Word: latters
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...sent unemployment soaring from 8.6 percent to 10.8 percent in 1982 alone--has hit down south as well. So the homeless make do as best they can--in the sprawling "Tent City" outside of Houston, under freeway passes in Southern California, in overcrowded church-run shelters. They are like latter-day Okies, but in reverse. Overwhelmingly, today's unemployed drifters come from the industrial Midwest and Northeast; that is, from a part of the country where another factory is shut down just about every...
...white. It was a history of conflict. King had accepted Hegel's view of history, namely, that there was a dialectical process of progress and growth through pain. But the dialectical idea for King, the notion of struggle, was also taken over from Gandhi and Thoreau, especially from the latter's essay on Civil Disobedience. King believed in struggle, in a kind of war, if you like, but a war in Gandhi's terms, "without violence." But King's view of history required that the large mass of men be led by leaders who believed in the highest ideals...
...movie centers on the characters rather than the plot, the latter being quite simple. Even in Salt Lake City, neuroses abound. Most of the characters seem to have been abandoned, left to their own, insufficient, devices. Charles, a civil servant, is confined to his glass cubicle for most of the day. Charles' boss treats him to endless tales of a Dartmouth son--"He wants to be at Harvard, but he couldn't get in"--who is suffering from sexual maladjustment. Then there's the typist Betty, a Ted Kennedy look-alike much enamoured of Charles and salad dip recipes...
...survive. Romance emerges when Charles meets Laura, a secretary who works in the same office building. They meet; he falls in love; he asks her to move into his apartment--all in the same afternoon. There are meetings at greasy-spoon restaurants, at his house, at her house, the latter furnished with a plant and a mattress. "I went to buy a folding chair, but then, I thought of how awful it'd be to live in a house with a mattress and a folding chair," she explains, a creature of instinct rather than bureaucratic calculation. Laura is appealingly vulnerable...
Konner believes humans are losing their sense of wonder but denies that this is due to the increasing advances of science and technology. The latter point is debatable, but if, as he advocates, we chose for "the further evolution of the human spirit," our success will be measurable only in geological time. Perhaps it is a positive reflection on our species that Konner, like any other human being, can only speculate. And wonder...