Word: thermidors
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...casino is dressed for mowing the lawn, Wishnick slinks into an azure silk ensemble with a slit up the side, slips a new seven-carat ring on her finger, straps on a pair of silver slippers and sips champagne before setting off for a meal of lobster thermidor. Then it's "Woooooooooow. O.K., roll those babies! Come on! Numbers! Numbers! Numbers!" As Wishnick screams louder and starts to shake all over, the crowd begins chanting, "Eight! Eight! Eight!" At the end of the roll, she walks away from the craps table $5,000 richer...
...with the received wisdom of his day that the Government would be threatened by the mutually hostile factions with which a sprawling America appeared dangerously overloaded. By their very number and variety, Madison argued, the factions would support an enduring centralized republic by canceling out one another, leaving a thermidor of balanced popular will. Critics wrote off these perceptions as nonsense: no large republic anywhere could ever survive, and as a matter of political chemistry, a government might be either central or federal but surely not both. Madison, of course, knew otherwise, yet he sternly reminded Congress it would have...
...covered with shimmering silver and gold spangles like the fringes on a flapper's dress. That night, like a magnanimous feudal lord, Khashoggi, in a gray-and-black satin tuxedo, greeted his guests with kisses on both cheeks. Servants trooped into the ballroom carrying great silver salvers of lobster thermidor and pheasant with apples. For the children, there was a magic show featuring live doves, as well as hand-painted Cinderella-like carriages for them to ride around...
...time for someone to move. Either the Gang of Four would wipe out the last resistance and Jiang Qing would reign, or the veterans of the revolution would wipe out the Gang of Four. A classic case of "us" or "them," as tight as the events of 9 Thermidor, 1794, when it became a matter of life or death for members of France's revolutionary Convention: Robespierre would get them, or they would...
...Soon the practical tasks of governing split moderates and radicals. In the second stage, extremists rise and consolidate their power. Next comes the Terror, when the regime desperately tries to accomplish revolutionary goals no matter what the cost in blood. This horror often engenders a Thermidorean reaction (named for Thermidor, the month of the French revolutionary calendar in which the reaction occurred), when moderates regain control and the nation begins a period of convalescence. But ahead lies the danger of the fifth stage: the coming of a dictator still fired by some revolutionary zeal, and beyond that, the possibility...