Word: warred
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...gush or two of Wordsworthian euphoria. Though a drawing of Yuri Andropov graces my office wall (a warm reminder of the good old days when The Enemy looked the part), I am a cold warrior who does not mourn the passing of the great twilight struggle. The cold war made thinking simpler in a "four legs good, two legs bad" (the Animal Farm axiom) sort of way. But simpler doesn't mean better. There could be no happier outcome for the cold war than for us to win it and for old cold warriors to face the invigorating challenge...
...just to hear it. Think only of this century. Russia tasted freedom in February 1917 and by October had lost it for 70 years. Weimar Germany tasted democracy for 14 years; it took Hitler and his storm troopers a few months to eradicate it. (Had Hitler not started World War II, the taste might to this day not have returned.) Hungarians let the genie out in 1956; five days and 5,000 tanks later, Khrushchev had stuffed it back in. Twenty-one years ago, the Czechs tasted freedom for an afternoon. Tell the Czechs that today's "Moscow Spring...
...good times Baker refers to in his title are from 1947, the year he joined the Baltimore Sun, until 1963, when Kennedy was assassinated. Yet to come were full-scale war in Viet Nam, civil unrest, Watergate, gas lines, stagflation, and the proliferation of junk food and junk politics. Unsurprisingly these not-so-good times provided Baker with his best material as a columnist. But as a memoirist he seems to be finding that Russell Baker is a tough act to follow, especially if you are Russell Baker...
...experiments in a concentration camp and executed after being tried at Nuremberg. One of his victims was the half-gypsy girl who became Sandra's mother. She was, the daughter notes ironically, "really lucky, and was all of 15 when I was born, at the very end of the war." Sandra, of course, never knew her father, and the mother who raised her was demonstratively sinking into madness. Given the bizarre facts of her conception, the heroine has - created for herself a special identity: "I am an ordinary person, but carried to extremes." And her mission in life is clear...
...bash or not to bash: that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous trade practices. Or to take arms against protectionist barriers. To punish, to avenge. Perchance to trigger a trade war. Ay, there's the rub that must give us pause...