Word: greeds
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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What distinguishes the mentality of the Moscow intelligentsia more than anything else is its greed for awards, prizes, titles: "honored personage . . . laureate . . ." In shameful pursuit of all this, people stand to attention, break off all unapproved friendships, obey all wishes of their superiors and condemn any of their colleagues if the party orders them to do so. I think even the sorriest pre-revolutionary intellectual would refuse to shake hands with the most illustrious one in Moscow today...
...that? The energy crisis glooms over us all, as does the memory of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war that led to the closing of the canal and the rerouting of shipping round Africa. From such a perspective, the rise of the supertanker looks like the kind of triumph of greed and technology over circumstance that customarily passes for progress...
Alas, as Mostert makes clear, greed and circumstance have overborn technology. The great ships are badly built and hard to handle. They are also, it appears, crucially overloaded, sloppily sailed, sketchily regulated for safety and steadily dangerous. The problem is partly a matter of scale, a dramatic change that-as Lemuel Gulliver learned to his sorrow-can be catastrophic. Especially in congested shipping lanes, the V.L.C.C.s are simply too big and too inertia-bound to operate safely by current rules of navigation. (Among other things, Mostert urges the establishment of onshore control towers like those now handling flight patterns around...
...wonder if Goya's faith in reason endured the Spanish-French war, which ended in 1813. For the question of his time was a gnawing fear that greed and lust might indeed win out over the pull of rational thought. For as Goya's contemporary, Alexander Pope, once asked...
...truth. The heroin is as shackling a possession as the bag of gold in Chaucer's Pardoner's Tale. Indeed, it is worse. Chaucer's three thieves at least thought that the gold was benign. Their catastrophe stemmed from disregarding Christian doctrine: radix malorum est cupiditas (greed is the root of all evil). Without a moral compass, Stone's characters cannot even plead ignorance. The irony that the heroin's value is rooted in its destructiveness does not escape them, but they cannot drop it. Its force has irradiated their world. They know...