Word: babylonian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Named for the 3rd century Babylonian Gnostic Mani, who taught that the Creator is an evil being opposed to the good God, Manichaeans viewed the world as bad and salvation as escape from it. Modern Manichaeans are those whose hunger for the spiritual leads them to disdain the material; they try to make the leap of faith without having their feet planted firmly on the ground...
...book's hero is Daniel Tiamat, an Irish-American newspaperman (his name is that of a doomed deity, the mother of the gods in Babylonian mythology). The book tells how Tiamat arrives at young manhood in full vigor of mind and body, with a crapshooter's wrist, moral faculties unblunted by use, and a more than Hearstian knowledge of what makes news paper readers salivate. By middle age he is reduced to physical paralysis and the ignominy of writing an agony column un der the pseudonym of Miss Friendship (clearly a fictional cousin of Nathanael West...
...style of Russian diplomacy has not fundamentally changed since the 16th century, when a local Cossack leader addressed the Turkish Sultan Mahomet III in a letter whose milder passages read: "We will lick you on land and sea, you hostile son-of-a-bitch . . . You Alexandrian goatherd, you Babylonian cook, you Macedonian wagonmaker, Jerusalem's traitor, Kamchatka cat, Podolian villain, swindler of the world, and evildoer of the underworld...