridled self-righteousness during his long-awaited appearance in the Iran-contra hearings, he portrayed himself as a dutiful junior officer, ever willing to "salute smartly and charge up the hill" at any order from his superiors. Yet the bemedaled Marine refused to fall on his sword and take full blame for the scandal that has wounded his Commander in Chief. Although he confessed candidly -- and defiantly -- to blatant lies and deceptions, North also threw what even he called "Ollie North's dragnet" over high officials of the Administration he had served. North's net fell only...
When Reagan and Nakasone first met on the sun-drenched White House South Lawn, the President again used the double-edged sword. Turning to television cameras that were carrying the ceremonies live back to Japan, he spoke of the importance of U.S.-Japanese relations and told of the "great care" that has been taken over four decades "to mold and create this gem of a relationship." Yet he called the gaping trade imbalance between the two countries "unsustainable" and warned that "tangible actions must be taken by us both...
Only the first half of the play deals with the fall of Aias; the second half is an Antigone-like dispute among several new characters over whether to bury a lawbreaker's corpse (shown as a mummy with a bloody sword in its chest). Favoring burial is the swashbuckling Teukros (Gintaras Valiulis); against burial are the petulant and imperious Menelaos (Elliot Thomson) and Agamemnon (Joe Song). All it seems to boil down to, though, is a contest among the three to strike the grandest pose, shout the loudest, and sneer the most...