Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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DONALD Regan, in the latest of the kiss-and-tell books on the Reagan Administration, revealed the regular use of astrology by the man who once said "trees cause pollution, too." Coverage in the media focused first on the practice's humorous aspects, the absurd images of Nancy Reagan and her faithful seer organizing the President's daily schedules according to the movements of the planets. I laughed until I cried...
...wildly asserts a parallel with Ionesco and the Theater of the Absurd...
Columnist James J. Kilpatrick argues that fears of a Japanese invasion were not absurd at the time. But the Japanese military turned its attention far to the east immediately after Pearl Harbor. By the end of December 1941, Lieut. General John L. DeWitt, who commanded West Coast defenses, concluded that no invasion was likely. By the time F.D.R. signed the Executive Order, top Army and Navy commanders agreed that an invasion was almost impossible. Nonetheless the evacuation policy proceeded, partly to show that the Government was busy doing something. There simply was no military need to uproot Japanese-American families...
...company of heroes, soliloquizing that "it is necessary to struggle, to be embattled, to be knocked down and to have to get up." Look at history's great leaders, he says. They have all trod the wilderness at times. Churchill, De Gaulle, Adenauer. If the audience thinks such comparisons absurd, clearly the comedian does not; that is the purity of the comedy. But, whatever it may think, the audience does not laugh -- at this or at anything he says ("That's a new tape recorder") -- because under the still alive scorn, the still alive paranoia, lives the embodiment of resilience...
Some tempers cracked under the strain of the early hour, letting out signs of patriotic fervor. "That's an absurd rule. Isn't that what the Revolution was about?" said one man, angered by the demands of a security officer in 18th-century uniform that he stay behind the ropes...