Word: trod
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...kick around some more; and if one reviews the tapes, it is easy to conclude that he actually won the TV debate with Jack Kennedy; and he was a crook. So there. With Nixon, every circumstance eventually turns out to be funnier than he is. The nation he has trod these 75 years, the framework for his antics, is itself a dark and serious comedy, simultaneously rejecting and accepting everything in its midst; a riot, a scream. Sometimes (rarely) Nixon laughs aloud. The gunshot laugh, the "Ha!" It is what Beckett designated as the risus purus: the laugh laughing...
...good for a laugh. Alone onstage in Saddle River, the comedian raises himself to the company of heroes, soliloquizing that "it is necessary to struggle, to be embattled, to be knocked down and to have to get up." Look at history's great leaders, he says. They have all trod the wilderness at times. Churchill, De Gaulle, Adenauer. If the audience thinks such comparisons absurd, clearly the comedian does not; that is the purity of the comedy. But, whatever it may think, the audience does not laugh -- at this or at anything he says ("That's a new tape recorder...
This was not the well-trod turf of Bach, Mozart or even Beethoven that Norrington's crack London Classical Players were venturing onto, but the terra incognita of Hector Berlioz, the virtuoso French composer who in the 1830s revolutionized symphonic sound in such works as the hallucinogenic Symphonie Fantastique and the blazing choral symphony Romeo et Juliette. "Our goal is to present a view of Berlioz very different from modern received opinion," Norrington told the audience before the performance. "We're not like a symphony orchestra playing notes. We only play poetry here...
Price hikes seem to make Poles see red. Riots over such increases toppled Poland's leadership in 1956, 1970 and 1980. So Warsaw officials trod cautiously last week when they announced price rises on virtually everything from cigarettes to kindergarten classes in the sharpest round of increases in six years. Though the jump in food prices was far smaller than the 110% boost that voters rejected in November, at 40% it was big enough to cause new ripples of unrest. In Gdansk, some 3,000 protesters chanted slogans and waved banners outside the local Communist Party headquarters...
True, some mercenary flights manage to offend. Judith Campbell Exner tastelessly trod on a national icon in My Story, the tale of her sexual adventures with President John F. Kennedy and Gangster Sam Giancana. Putative Aristocrat Sydney Biddle Barrows' best-selling book The Mayflower Madam -- and the forthcoming TV movie -- raises the grating spectacle of a woman thumbing her nose at the system that convicted her of promoting prostitution...