Word: crux
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Crux. Despite such isolated backers as Menzies, President Johnson decided that he could not ignore all the criticism. Accepting a longstanding invitation to speak at Johns Hopkins University, the President appeared before students and faculty in Baltimore. He described the Vietnamese war as one of "unparalleled brutality," where "simple farmers are the targets of assassination and kidnaping. Women and children are strangled in the night because their men are loyal to the government. And helpless villages are ravaged by sneak attacks . . . terror strikes in the heart of cities...
...crux of their arguments for change comes down to the fact that the Soviet economy has grown too complex and sophisticated to be efficiently manipulated by pushbutton from Moscow. The economic reformers are not out to undermine Communism but to improve its efficiency. Nonetheless, the solutions they have proposed are distinctly Western: the use of profits on invested capital as the single best indicator of factory performance, flexible prices responding to the market forces of supply and demand-and, of all things, charging interest on the use of government money by shops and factories...
Actually, Percy (Harry H. Corbett) seems entirely believable as a Lancashire bloke of almost invincible rectitude. For 39 years he has been a virgin, and that is the crux of this lacklusty comedy adapted from a London and Broadway play. The boob and the bawd (Diane Cilento, the gamekeeper's daughter of Tom Jones) meet, maunder, tell one another pathetic little lies, and slowly uncover their loneliness...
...shed the light of art too timidly, too meanly, too intermittently on this world that I was depicting. The crux lies not in the quality of such gifts as I have, but in spiritual hastiness, in the fact that we were blinded by tremendous events, deafened by cannonades, by roaring, by intensely loud music, so that at times we ceased to detect the nuances, hear the heartbeats, and so lost the habit of discovering that spiritual detail which is the living tissue...
...that night was very dark, man was far from home, he lacked inner strength to make the effort, and, besides, the right way was lost." It was this deeply felt mood of young man's pessimism that led him to abandon religion and embrace Communism. To Chambers, "the crux of this matter is the question whether God exists. If God exists, a man cannot be a Communist, which begins with the rejection of God. But if God does not exist, it follows that Communism, or some suitable variant of it, is right...