Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Absurd as the charges often seem, they cannot be easily dismissed. No other nation has remotely matched the U.S. ambition of higher education for all. Yet, if enrollment has doubled in ten years, the results are mixed. One reason is the sheer incoherence of big, bureaucratic universities that allow "research"?much of it trivial?to overshadow everything else. Jacques Barzun likens the current U.S. campus to the medieval guild which "undertook to do everything for the town." The university today, he writes in The American University, "aids the poor, redesigns the slums, advises the small tradesmen, runs a free...
...TIME Essay "The Danger of Playing at Revolution" [March 28] was thoughtful and incisive but irrelevant. It is, of course, absurd to believe that the U.S. Government can be actively overthrown by any combination of New Leftists, Yippies or Black Panthers. But your Essay considers only the classical type of revolution of the French or Russian variety. Certainly other kinds are possible-not only possible but apparently inevitable...
...Sociologists Simon and Gagnon have stretched behaviorism to its absurd limits with the assertion that sexuality in man is a learned behavior pattern. It is a sad comment on the limiting influences of specialization in any field when a sociologist tries to refute such a basic biological tenet as evolution and natural selection. For behavior patterns and their modification possibilities through learning are fixed in the genes of species, consequently modified but not eradicated in individual development. Just as ethologists are beginning to find that man has more instinct-caused behavior than we thought, Simon and Gagnon rush...
Nonetheless, it is becoming increasingly clear that U.S. power has distinct limits, which must be better recognized than in the past. That power, often with absurd reliance on technology, is badly suited to guerrilla warfare, as in Viet Nam. It cannot be used to keep balky allies in line, as Russia did in Hungary and Czechoslovakia, because American values and politics would not permit it. It is unsuitable for ready use against mischiefmakers, whether in North Korea or Peru, because heavy ripostes to such irritations usually entail intolerable military or political risks...
...defies surface credibility. Even highly respected California Psychiatrist Bernard L. Diamond, key defense witness last week at the Sirhan trial, admitted that the jury might have trouble believing his testimony that Sirhan killed Robert Kennedy while in a self-induced hypnotic trance. To the layman, this would be an "absurd, preposterous story, unlikely and incredible," he allowed. The reputation of psychiatric wisdom was certainly smudged when another expert witness at the trial, Psychologist Martin Schorr, admitted that he had relied heavily on the terminology of another man's book to formulate his own description of Sirhan's state...