Word: thin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Other remote Muslim enclaves would be vulnerable if fighting escalated, but Serb forces in the Bosnian republic have dwindled through desertion. According to best estimates, only about 80,000 Serb fighters remain active in the republic, but they lack sufficient fuel and are stretched thin. Though they outgun the Bosnian army 6 to 1 in heavy weapons, Sarajevo's infantry has an edge in manpower and a mobility advantage over tanks and artillery in winter. , The Bosnian army has a chance of holding its own and even of advancing -- which is probably a major reason why Serb commanders undertook...
...these facts are not related. Martin is so disturbing because he attempts to pull out of thin air a direct, causal relationship with his ridiculous rhetorical concept of a "Jewish monopoly...
...leads do attempt to lend substance to this thin material. Brian DeVries is charming as the hapless Ruthven, flailing about like a singing Bertic Wooster. Tori Jueds is strong as the prim Rose Maybud, though one gets frustrated with her etiquette-obsessed, lightweight character. Rose is most interesting when interacting with her social opposite and some-time-fiance, the lusty sailor Richard, played on some evenings by Douglas Miller. Richard should be pure comic relief for the audience: a nautical libertine among the prim British. Unfortunately, although Miller's voice is strong and expressive, his stiff, blocky stage presence...
...founding giant -- visionary, ruthless perhaps -- establishes the fortune. His sons try to consolidate it. As the generations follow one another, the founder's energy dissipates, like gases flung out from a star. Heirs proliferate. They squabble. Trust funds thin out. Distant cousins go for one another's throats. By the fourth or fifth generation, they are turning up with guilt complexes about the family name and about the founder's long-ago crimes of piracy. Some take to drugs, others to environmentalism. Some heir will tithe his trust fund to a cult. An heiress will be arrested in Saks...
...getting too inspired or sanguine. In the 1990s a cynic's eye reads a certain rotted sociology in important places -- an America disuniting into self-righteous tribalism (gridlocking interest groups; the indignant, victim-singing, litigating, on-the-make cousins, who are fighting over a national patrimony spread too thin...