Word: vane
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...name at the top of the party roster reads Jiang Zemin, but power in China still rests in the hands of a few octogenarians. So it made sense for them to choose as party General Secretary a man known as "the weather vane." Jiang is the consummate apparatchik, whose rise to nominal power rests almost wholly on his ability to read China's swirling political winds correctly. The 63-year-old former mayor of Shanghai perfectly mirrors the party line of the moment -- slower economic reform coupled with rigid political orthodoxy -- as he made clear last week in his maiden...
...many will say that, if he doesn't beat them to it. And they'll relate his many personal kindnesses. Others will say, privately, that he's a fraud, an egomaniac, that his reputation is rooted more in legend than in fact, that he is too often the weather vane and too rarely the wind...
...harder slot. With victory all but ceded to Dukakis, Simon embarked on a last-ditch struggle to dethrone Gephardt as the principal challenger. Gone was the Illinois Senator's reticence about direct attacks; already in debt, he borrowed $110,000 to pay for ads deriding ! Gephardt's weather-vane voting record. But Simon's scorched-earth tactics could in the end mostly benefit Dukakis and Gore, whose money and organizational strength will keep them well equipped for the march through the South...
These geographical conditions conspired to provincialize American culture. Today, no colonial weather vane or goffering iron fails to find its collectors, and the productions of traveling limners evoke an enthusiasm that might once have seemed excessive for Gainsborough. Nevertheless, most American towns looked more like Dogpatch than Williamsburg, and none of them could have been confused with Bath. The best American minds, like Thomas Jefferson, were by no means unaware of this. Jefferson in the early 1780s complained that many of the buildings in Virginia's capital of Williamsburg were rude, misshapen piles "in which no attempts are made...
...this scheme of things, they also made plausible heroes. The great example is Stubbs' prosaically titled Hambletonian, Rubbing Down, 1800. Hambletonian, winner of both the St. Leger and the Doncaster Gold Cup in 1796, belonged 3 to a rich and deep-gambling young baronet named Sir Henry Vane-Tempest. In 1799 Vane-Tempest put him up against Diamond, another star horse, for a purse of 3,000 guineas. (At the time, a farmer's laborer might have made the equivalent of five guineas a year.) The match drew the biggest crowd and the heaviest side-betting ever seen...