Word: wanly
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...President. In fact, for many voters under 30, he has become almost synonymous with the job itself; since World War II, only Dwight Eisenhower, that other benign patriarch, served as long a tenure in the White House. It is no mystery why a conventional politician like Bush seems so wan in comparison and why an unfettered challenger like Dukakis remains so cautious in attacking the incumbent. Reagan has molded public attitudes too much in his own cheerful, nostalgic image to permit otherwise...
...lower Mississippi River, which is supposed to run full and fat with spring water, is wan and puny, coughing up sandbars that have blocked as many as 130 towboats and 3,000 giant river barges filled with paper, grain and chemicals headed for market. Around Greenville and Vicksburg, Miss., the Army engineers have had to dredge an emergency channel in the shrinking river to & unclog the bizarre traffic jam. At Memphis low water levels broke all the records that had been put down on the books going back to 1872. But where somebody is losing a buck, there is always...
...Nockmaar, he acquires a few worthy friends and foes: an outlaw warrior in the Han Solo mold (Val Kilmer), a dashing knight with Lando Calrissian's righteous swagger (Gavan O'Herlihy), a willful princess with martial guile (Joanne Whalley), a Yoda-like wizard (Billy Barty), an ancient sorceress -- Obi-Wan Kenobi's kid sister, perhaps -- struggling under a curse (Patricia Hayes) and a couple of impish brownies reminiscent of Artoo Detoo and See Threepio...
...charming old Connecticut house they have just bought. The Deetzes' teenage daughter Lydia, who dresses like Carolyn Jones in The Addams Family, sulks in the corner. The conversation fizzes, then fizzles; the guests shift uneasily. Time for a little . . . Day-o! Day-ay-ay- o! Daylight come and me wan' go home! What? Delia has risen and, to the astonishment of all, begun singing Harry Belafonte's banana-boat hit of 30 years past. Work all night on a drink of rum! Now the entire party, pulsing with the calypso beat, dances around the table like frenzied Jamaican dockworkers. Lift...
...long preliminary stages, the '88 campaign seemed depressing, a drama in wan search of heroes and meanings. Such diminutive choices must mean that the nation itself has grown diminished. The Old Testament, that thunderous text inhabited by nothing less than the gravitas of God, recorded, "There were giants in the earth in those days." Americans now alive remember Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, John Kennedy -- not all giants in any consensus but men of weight and consequence. But history is full of optical illusions...