Word: hopelessness
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...chain of American Imperialism to a political statement that the CFIA ought to be destroyed. That second claim, the call to act upon analytical judgement, ran counter to the academic grain. Dick insinuated that intellectuals do not have to be carried by the precision of their documentation to a hopeless cynicism, in which there is only the celebration of work, normally a means, as an end in itself. Similarly he questioned the valuation of intelligence divorced from a simultaneous valuation of the ends which intelligence is to serve. Intellectuals could come down from their towers, declare their values, and undertake...
...Johnnies of America don't respond to their teachers and learn to read. And fortunately, where it would have been easy to pain his audience with his own deep pessimism, he doesn't play the bogeyman. At the same time that he is writing. "Look, the situation is hopeless: my manual instructs me to encourage creativity, but my kids would rather take the salamanders meant for our science show-and-tell and fry them on the classroom radiator," he is working us into believing that if we would give a damn, things might be different...
Working class people must first be seen as individuals and not stereotyped as hopeless, ignorant racists. The greatest virtue of The White Majority is its portrayal of the actual life-style of the white working class--one very distant from Harvard's. In the words of Gene Cappelli, a 29-year-old hospital attendent who makes $101 a week to support a family of four, "If a lot of these higher-up people discussed some of this and tried to see it like the lower class people, it might help...
Although that demand was subsequently seized upon by state officials as an example of the prisoners' dangerous radicalism, it was soon abandoned by the rebel leaders when other inmates pointed out how hopeless it was. Throughout the uprising, in fact, the inmates never quite lived up to their fierce rhetoric, although their threats to kill the hostages sounded credible enough. Underlying the bullying tone of their demands was an unmistakably genuine plea that even if they were convicted criminals, all they wanted was to be treated like human beings. "We are men," said the inmate statement. "We are not beasts...
...enough. Mass is a jumble of literal and symbolic meanings, a contrived happening with pretentious overtones, a non-play about a non-Mass. In fact, what Bernstein created, perhaps unwittingly, is an upside down atomic-age Everyman in which the medieval morality play's message (man the hopeless, fleshly sinner, whose soul may yet be redeemed by Christ's Passion) degenerates into a kind of soupy, sentimental Brüderschaft...