Word: great
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...months ago. I have heard a lot about how you can't get hooked just blowing grass. I've got too many friends disproving that theory. We all started on grass, but they are now dropping acid, popping speed and sniffing glue. Getting high is a great feeling, but it is a greater feeling being free and seeing someone else, and not yourself, ruin his life...
...secret that General Earle Wheeler owed his elevation to Army Chief of Staff partly to the fact that he impressed President Kennedy with his skill as a briefer. Without exception, an officer is briefed before he goes on a mission and debriefed after it. Base commanders take great pride in showing off their briefing rooms and their graphics departments, which turn out an unending stream of impressive audio-visual aids. "When we briefed General Westmoreland," recalls one officer in Viet Nam, "we knew that we must fill at least 30 minutes even if the information did not require...
...Living Room War, is that one hundred million or more people feed on television daily. It hammers them like malleable gold; it takes and does not give; it bludgeons man, and voraciously relieves him of whatever sensitivity he timorously guards. Television has been described with varying enthusiasm as the great galvanizer, tranquilizer, hypnotizer, pacifier, stupefier, paralyzer, agitator, commentator, activator, adjudicator, erupter, corruptor. It provides a daily vindication of American technological genius, a daily spectacle of panoramic American social and political epiphanies, so that watching it is in part an act of self-congratulation. There is information given out in abundance...
Arlen wrote me that he was not at all certain that his pieces were about TV. Perhaps they were about a great, white, ultratechnological superpower picking an out-of-the-way closet of the world in which to have a nervous breakdown- "like sending one's crazy aunt to Pernambuco... but Jesus, now the nervous breakdown seems to be here." His primary concern throughout the book is to present television as a dynamic power capable of fashioning human dreams and fears. He writes...
...period of rapid and unforeseen change such as our own. One may question the validity of the fear that the consequence of joining in a national effort to end the war in Vietnam will be to drown the Faculty in "continued and inevitably impassioned political debate." It is a great bother, and it takes a great deal of time, to engage in such debate. Most of those who do engage in it do so because they feel driven to do so, and would much prefer a world in which they did not feel so compelled...