Word: disarming
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Bernard of Clairvaux, in the 12th century, wrote engagingly that "if mercy were a sin, I believe I could not keep from committing it." Moreover, as a French Jesuit theologian observed last week, by building a religious scaffold for the pardon, Ford may well have hoped to disarm potential critics. "If Ford draws the cloak of New Testament moral theology around his pardon," said Father Michel de Certeau, "it makes it infinitely harder to argue with it. It puts opponents in the position of not having a Christian conscience...
...this is more than Roth can handle. The poke at Salinger juts oddly out of place, and the parodies of other writing aren't very funny. For all his frequent flashes of skill, Roth is swinging wildly. He is trying to be winning, trying to disarm our reaction to all the ugliness in Tarnopol's life, trying to get us to laugh it all off. He confronts head-on the inevitable tendency to link novel and author by trying to turn it into yet another novelistic joke, luring us into the connection and then proving how unjustified...
...with all these rabbits?" he bellows, opening up the trunk and blasting away at them with his shotgun, which he also commences to turn on Thunderbolt and Lightfoot. This movie adeptly creates the sort of antic cartoon world where crooks case the getaway route in ice-cream carts, disarm a security guard by dressing in drag, and break into a bank vault by the simple expedient of blasting it with an enormous antitank...
...Arming to Disarm in the Age of Détente" [Feb. 11] is like telling two men having a quarrel to train for an all-out fight, hoping that each will recognize the other's strength and back down. But just like two animals with a fighting instinct, they will end up beating each other's brains...
...What if we should unilaterally disarm, destroy all our nuclear weapons, and maintain only a small army within our borders? What would happen? Frankly, I do not think much would happen. I cannot see Russia destroying us just...