Word: facelessness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Anyway, Cockburn is suited to these times because he understands what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil." The wild-eyed potential generalissimos of Thompson's day have given way to the faceless bureaucrats, unknown corporate executives and "liberal" intellectuals who really make the rules. His weekly columns written with Ridgeway--an Institute for PolicyStudiesradical--under the heading of Surplus Value (economic issues) and The Greasy Pole (presidential politics), are generally thoughtful and serious pieces. Cockburn saves his true Private Eye spirit for the Press Clips. Also featured are "Dear Dr. Pressclips; Helpful Hints for Harried Hacks" (where Marshall Frady...
...Ireland with his wife and five children, looking for a place to settle for a while. Mama and Daddy began "their career as tenants and travellers" 15 years earlier "when they'd surrendered their house in the woods, the first and last place they'd ever owned, to the faceless men of the highway department for a service road, and a few years later, when they'd surrendered the beautiful old place, the oldest house in the town, to the faceless men of the department of education for a parking lot (now occupied) by a faceless building), there had been...
Powers suggests no way to escape the faceless men of the highway department. At the end of "Look How the Fish Live," when the young father has decided that survival of the fittest is indeed the rule of life, unethical as he finds it--all he can do is "accept his God-given limitations" and give up. Powers's bleak vision offers no hope. The traditional relations of the hierarchy are gone, and the only response left for the reader is a quiet desperation...
Sissela is not a stranger to the limelight; from childhood on she's never known a day of anonymity. Yet she is not herself among a group of faceless cocktail conversationalists. She trys hard and bears through it all, joining intellectual discussions whenever possible...
...problems with the welfare system are far graver than Harrington makes out. It is not just more money that's needed: the whole system must bereorganized so that it is controlled from the bottom up, not managed by faceless bureaucrats. If Marx taught us anything, it was that freedom cannot be conferred from above--people must have the opportunity to organize their own lives and discover their own dignity and worth. Frederick Wiseman's recent documentary, Welfare, made it amply clear that both freedom and dignity are absent in the current welfare system...