Word: blanks
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Such is the pedagogy in The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. A burring, feline spinster, Miss Brodie (Maggie Smith) lives off the baby fat of the land-Edinburgh, 1932. In a provincial girls' public school, she inscribes her prejudices on scores of blank pupils. Her taste becomes their only touchstone, her politics their only truth. "I am in the business," she loftily announces, "of putting old heads on young bodies...
...downtown Montreal. There, students protesting alleged racism on the part of a young white biology teacher climaxed a 13-day occupation of the school's computer center by turning it into a shambles. They started a major fire in the building, littered the street with a blizzard of blank punch cards, and, like latter-day Luddites, demolished the two computers with axes. Riot police broke through barricades and arrested 97 people, but not before the rioters had done more than $2,000,000 of damage, twice the previous record for destruction of property, which was set only last month...
...wall to reassure him that "Dr." is part of his name. By contrast, a novelist may have a few of his books on the shelf (unlike the physician, the writer cannot bury his mistakes), but when he goes to work he is greeted by the gaping anonymity of blank paper. More than most working people, the professional writer of fiction must constantly create himself out of himself if he is to know who he is with any regularity...
They are merely dragged along through a universe in which time seems to have stopped and logic is dead. A flipped coin comes up heads 85 times in a row. The landscape seems blank and irrelevant to life. Meanwhile, they must watch all of Shakespeare's characters as they walk in and out, moaning and pontificating on subjects that escape them. As Rosencrantz cries in the last act, "Incidents! All we get is incidents! Dear God, is it too much to expect a little sustained action...
Significantly, patriotism apparently remains high. If asked what other country he might prefer, the average American still draws a blank. Rarely in the past-or present-have Americans hated America enough to commit treason, renounce citizenship, or stop longing for God's country while abroad. In that sense, patriotism thrives not only among the more demonstrative flag wavers, but also in unexpected ways among dissenters and antiEstablishmentarians. Even if the disaffected young bitterly criticize American institutions and values, they reflect the traditional patriotic view of the moral and providential nature of the American destiny. The insistence that...