Word: uso
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There was no immediate claim of responsibility for the blast which happened shortly after 8 p.m. (2 p.m. EDT) at the USO club...
Like her predecessors, Burrows will keep the Army on a conservative tack. The U.S. branch was a founder of the USO but resigned from the group in 1976 when it began serving alcohol to soldiers. In 1981 the Army quit the World Council of Churches after it awarded welfare grants to guerrilla organizations that eventually overthrew the white minority regime in Rhodesia. The Army found aid for violent groups inappropriate...
...most important, American pop strikes receptive non-Americans as relaxed and slaphappily loose, even liberating. For Europeans, the cascade of pop arrived in the late 1940s and '50s along with reconstruction; it was as if the Marshall Plan came with its own USO for civilians. "Remember," says Furio Colombo, the Italian president of Fiat's American division, "we were liberated in 1945 by the American troops. That is what American pop culture represents to Europe--freedom, even when it's just a fashion...
Zalmie is wounded while performing in a USO show during World War One and returns home, maturing into a sort of Vito Corleone. America becomes the battleground, and Al Capone-style gang killings flash left and right, suspended in a vacuum, as "Sweet Georgia Brown" trumpets on the soundtrack. After Zalmie's wife is gunned down, he goes to his son Benny who is playing jazz with blacks, and pleads, "If you won't live my dream, at least live my life"--a characteristically melodramatic clinker that calls embarassing attention to itself...
Terkel revels in giving his readers sudden insights from unexpected sources. An ageing actress who performed in the USO shows in Vietnam asks, "Who wants to die cool? Nobody cool ever changed the world." Or the bitter but successful Mexican businessman who says, "The American Dream, I see now, is governed not by education, opportunity and hard work, but by power and fear. The higher up in the organization you go, the more you have to lose. The dream is not losing." Terkel doesn't capitalize the "d" here as he does elsewhere--this clearly isn't his idea...