Word: skirmishing
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...player," he says. "He's a kid off a Wheaties box. I wanted to yank the kid off that box and mess with his image -- take him to the dark side." So the kid goes off to war and sees a slaughtered Vietnamese family. In the chaos of a skirmish, he kills one of his own men. Paralyzed from the chest down, he finds his sex life over before it begins. In horrifying rants, he abuses his parents, his country and himself. This Ron is not a nice person or even, in his hippie garb, a nice-looking one. Moviegoers...
...Thomas Francis McGuane III that struggle began at the age of ten when a disagreement with a boyhood chum over the description of a sunset ended in a fistfight. "It was my first literary skirmish," he says. Born and raised in Michigan, McGuane was introduced to the outdoors and a stern Irish work ethic by his father, an auto-parts manufacturer. McGuane early on developed an "adventurous image" of what a writer should be from Horatio Hornblower novels and books about World War II. "I saw myself on the deck of an Amazon steamer or something," he recalls. At Michigan...
...latest skirmish erupted last week in San Francisco, as parishioners of St. Francis Lutheran Church voted 46 to 5 to call a lesbian couple as assistant pastors: Ruth Frost and Phyllis Zillhart, both graduates of Luther Northwestern seminary in Minnesota. Bishop Lyle Miller refuses to approve them as ministers because they will not commit themselves to sexual abstinence. The congregation, half gay, will have to ordain the women on its own, defying both the ordination rules of the 5.3 million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and its policy against "homosexual erotic activity" among ministers...
...miasma of public relations stunts. The President's recent "education summit" with the nation's Governors produced some interesting ideas about national standards but little about how to pay the costs of helping public schools meet them. His much trumpeted war against drugs was more an underfinanced skirmish. Bush told voters last year that he is an environmentalist, but the most significant clean-air proposals put forth this year -- stringent new standards on automobile emissions -- were adapted from California's strict limits for the 1990s...
...then move on to the next issue without supporting substantive change. Months after Bush's famous press conference from a national park, he has yet to present tough clean air legislation to Congress. And he plans to fund his famed War on Drugs as if it were a minor skirmish...