Word: grasps
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...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...
...eloquent voice in Carter's defense is former Secretary of State Dean Rusk, now a professor down at the University of Georgia. Rusk sees much of the Carter problem as arising from the very noble motive of standing beyond the grasp of any interest or bloc...
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...
...trying to find out why they happened. Fate denies them selfdiscovery, sometimes in ludicrous ways. A Mississippi-born tennis pro falls into a river and comes close enough to drowning to survive only as a vegetable. The Oedipal tangle that led to his accident will never be his to grasp...
...bludgeoning. The rest of the questioning deals with the relationship which Kovak's Teamster-clones have enjoyed with the Mafia during the union's meteoric climb in membership, a relationship which entangles the former Lord of Flatbush in a scandal the magnitude and significance of which he cannot quite grasp...