Word: complex
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Dates: during 2000-2000
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...part deeply democratic, and joyously so as well. It is no longer "provincial," a distant and nervous response to norms generated in imperial centers. It is the result of a bloodless and slow-developing social revolution conducted over 40 years as a small society grew larger and immeasurably more complex, shook off its sense of derivative Englishness and its fear of American domination and learned to trust its own talents...
...strange man from Whittier, that I find myself wanting to defend Nixon - which is quite a novel impulse for me. Even Oliver Stone, who has a minor genius for mischievous dark cartooning (as in his contemptible movie "JFK," with its hallucinations of kitchen-sink conspiracy), treated Nixon as a complex and in some ways sympathetic figure. H.R. Haldeman had it about right when he compared Nixon to "a multifaceted quartz crystal. Some facets bright and shining, others dark and mysterious. And all of them constantly changing as the external light rays strike the crystal...some smooth and polished, others crude...
Worst hit has been the Bitterroot Valley, where the skies glow red all night and the smoke on the highways forces vehicles to travel in convoys behind pilot cars. Paul Chamberlain of the U.S. Forest Service, deputy operations chief assigned to the raging valley complex fire, has never seen anything like this disaster. "Many of you have been fighting fires for a long time and haven't ever witnessed a fire event like yesterday," Chamberlain told his tired troops. "You may never witness another one in your whole career." What complicates the fire fighters' job is that the picturesque valley...
...stealing their sports-complex idea b) Goofy's mistakes c) burns caused by hot Disney coffee...
...such a setting, containing the blazes is not a priority, nor is it even practical. "As it is," says Steve Frye, incident commander for the valley complex, "we have only enough resources to protect homes and property." Given the flames' unpredictable behavior, providing a heat shield is often impossible, and even under good conditions it can require novel, high-risk tactics. "We are going into situations that, absent homes and property, we wouldn't be putting fire fighters into," says Frye. Now and then rugged cabin dwellers tell Frye they don't expect the Federal Government to defend their dwellings...