Word: vastness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...long-range terms, the most worrisome prospect is the deterioration of U.S. influence in what National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski has called "the Arc of Crisis," a vast region of the Middle East and Asia Minor where instability invites Soviet adventurism. Saudi Arabia, in particular, has become increasingly skeptical of America's resolve to safeguard the Arc, and, according to some unconfirmed reports, has opened discreet diplomatic channels to Moscow. There is little chance that so virulent an anti-Communist state as Saudi Arabia would seriously consider any accommodation with the Soviets, but the very fact that...
Almost as nerve-racking as the worries about physical safety is the overpowering sense of isolation. Communications in Iran are unreliable, with the result that the country has become a vast rumor mill. Says an elementary school teacher at the U.S. compound of Shahin Shahr, near Isfahan: "We alternate between panic and being very blasé. Some days we don't get a thing accomplished." Desert picnics, once popular, are now regarded as too big a risk for families to take. Says one American housewife: "It's a big social event to sip coffee and listen...
...difficult for Westerners to understand how so vast a population can psychologically reverse itself so quickly. It is like trying to imagine an aircraft carrier turning on a dime. Over the years, of course, the Chinese have been required to perform wrenching changes of allegiance, as friends became enemies and onetime heroes of the revolution underwent their metamorphoses in the character assassins' wall-poster invective that declared dissidents to be "insects," "pests" or "ferocious feudal monsters." The process has bred measures of confusion, sophistication, cynicism and nimbleness in the Chinese...
...overriding ambition was to rid China of all traces of its decadent past, while at the same time transforming the Chinese national character. His instrument was a vast totalitarian party and police apparatus that reaches into every facet of daily life, that controls what a Chinese can read, where he can travel, how he should live. Despite the omnipresence of this Orwellian machinery, many practices of the feudal past are observed. In the privacy of their homes, there are many peasant families who still pray to Kuan-yin, the goddess of mercy, and burn incense to their ancestors. Ouija boards...
...Times says Hillary is "the one candidate who will best fill the vast gap that will be left in the Senate and within the Democratic Party by the retirement of Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan." Did we expect Republican Rick Lazio to be the one candidate who could best fill that gap within the Democratic party? No. The Times' editorial board was not deciding between Lazio and Clinton at all, but was applying its solemn rubber stamp to a foregone partisan conclusion...