Word: alienating
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...nagging fear behind this cautious treatment is that alien organisms might hitch a ride aboard the spacecraft, in the bodies of the astronauts or in moon rocks that they will carry back. Such bugs, against which man has developed no immunity or medicines, could conceivably cause a catastrophic plague on earth. "We know that we're dealing with a low-probability risk and that no one really expects life to be found on the moon," says NASA's Dr. Walter W. Kemmerer Jr. "Yet the best way to preserve life is to freeze...
What he seeks and what he does in his five days is as various as American youth itself. In general, the modern U.S. serviceman is better educated, more sophisticated, more curious about alien cultures, and better behaved than any of his predecessors-and he has more money to spend. On the average, he spends roughly $200, making a total yearly tourist bonanza for the area of some $72 million. And he may be the best-behaved soldier in history. One R & R officer stationed in Thailand, where the record shows only one serious incident for every 12,000 G.I.s...
Thus, the students who work in mental hospitals, frequently while continuing their studies, meet an alien culture right here at home, which can be as terrifying and illuminating as any cross-cultural experience. Likewise, those who teach in a Freedom School in Mississippi or in a nearby slum may face dangers considerably greater than they would face in an overseas project. In all such enterprises at home and abroad, students can try themselves out in areas which are not primarily academic, areas where qualities of cooperativeness and human solidarity may be as relevant as ambition and keenness of mind...
...bizarre concreteness of this alien reality seduces us to accept the fantasy. The convincing stylistic precision restrains the unreal reality from becoming nonsense. In the next paragraph we become involved in the magician who works to dream a man and "insert him into reality" and who later learns that he himself is "a mere appearance, dreamt by another." Borges has taken us from reality to illusion without our awareness of the change...
...Over the years, peacetime patriotism in the U.S. was expressed as a wealth of other emotions; how Americans feel about America is clearly linked to how they feel about themselves functioning in America. Thus in the 19th century every imaginable interest group claimed superior nativity. Businessmen denounced unionists as alien anarchists; each generation of naturalized immigrants scorned each later wave of "foreigners," notably Roman Catholics, victims of outrageous persecution by the nativist Know-Nothings of the 1850s. Just before the Civil War, slavery apologists attributed to themselves the one true Americanism; some Southerners wanted to claim the Stars and Stripes...