Word: timidity
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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This time, by golly, no one would call George Bush timid. Quite the contrary, the President made a rare appearance as Bush the riverboat gambler. By sending a high-level delegation to Beijing to confer with Chinese authorities who only six months earlier had ordered the massacre of pro-democracy demonstrators near Tiananmen Square, Bush knew he would stir up a hurricane of outraged protest. And for what? The slender chance that China would respond with concessions that could begin to melt the ice in U.S. relations with the world's most populous nation...
Bancroft, playing a South American aristocrat, sounds more like South Brooklyn and about as aristocratic as a hash-house waitress. Alexander ably sketches differences among the dowager's airhead sister, mean daughter and timid nurse, but, as the last, lapses into a singsong that has become her trademark shorthand for innocence. Adding to the problem, Robert Allan Ackerman's archly formal staging emphasizes ritual over a sense of place. Still, the two women establish an ever shifting power dynamic. In the last fantasy, when they embrace fondly in an imagined courtyard, their warmth and urgency enable the audience to share...
...else was prepared to. Purges following the 1968 invasion wiped out all potential reformers within the party, and a continued hard line kept any progressive new party figures from emerging. The government also used Czechoslovakia's relative prosperity to buy off the workers, who proved reluctant, if not downright timid, about demanding change. Last week the workers listened to men like Havel and agreed to join in. Said a truck driver: "They showed us not to be afraid." That coalition of intellectuals, students and workers turned out to be an unstoppable force...
...Bush Administration has put forward the Brady Plan, whereby the U.S. Government urges private banks to provide some relief to debtor nations. Yet you've called it timid...
...President is riding high in the polls as he presides over peace and prosperity, yet he is hearing mounting criticism for his timid response to the stunning changes taking place overseas. The other President, though wildly popular around the world, is in serious trouble at home, threatened with civil war in the south of his country, a secessionist movement in the north and a collapsing economy that heralds a winter of fuel shortages and food riots. For all these differences -- and because of them -- George Bush and Mikhail Gorbachev both stand to gain from a feet-up-on-the-table...