Word: civics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...houses and apartments, everyone sits down to Sunday lunch. One after another, the husbands discover flies in their soup. Smiles turn to frowns, soothing words to cross ones. Insults are delivered and returned. Crockery goes smashing. Soup (with flies) pours in torrents from under doors. The police arrive. The civic disturbance turns, absurdly, into global war, and then into an atomic Armageddon. The final scene, projected on television, is of the planet exploding-because of a fly in the soup. Ionesco's black joke scarcely exaggerates the monstrous disproportion, the near pathology, of latter-day anger. If every period...
...COLOMBO'S civic career is a recent development. Until he organized the Italian-American Civil Rights League, he was a much more private person, intent on following his father's profession. Anthony Colombo was a successful Brooklyn mobster until he was garroted one night in 1938 in the back seat of his car along with his girl friend. The killing forced young Joe to quit high school and go to work in a printing plant to support his mother and younger sister. He enlisted in the Coast Guard in World War II, but he got into so much trouble that...
This kind of civic action at home has not been an Army practice in the past, even though the Green Berets made their reputation by doing just that -along with more dramatic feats of counterinsurgency-in Viet Nam and other underdeveloped nations round the world. But the Berets' luster has been dimmed by scandal, the war backlash and the withdrawal of the last remaining Special Forces units from Viet Nam last February. From a wartime peak strength of 9,000 men, the Green Beret force has been whittled down to 6,000. Consequently, two pressing concerns within the corps...
...General John J. Tolson III, now deputy commander of the U.S. Continental Army, last year came up with a notion that may well provide the answer. Why not apply the skills of such specialized units as the Green Berets where they are most needed-at home? If Green Beret civic action teams in Viet Nam could combat sores, human parasites, rats, venereal diseases and other miseries, Tolson reasoned, how much better to do the same thing in the Army's backyard as part of regular training for their primary role as a topnotch fighting force...
...reluctant Berets. One was Lieut. Colonel Bill Robinson, a tough man who was operations officer for the Son Tay prison-camp raid into North Viet Nam. He admits that he was dead set against turning his troopers into community helpers, but has come round to see that "with this civic action thing, we're just using our talents in a different...