Word: abstract
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After Chappaquiddick, in 1969, Edward Kennedy practiced what might be called the pre-emptive deflective confession. The idea was to assume the guilt in one large abstract gulp in order to silence any further specific inquiries. It did not work well for Kennedy. He spent a full week in a fortress of silence while the reassembled talents of Camelot labored over a text for him. Then he went on national television to take the responsibility of a young woman's death unto himself but also, simultaneously, to leave himself in a state of dazed blamelessness. His biggest mistake...
Gorky's career was of inestimable significance to modern art in America. It formed a sort of Bridge of Sighs between European modernism-in particular, surrealism-and abstract expressionism...
...hesitations and failures were as essential to the man's identity as his real successes. Nobody could expect that in so short and racked a life, Gorky could have resolved all the tensions and contradictions of his work. But in those tensions, the existential map of abstract expressionism was drawn. -By Robert Hughes
...capable of killing every person on earth, but the point is that the U.S. strategists now speak primarily of eliminating military targets--of "counterforce"--as if human life were not involved. Concepts such as counterforce increase the strategic complexity of the arms race, making discussion of the issue more abstract, more removed from the real dangers of international instability...
...help perpetuate the arms race. But the first step in the Lab's conversion to non-military work must be recognition by the Lab's management that it does contribute to the instability inherent in the arms race. Nuclear weapons, and the systems that guide them, are not abstract concepts. Their impact is connected to all of us--indeed it threatens our very existence. It is very easy to withdraw into our own personal concerns, whether they be the solution to a particular problem in inertial guidance, or a question of how to appeal to a graduate school interviewer...