Word: confrontation
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Instilled by our education with a reverence for content before form, we tend to confront even the most visual, affective arts with an analytic mentality. For months after Picasso's enigmatic fifty-foot sculpture was uncovered in a downtown Chicago plaza, discussion centered frantically on whether it was a woman, a dog, or a bird. Newspapers covered the controversy greedily and people who finally felt they had identified it were at last able to react. When Dylan Thomas spoke at MIT in 1953, his lyrically eccentric speech was met with silence by an audience of what must have been tightlipped...
...order to succeed, Alinsky believes, a community organization must confront or conjure up an enemy of impressive stature. In the early '60s, he was having trouble organizing the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago until the University of Chicago presented itself as a fat target. Planning to tear down part of Woodlawn to make room for an expansion program, the university committed the tactical error of attacking Alinsky as a provocateur. That convinced the suspicious Woodlawn blacks that Alinsky was on their side. When he started organizing the Negro ghetto in Rochester in 1965, Alinsky found another suitable opponent...
...setting is a Catholic boys' school. The boys are seemingly possessed by a plague of violence, savaging each other brutally and without ostensible cause. They stalk along the stairway and confront their teachers, lay and clerical, with an oppressively arrogant silence that makes the generation gap look more like an apocalyptic abyss. For better or worse, three lay teachers are closest to the boys. One is Dobbs (Pat Hingle), an American Mr. Chips, a cuddly Teddy bear of a man who sees his boys as substitutes for the sons he never had. His antithesis is Malley (Fritz Weaver...
Plainly, the week's events have complicated the already grave dilemmas that confront all the principals in the Middle East crisis...
Despite such shortcomings, the President's message highlights the complex issues that Americans now must confront. At the very least, it should serve to tell skeptics that environmental problems are real, and will not just go away. If Congress responds, the U.S. can begin coherent action on a scale that few dreamed possible even a month...