Word: commissar
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...there are exotic trains still in ser vice. The Trans-Siberia Express is running, though there is a strong possibility of having a lady commissar as your sleepermate. Angola's Benguela line, whose locomotives are the world's most fragrant (they burn eucalyptus logs), huffs up and down mountainsides, as does Chile's Antofagasta & Bolivia. The great Sud Express from Paris to Madrid - with a stop at the Spanish border for a change from standard-to broad-gauge (more than half a foot wider) undercar riage - still hauls magnificent Pullmans with inlaid-wood furniture and three-star...
...Eyes Right." After that Hašek was drafted into the Austro-Hungarian army. He deserted to the Russians, converted to Bolshevism and became a commissar. Later, he gave up the Party and drifted back to Prague. There, as he slowly died of drink and TB, Hašek wrote the saga of the good soldier Švejk...
Crucial Command. The most note worthy transfer was of Li Te-sheng, 61, the army's top political commissar and a member of the nine-man Politburo standing committee and of the party's military affairs commission. He was sent from Peking to the crucial northern command in Shenyang, which covers the vital industrial regions of Manchuria and the vulnerable northeast frontier with the Soviet Union. Li is considered one of the army's rising generals, and his posting to the sensitive Soviet border testified to continuing Chinese concern over the Russian troop buildup in the area...
...moral problem at the root of Watergate. It is the phenomenon of 20th century "amorality -a combination of technology, propaganda and administrative mentality; the kind of dangers Kafka and Orwell warned us of. The problem of the future is not ideology but technicians. Albert Speer [Hitler's industrial commissar] held conventional political views, was a family man, but Speer lacked any psychological and spiritual ballast. Our problem now is a general belieflessness, a nonideological commitment to the system...
Young Skelton is as concerned as Hemingway was with "a good death," but he is contemporary in knowing that there is no such thing. "There are no tremendous deaths any more. The pope, the president, the commissar all come to it like cigarette butts dropped to the sidewalk." Still, he clings to a notion of a powerful grace born of desperation, and goes off to a rendezvous with Dance where they both know the fish will be running...