Word: beasting
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...case, self-pity congeals to make a hard shell. The Serbs are indifferent to mere world opinion. Their leaders have manipulated them to obduracy. So Bosnia becomes another parable (savoring ominously of the '30s) of the primary human mystery, the beast potential in everyone. Sometimes the beast can be talked out -- negotiated out -- and calmed and recivilized. But the bully-beast loves to play with the people's hopeful illusions. Sometimes the beast, once risen among us, needs to be beaten until it is helpless to harm any longer. Sometimes it simply needs to be killed...
Will anyone drive the beast out of Bosnia? The terror of getting involved is powerful. The craven thought is that one Bosnia begets another. But Bosnia will happen again and again elsewhere unless this one is stopped. Europe should have undertaken the job. But the Europeans long ago exhausted themselves in sponsoring such projects as colonialism and two world wars. They have ended up smug, fat-bottomed and morally useless...
...here is a thing . . . to hold the handle of a plow, a thing to load your bales of cotton, a thing to dig your ditches, to chop your wood, to pull your corn." In effect, Jefferson is not condemned to die like a man but be destroyed like a beast. Worse still, he believes that he is no better than a dumb animal...
...from the behaviorist school of psychology, take a more skeptical view. What looks like language, they say, may be simply mimicry or rote learning. One of Herman's critics, animal behaviorist Ronald Schusterman, insists that before anyone can say an animal is speaking, they had better determine whether the beast is capable of the kind of abstract thinking that forms the basis of speech. "My argument is that the language experiments have moved too fast," says Schusterman. "They have not looked at some fundamental cognitive abilities that give rise to linguistic abilities." At Long Marine Laboratory in Santa Cruz, California...
Harvard will need that beast-like aggressiveness this year because it knows about unfulfilled expectations in another sense...