Word: humanity
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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These two conditions are handsomely fulfilled by an age in which not only events but their meaning strain human understanding. Merely to live with the omnipotence of science and technology is enough to send man back to the safe harbor of primitive myth. Just as myth was the predecessor of science and religion, so may rumor have been the precursor of myth. Long before man registered his thoughts on the pages of history, he committed his anxieties and his faith to rumor-that welcome channel of information and misinformation that made sense of senselessness...
...satisfying the human need for reassurance, rumor plays a role that truth not always can. It goes through three distinct stages. In the first, the fact content is reduced, partly because of the porosity of human memory, partly because of man's inclination to simplify. The Great Blackout of 1965 was a cause of countless rumors; some people immediately assumed that it was the result of a Communist sabotage plot; others believed that it was an unannounced air-raid test by the U.S. Government. In the next stage, the rumormonger accents certain parts of the story that appeal...
...problems, as well as the few unembarrassedly passionate love poems, have been the work of writers who are not heterosexual . . . Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Genet and Auden. They have a steady consciousness of a dark side of love that is neither homo-nor heterosexual but simply human." New York Times Drama Critic Clive Barnes muses, "Creativity might be a sort of psychic disturbance itself, mightn't it? Artists are not particularly happy people anyway...
...DESPERATE. Members of this group are likely to haunt public toilets ("tearooms") or Turkish baths. They may be pathologically driven to sex but emotionally unable to face the slightest strains of sustaining a serious human relationship, or they may be married men who hope to conceal their need by making their contacts as anonymous as possible...
Socarides: We do hear, from people who are in treatment, about their friends in homosexual life and some of these also come to us. They see around them a complete disaster to their lives. They see that the most meaningful human relationship is denied them?the male-female relationship...