Word: slow-burning
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...s.o.b. on the block" rule, that America should enter fights with every bit of force available or not at all. Second, that the U.S. should never start a fight it didn't know how to end. Powell's doctrine was designed as a kind of notional vaccine against slow-build, slow-burn conflicts like Vietnam. But last week's action exploded both principles: America was not only moving in with less than blinding violence, it was also moving in without knowing how exactly it was supposed...
...stole into an Israeli army camp and, using a huge ax and several knives, hacked three soldiers to death. Assuming the killers were Palestinians from the occupied territories, Jews at first saw the attack as yet another terrorist engagement that fell within the unwritten rules of the region's slow-burn war. But then came the stunner: the alleged assailants, apprehended last month, were not aggrieved residents of the territories but citizens of Israel -- Arab citizens, "our Arabs," as Jewish Israelis think of this normally pacific minority. Suddenly, it looked to the country's Jewish majority as if the enemy...
...Paul's bomb begins ticking suspensefully not for any vast didactic reasons, but because everyone associated with it behaves in recognizably human fashion. Paul, for example, started to tinker with fissionable material down in the basement because a physicist named John Mathewson (played by John Lithgow in his best slow-burn style) is intent on tinkering with Paul's newly separated mom (Jill Eikenberry). This does not send the boy into an Oedipal frenzy, but it makes him wary when John invites him to his lab to play with a laser. The physicist has underestimated Paul, who is cannily played...
Alan King, one of the pooh-bahs of show biz, plays the psychiatrist with two alternating expressions. He pops his eyes like the late Benito Mussolini, and he breaks into a slow-burn grin like a pregnant volcano. This gives him wice the comic range of the play...
...Vaudevillians Burns & Allen are not likely to disappoint their fans. Pointing up Gracie's gags, Straightman George uses a slow-burn delivery and purse-mouthed pauses ("A man drowned once while I was pausing"). Compared to the machine-gun patter of most TV comics, his style gives the show a relaxed, almost leisurely pace. A high point of the program: Gracie's dubious plugs for Carnation Milk ("I don't see how they get milk from carnations...