Word: viets
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...long ago, the "go for it" mentality of untrammeled capitalism was a virtue in the culture of Reaganism. Now that culture is being questioned. The Rambo story, which was a cartoon of Reaganism's individualist machismo, has been discredited by the escapades of Oliver North. The enduring ghost of Viet Nam returns not in the cretinous revenge fantasies of Sylvester Stallone but in Platoon, a movie that confronts the ambiguous mess and tragedy of America's mission in Viet Nam. The show that has captured Broadway is Les Miserables, with its themes of suffering and redemption, and the injunction "Look...
Those who tend Washington decade after decade have many faults, but there are splendid moments when the best rise to defend this ungainly democracy. When Lyndon Johnson passed the acceptable threshold of bloodshed in Viet Nam, the political establishment weighed in. Richard Nixon violated the law andthe threshold of decency in Watergate, and the city exposed and expelled him. Reagan crossed a threshold of mismanagement, and is being called to account...
While the White House has been in and out of more political battles than one can count in the past half a dozen years, the armies of the industrialized world have been mercifully underemployed. There have been no superpower standoffs, no new Viet Nams in Central America, no Cuban missile crises or Afghanistan invasions, no oil embargoes. There have been failures like Lebanon and frustrations like Nicaragua. Yet a significant number of experts believe that even if Reagan does not manage to negotiate a reduction in nuclear weapons, the grim specter of World War III, an image relished by demagogues...
...author's favorite words is "segue," an old music term, now used freely in the movie business. It means to move smoothly and without hesitation from one element to another. The Red White and Blue, in fact, segues from the radical politics of the '60s to Viet Nam to the bloodless take-over of the nation by a communications culture in which concepts of image and credibility have become acceptable alternatives for substance and truth...
...Leah's splashy assassinations at the hands of a crazed Viet Nam veteran are a navigational point in Broderick's looping narrative. His delivery owes something to Raymond Chandler, but rather than plot there is a proliferation of character and incident that builds to an ugly and violent mood. Dunne is a masterly setter of scenes and a merciless satirist, whether the target is an incontinent captain of industry or a criminal who has been packaged as a black revolutionary and needs an investment adviser: "The Merc and I were thinking more along the lines of Ornstein and Shay...