Word: cuttingly
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...just another "transient," a minor glitch somewhere in the complex system like so many they had dealt with in the past. Unit 2's huge turbine, which generates 880 megawatts of electricity, had "tripped," shut down automatically, as it should when the steam that turns it has somehow been cut off. The technicians assumed that the cause would be easy to find and correct...
...some of his readers, what appeared to Levenson to be a universal problem of the individual's relation to his past, became instead merely Levenson's problem as a Jew in America, cut off from his own culture and roots. In discussing one Chinese attempt to reconcile present with past, Angus McDonald complained that "the synthesis that the Chinese had found in the thought of Mao... was beyond him [Levenson] as a Jew in exile." The limits of the Jewish experience (limiting the comparisons that Levenson could make from within his own culture), McDonald held, prevented Levenson from responding...
Levenson's own experience as a Jew was crucial to his life and work. In the introduction of what was to have been his retirement book on Judaism, Levenson proudly reaffirmed his commitment to a Judaism with links to the past that McDonald believed cut him off from the present. To be a Jew in America was for Levenson a choice of standards from which to view not only his own time and culture but any other--"To choose well in life is nothing less than to choose life itself...
...larger question, which persists in China still as it did in his own choices to live as a Jew, an intellectual and an American: is there a happy medium between a feckless cosmopolitanism (hampered by the "fact that the cosmos was somebody else's"); and a terrifying isolation that cut off both the foreign and the past...
...fascination with Nazism: Elvis Costello talks about emotional fascism, Johnny Rotten sings about Belsen, and the swastika is the dominant icon in punk life, but what does it all add up to? With Rotten, it may just be the shock value, as when he used to tell people he cut out his hemmorhoids with a razor. And just how is one supposed to react to something like Belsen, anyway...