Word: atomization
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...atom was still unsplit. So were most marriages. Movies were silent, television existed only in the laboratory, and a "byte," however you spelled it, had to do with food, not information. Freud was becoming an unsettling household word, although the U.S. was not yet his colony. Hitler was still widely regarded as a hysterical Munich beer-hall brawler who could have benefited from Freud's treatment. In headlines "holocaust" was only a word for a large fire. Japan's chief export was raw silk. The jet set did not yet exist; its precursor, the smart set, took a week...
Occasionally, the enormity of these past 60 years has exploded the familiar framework of TIME. New headings forced themselves into the magazine to accommodate War or the Atom or Space, and the physical appearance of the magazine changed dramatically. Yet the structure always reasserted and reassembled itself, the department structure that is the organizing principle and essence of TIME. It is a form that not long ago some people proclaimed obsolete in a world of instant and random electronic communications. Yet in today's chaotic world a sense of order and organization seems more useful than ever...
...question has not seemed rhetorical. The century began with the Russians shaking the world, but he world seemed prepared to be shaken. Hitler was free to conquer most of Europe and to kill most of the Jews. India free; Africa free. In the 1930s scientists sought to free the atom. In the 1960s blacks and women sought freedoms of their own. Free ove. Free fall. Psychologists freed minds from guilt. Vatican II freed the church from its past. Drugs too proffered self-fulfillment. In the 1980s experimental engineers would see if the body could be freed from genetic dictates. With...
...process of occurring, it was sometimes difficult for the world to weigh Hitler, to judge him, to predict him, to know his ambition or his lunacy. He was a perfect phenomenon of the age of Einstein, in which seemingly infinitesimal causes can produce spectacular effects: cataclysms. Hitler was an atom, a nonentity convinced he could conquer the world. But the very madness of Hitler's enterprise made war, from the Allied perspective, seem sane and necessary. If ever there was a war that should be fought, it was that one, against such evil. But war always has its reasons...
With the controlled splitting of the atom, humanity, already profoundly perplexed and disunified, was brought inescapably into a new age. The race had been won, the weapon had been used by those on whom civilization could best hope to depend; but the demonstration of power against living creatures instead of dead matter created a bottomless wound in the living conscience of the race. The rational mind had won the most Promethean of its conquests over nature, and had put into the hands of common man the fire and force of the sun itself...