Word: backdrop
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Against a backdrop of financial crisis in public higher education, nonfaculty professionals at the University of Massachusetts voted 3-to-1 yesterday to form a union...
...West was won, Los Angeles and the 20th century were built, by the cowboy mind. To the cowboy, nature was a vast wilderness waiting to be tamed. The land was a stage, a backdrop against which he could pursue his individual destiny. The story of the world was the story of a man, usually a white man, and its features took their meaning from their relationship to him. A mountain was a place to test one's manhood; an Asian jungle with its rich life and cultures was merely a setting for an ideological battle. The natives are there...
Some of these circuits are long and slow, so that consequences may take years or generations to manifest themselves. That helps sustain the cowboy myth that nature is a neutral, unchanging backdrop. Moreover, evolution seems to have wired our brains to respond to rapid changes, the snap of a twig or a movement in the alley, and to ignore slow ones. When these consequences do start to show up, we don't notice them. Anyone who has ever been amazed by an old photograph of himself or herself can attest to the merciful ignorance of slow change, that is, aging...
...Deng Xiaoping ten years ago began a miraculous economic transformation, to Beijing and a village not far from the capital that is infinitely poorer than towns a thousand miles farther inland, I find little that is charming or especially exotic. Just a mostly drab and dusty country, a perfect backdrop for the tedious and too often unrewarding nature of daily life. Still, the people seem energetic, if fitful; a fifth of the world's population in a cage. Good, hardworking people who deserve better than the suffocating Communism that limits their enterprise...
...central romance, like the political backdrop, is a rescue fantasy. Soldier Chris (Simon Bowman) meets Kim (Lea Salonga), a village girl turned prostitute, and seeks to save her from that servitude, then from the wrath of a cousin to whom she was betrothed in childhood. At last, impulsively, he vows to save her from the coming chaos. His heart is good, but his head is clouded: he has no thought for the practical realities of her future in an alien land, only for the sweet moment of his own chivalry. Even that fails. In this revamping of Madama Butterfly, Chris...