Word: graspings
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...also thought we might pick up a few ideas for our own simulations." Carrico and his colleagues gave the civilian amateurs high marks for their skills at play-fighting. Said Lieut. Bill Bradburn, 25, a field-artillery officer: "Some of them are amazingly adept. They have a tremendous grasp of some of the theory and doctrine that is taught in the Army. They keep very current. Some of them seem to have a steady information pipeline to the active military." But Bradburn also detected a weakness in the civilians' knowledge of artillery tactics - which his team was about...
...masses of the main charge across the rolling fields and up to the stone fence and over, where the Confederacy reached its high-water mark. He stood in his imagination for a moment with the few troops who had breached the Union line, his heart working to grasp the commotion and the meaning of those terrible days 115 years ago at Gettysburg...
...novel Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow described the onset of fame: "I experienced the high voltage of publicity. It was like picking up a dangerous wire fatal to ordinary folk. It was like the rattlesnakes handled by hillbillies in a state of religious exaltation." Some who grasp those charged serpents will themselves incandesce in celebrity for a little while and then wink out (goodbye, Clifford Irving; goodbye, Nina van Pallandt): defunct flashlights, dead fireflies. Thus they will have obeyed Warhol's Law, first propounded by Andy Warhol, the monsignor of transience and junk culture: "In the future, everybody...
...casual, even haphazard; in truth, they are rigorously philosophical. His power stems from the very limitations he clamps on his art. While refusing to spell out anything other than rudiments, he hints at vast areas of life that are beyond the power of words to express or minds to grasp. By the standards of conventional fiction, his characters are little more than ciphers, but they arouse considerable interest and sympathy simply by facing up to the ominous atmosphere that pervades their lives. If something terrible has not already happened to them, it will. They shrug, say silly, inadequate things...
Stockwell's basic case is that clandestine operations and democracy are incompatible, in America or anywhere. He documents all the CIA's institutional imperatives to create dirty little wars, to avoid peaceful options like negotiations, to corrupt everyone in its grasp, to stifle dissenting opinions or information not based on prior, biased, CIA assessments. Stockwell's intimate knowledge of the Angolan operations fills in all these points with layer after layer of scummy stories. To take one minor instance, the last U.S. payoff to the anti-MPLA forces, over a million dollars, was pocketed by Mobutu of Zaire. Stockwell further...