Word: absurdly
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...listed 25 British diplomats, businessmen and journalists who would have to leave Moscow within three weeks. Ambassador Sir Bryan Cartledge was called to the foreign ministry and told that those being expelled had engaged in "activities incompatible with their status," diplomatic language for spying. Cartledge described the charges as absurd. At week's end it was not clear whether Britain would raise the stakes by ejecting still more Soviet officials who might have been fingered by Gordievsky...
...does not work, of course. But Calvino's narrative of this doomed quest succeeds admirably, in part because he, like Samuel Beckett, recognizes the comic possibilities inherent in the tailspin of logic toward the absurd. Mr. Palomar's relentless speculations render him buffoonish. Passing a woman sunbathing topless on a beach, he averts his eyes lest she cover herself and embarrass them both. On reflection, though, he decides that his behavior was incorrect, since it reinforced outmoded taboos against nudity. So he walks by again, this time taking in the bare breasts as an incidental feature in the general landscape...
...search for housing can become blackly absurd. When an AIDS crisis center in Atlanta tried to rent a home for victims, real estate agents refused to help them. One even ordered the center's representative, who did not have AIDS, out of his car. "There's just too much I don't know about this disease," the panicked agent protested. "I have kids. I didn't know what you wanted this property for." The center finally found a house for AIDS victims by keeping their ailment secret. Bounced around by unnerved officials, some AIDS sufferers have become pitiful nomads. Fabian...
...Africa and corporate disinvestment from the country are concepts once abstracted from brutal reality. If that is the case, then Harvard's policy of "intensive dialogue" with portfolio companies operating in South Africa is twice abstracted from reality, now so irrelevant to South African conditions as to be utterly absurd. If Harvard continues to argue that the University's current policy can make a difference in South Africa, its words will sound more and more like an apologia for the status quo than a realistic program for change...
...Africa and corporate disinvestment from the country are concepts once abstracted from brutal reality. If that is the case, then Harvard's policy of "intensive dialogue" with portfolio companies operating in South Africa is twice abstracted from reality, now so irrelevant to South African conditions as to be utterly absurd. If Harvard continues to argue that the University's current policy can make a difference in South Africa, its words will sound more and more like an apologia for the status quo than a realistic program for change...