Word: absurdes
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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...
...machine heir. Singer's idea of a bauble was a ten-diamond pendant; Robards' idea of acting is to bark his love scenes tersely, as if ordering a gross of No. 11 needles. Isadora had a child by each of her lovers; both children died in an absurd and macabre automobile accident in France. From then on, it was a long bouree downhill. "I love potatoes and young men," she sighed, "that's my trouble!" Calories and sycophants attended her decline. Choreographer George Balanchine recalled her Russian dance recital in 1921: "Absolutely unbelievable -a drunken, fat woman...
...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...