Word: extinguishers
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...20th century has amply demonstrated machines' nightmare side and thus tended to extinguish that kind of proud, dizzy, uncomplicated hubris. Its last full flowering was a generation ago, when the four full-fledged world's fairs of the postwar era took place back to back, almost continuously: 1958 in Brussels, 1964-65 in New York City, 1967 in Montreal and 1970 in Osaka. And then, in the neo-Luddite, small-is-beautiful era since, we have had nothing -- or nothing but piddling, second-and third-rank expositions that reflected (and self-fulfillingly confirmed) the tapped-out, lowered-expectations zeitgeist...
...that the threat of a nuclear war with Moscow is fading, atomic-weapons designers have been casting around for a mission. Some of them -- including physicist Edward Teller, the father of the H-bomb -- have proposed using a Super Nuke to destroy a huge asteroid that could extinguish human life if it crashed into Earth...
Obviously it meant war. No momentary lapse of reason would damn us to the dank labyrinths underneath that depressing medieval castle. We would rail against the grippe of German philosophy and black turtlenecks. We would extinguish smoking. Vegetarians (and other radicals) would convert, or die at our hands. The Bright Clothes Coalition was born...
...Atlantis, carried under by terrible convulsions. The ascendant civilizations (the Europeans, Americans, Japanese) accomplished horrors that amounted to a usurpation of the power of God over creation. The world in this century went about a work of de-creation -- destroying its own generations in World War I; attempting to extinguish the Jews of Europe in the Holocaust, to destroy the Armenian people, the Ukrainian kulaks and, much later, the Cambodians -- all the reverberating genocides...
...will have much oil to refine until fire fighters extinguish the Iraqi-set blazes that raged last week through more than 500 of Kuwait's 1,000 wells, blackening the country's sky. It will require millions of gallons of water and tons of dynamite and other explosives to snuff out the flames. "It's one gigantic mess," says Red Adair, whose Houston company is one of four Texas firms engaged in the effort. "No one knows what we're really in for. I've never seen anything like this before in my life." Experts say dousing the fires...