Word: banally
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Willful action must be distinguished from violence, although many have called the walking into the building violence ("We seek only peace in Vietnam"). Willful action has more impact than violence, because violence, especially police violence, has become banal. It may seem remarkable that scarcely a word has been said at faculty meetings about the incredible brutality of the police in the Thursday morning bust. But why? Police violence has become accepted in our society, built into our ideology. Killing in Vietnam, remember, is not murder. It is not murder because it has a reason rooted in ideology. ("Our criminals...
...they not been socialized. Socialized men will almost never act. They believe too much in the system that they have been taught. Socialized men are middle class dullards and right-wingers. They only commit acts of violence--like cops beating kids, or soldiers killing Viet namese--they are basically banal. Men of action, however, are "alienated," as various people have told us. They have not been socialized. They have realized the idiocy of quietly acceding to society. The only reason that some men act and others do not is that the ones who do have not been taught well enough...
...Quixote. When he and Publisher Charles Thieriot took over the Chronicle in 1952, the paper was sobersided and international-minded. Circulation was 155,000, behind two mediocre competitors, and profit-and-loss figures showed only losses. Newhall de-emphasized foreign affairs and accentuated a breezy-and sometimes banal-mixture of splashy local stories and columnists, including San Franciscophile Herb Caen and Art Hoppe, the West Coast's answer to Art Buchwald. One of the paper's series, probing the police department, went so far as to lead with the old saw about the dumb cop who found...
Without troubling thought, the Proposition is funny. To be sure, it is not consistently funny. The banal Lester Maddox, Leave It to Beaver, and cigarette clinic jokes are only touched up leftovers from before, and the Nixon Messiah is a disappointing adventure beyond the range of the actors' voices. But you don't notice until you've left and your chuckles turn to resonant Harvard sighs. Ken Tigar, Judy Kahan, and Fred Grandy are funny. And I'm an escapist at heart anyhow. SCOTT W. JACOBS
...passages he could speak feelingly because he is the primary American exemplar of the triumph of the human spirit over adversity. The astronauts never had such dark and lonely moments as Nixon had, and out of that experience he fashioned a philosophy which is essentially hopeful." Still, he found banal passages: "We are going to turn our swords into plowshares yes yes yes." Buckley also detected "the rhetorical blight" of Kennedy Speechwriter Ted Sorensen, who, Buckley claimed, first employed "those false antitheses which are substitutes for analytical invigoration: 'We cannot expect to make everyone our friend...