Word: uncertain
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Forty years ago this Sunday, Mao Zedong stood on a balcony overlooking Tiananmen Square and said, "The Chinese people have stood up, and the future of our nation is infinitely brighter." Infinitely messier is closer to the mark today. The economy's course is uncertain. Provincial and municipal governments will surely pursue their own interests despite efforts to restrain them. The party, with its ideology bankrupt, offers only order and is begging for faith -- and not getting it. How long can a government like that retain control and stay in power? "A regime that . . . is forced to fire...
...there any substance to this life? Was Carsey a kind of scapegrace hero for clearing out? Good, portentous questions, explored by his former friends. The answers may not quite measure up, and the author uses the novelistic device of the omniscient narrator, leaving the reader uncertain of how evidence was tracked down. But when Carsey turns up tending bar more or less happily in the Southwest, it seems that his problems may have been nothing much more than an empty marriage and heavy drinking. He spoke eloquently by his action, and has little more...
Farm gets as close to the sweat and slim profit margins of an uncertain occupation as any suburban slicker could imagine. Rhodes says he filled 42 notebooks during working visits to Tom Bauer's Missouri farm, and he seems to have used every detail from them, including the squeal of Bauer's hogs...
...this column before, it was Lee who attempted to justify his initial support for ROTC by claiming that he "wasn't aware" of the military's policy of excluding gays and lesbians. Of course, Lee presided over a council meeting at which the issue was debated in no uncertain terms. Yet he still voted in favor of ROTC. In true Reaganesque fashion, we are left with two possible explanations: Either Lee conducted the meeting while in a coma, or he lied about his ignorance...
...disaster: the Soviet army invaded eastern Poland and proceeded to grab whatever had not yet been grabbed by the Germans. Actually, this had all been preordained in several secret protocols of the previous month's Nazi-Soviet treaty. Only the date of the Soviet invasion had been left uncertain. Stalin had a little difficulty in thinking up an excuse to attack, but he finally declared that he was acting "to restore peace and order in Poland, which has been destroyed by the disintegration of the Polish State...