Word: absurdities
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...offered last fall for the bugging of the Democratic Party's Watergate headquarters was that the Committee for the Re-Election of the President had so much money that it had to dream up harebrained schemes to spend it. New evidence suggests that the thought was not altogether absurd. Nixon's finance committee reported last week that it had finished the campaign with an unprecedented $3.5 million surplus. Apparently, nobody could figure out how to use up the $50 million that had been collected. The question now becomes: How much imagination will the Republicans show in disposing...
...tendency of myth to take over all speech, creeping into words and making them say things they were never intended to say. Myth can set up its meanings almost anywhere: because it works by making form and meaning coincide, it can even give meaning to the meaningless and the absurd, as it does in surrealism. The only language which is safe from its infiltration, according to Barthes, is the language of overt intentions--political language...
Most awkward for the old China hand are those situations which defy explanation, those statements that simply do not make sense. Tuchman encountered several. Officials denied facts of history, made senseless decisions, and gave seemingly absurd rationales. Tuchman mused, "One never knows...whether it is ignorance, or befuddled Marxist orthodoxy, or some kind of reverse oriental version of reality." She was standing at the edge of a yawning cultural...
...schoolmate of James's who has been lobbying privately for his release for over a year. Too weak to offer more than cursory details of his imprisonment, James did tell a journalist friend that the Chinese had accused him of spying for Russia. "James signed five or six absurd, fairy-tale confessions," reported the Australian's Gregory Clark, who also characterized James's stay in China as "three years of constant interrogation and solitary confinement...
...they would later be re-employed as conditions permitted. There seems to be no possible excuse for the authorities not paying off the women with at least a week's advance. Granted that the persons handling Harvard's financial affairs have to do it carefully and wisely, it is absurd for the richest university in the country to act like a penny-pinching miser. The University does, to some extent, act charitably in employing women on part time who would otherwise have difficulty in finding comparable work elsewhere, but last month's case gives no sign whatsoever of any feeling...