Word: absurdes
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Even the '50's rebels were quiet ones. Their "Beat Generation" represented a personal rather than political revolt. Politics became "absurd," and the Beatniks chose an existential answer, expressing discontent with the personal outrages of American life like IBM and increasing automation. The radical cry of the '50's was "impersonalization" perpetrated by the centers of economic power; today's radicals concentrate on the central power's "manipulation...
...where a few years ago a murder was committed." So begin both Carson McCullers' novel Reflections in a Golden Eye, and this film based on it. Thereafter the two follow divergent paths. In her book, love was a self-inflicted wound, and the South a theater of the absurd. Director John Huston spills the novel's poetry on the way to the screen, leaving only its gothic husk and a gallery of grotesques...
Commissar Pilate. Bulgakov's novel is highly complicated, though there is consistency within the fantasy. He has succeeded in bringing the fear endemic to life under Stalin to a level where it can be borne-as excruciating comedy. Yet, while entertained by the absurd carryings-on of the Devil in Moscow, the reader is also made aware that grave matters of eternal importance are being decided behind the showy fireworks...
...government looks like a comic farce. The ruling colonels are a parody of the modern military regime: right-wing officers bow out to reactionaries; one purge succeeds another until there remains only a core of deeply paranoic rulers with a dramatic flair for secret police and censorship. Combining the absurd and the petty, the Greek colonels prohibit political talk in private homes, and deprive Melina Mercouri of her citizenship. Puritanical instincts have prompted them to ban mini-skirts, long hair, classical Greek plays, and to declare compulsory church attendance...
...last charge by the group of demonstrators who rushed the Pentagon doors was sufficient reason for cracking down on the protestors. The Marshals began to push the MP's forward until they were pressed against the sitting demonstrators. Then they would tell an unfortunate protestor to move--an absurd request because the seated crowd was packed knee. When he didn't move, they clubbed him and anyone who tried to hold onto him. Many of the demonstrators pleaded with the soldiers to drag people out instead of clubbing them. But the soldiers evidently had orders to leave the removal...