Word: mays
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...downfall of Panama's General Manuel Noriega had little in common with Ceausescu's overthrow. The Rumanian was driven out by his own people, the Panamanian by an outside army. The Rumanian ran and was caught; the Panamanian found sanctuary in the Vatican nunciature in Panama City and may yet escape punishment. What the two episodes had in common was the simple fact that they rid the world of two dictators...
...hard task of transition sets in. He acknowledges that he does not know much about the intricacies of international economics or the Warsaw Pact, and some skeptics see him as susceptible to manipulation by other leaders of the Civic Forum revolutionary movement. But in times of philosophical upheaval, Plato may have been right: the philosopher makes the best king. Havel has written acutely about the psychological and metaphysical impact of the communist years and about how the change to a free, capitalist society requires the restoration of a sense of individual responsibility. Without that lesson's being learned, details...
Havel's English-language reputation was secured with his second play, The Memorandum, in which a society's leaders imposed an artificial language, incomprehensible to everyone but nonetheless required for all transactions. It debuted in Prague in 1965 and reached the U.S. in May 1968 in an award-winning production by Joseph Papp's prestigious Public Theater in New York City. Havel attended the premiere. Three months later, Soviet tanks rolled through the streets of Prague. The political and artistic blossoming withered and died. The bureaucrats Havel had mocked were firmly back in charge...
...came in 1938. As Beckett walked along a Paris street, a panhandler stabbed him in the chest, perforating a lung and narrowly missing his heart. When Beckett later asked why the attack happened, the assailant replied, "I don't know, sir." That glimpse of the random perils of existence may have confirmed Beckett's dark vision but did not initiate it. His novel Murphy, published the same year, depicts a destitute Irishman, living in London, who daydreams away his days in a rocking chair until a gas plant explodes and shreds him. At his instruction, his ashes are flushed down...
...succeeds hilariously -- and sometimes poignantly. But it has a number of bothersome aspects. One is its treatment of the cataclysm itself. GM's layoffs were not as extensive or precipitate as Moore suggests, and many of the failed civic- improvement plans were begun years before the firings. But it may be that Moore's largest untruth involves his own screen persona. He would have us see him as a sort of Rust Belt Garrison Keillor, innocent but natively shrewd...