Word: apt
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This trend demonstrates more emphatically than most intellectual realignments the way the past alters under the gaze of new generations. Children raised on the stultifying history textbooks of the past-especially those of the '40s and '50s-are apt to think of the past as a mass of impermeable and indigestible facts: a huge and useless object, as lifeless and impassive as a moonscape. But the past actually teems with an almost irrepressible life, especially in a nation as widely literate and elaborately documented as the U.S. The past constantly achieves renewals and transmogrifications as political symbol...
...only be compared to an ancient family quarrel: tediously familiar, yet ever fresh in its capacity to wound. On both sides of the Atlantic, one regularly hears the ritual incantations about a joint cultural heritage. Yet America is, at most, only partly European. Besides, kith and kin are apt to have harsher conflicts than total strangers. At the outset, America defined itself against Europe (a fact neatly re- versed in Henry Kissinger's latter-day complaint that Europe seems to be able to unite only against Amer-ica). The U.S. saw itself-and to a great extent still sees...
Traditionally the Soviets have held lawyers in low esteem, which may be apt for a country in which laws were supposed to be necessary only during the transition to a self-governing society that would not require courts, prosecutors and police. But increasingly the Soviet authorities find themselves resorting to law to accomplish goals and deal with change...
...point of these people's lives is that they contain no resolution, no escapes other than the temporary ones offered by a nightly dose of beer drinking and western fantasy. That mechanical animal is a peculiarly apt metaphor for their way of life: it endlessly repeats itself until, like all mechanized fantasies, it must madden anyone caught in its thrall. Nor can the contraption be broken - any more than most people can be broken of the habits, routines and saving dreams of their cramped lives...
...didn't quite turn out that way on the streets of Cambridge--though 19 days later at Kent State and 30 days later at Jackson State the prediction would prove apt enough--but the comment reflected the tenor of the times. Police shut down Widener and Lamont Libraries after receiving an anonymous bomb threat. We might not always do this, they say, but in times like these we have to. For the hell of it one day, about 15 kids, aged ten to 13 according to reports, decided to have some fun. They stood on the Weeks Memorial Bridge...