Word: absurdism
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...intelligence provided a fairly accurate view of what happened over Siberia, but the U.S. leaders ignored or distorted the facts in their enthusiasm to condemn the Soviet Union and promote themselves. Hersch describes the horrified intelligence experts watching Reagan on television make absurd claims based on their reports...
...That's absurd...
...cannot simply sign away constitutionally protected freedoms. That's about as absurd as forcing students to agree not to discuss politics in the dorms for fear of creating a ruckus, or banning political buttons on campus for fear of offending others. A contract that violates the Constitution may give John Silber something to wave in his hand, but B.U. students wisely called his bluff. Silber's contract typifies his attempt to dress up his actions, but he really adorns himself in the Emperor's wardrobe...
...gung-ho activism. Finding some legal justification for them was another of those details that the President left to aides. The other tendency was to delegate disproportionate authority to subordinates who took a can-do approach, and then to let them operate with little supervision. In retrospect it seems absurd that so ostensibly minor a functionary as North would have been entrusted with such delicate matters as negotiating freedom for American hostages held in Lebanon and organizing a secret network to supply the contras. And not only seems -- it was absurd, and it got Reagan right into a dangerous mess...
That a half-century of American literary studies could be recalled for a defective platitude is a contingency that would appeal to Playwright Eugene Ionesco. A major contributor to the theater of the absurd (he prefers the term "theater of derision"), Ionesco reviews the influence of surrealists and dadaists without missing the historical joke: "They all wanted to destroy culture . . . and now they're part of our heritage." Arthur Koestler, a leading intellectual and novelist of the '30s and '40s, sounds weary and detached. "I'm vice president of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society," says the author of Darkness at Noon...