Word: logicality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...little outdated. Simon had a period of modest renown during the 1950s and early '60s. Along with Nathalie Sarraute, Alain Robbe-Grillet and Michel Butor, he became a chief exponent of the French nouveau roman, a form of fiction that rigorously questioned traditional narrative devices. Reality, so the Gallic logic went, is not easy to read. Simon has proved himself just as good and as exhausting as the form that he helped to develop...
...aftermath, Yasser Arafat said the U.S. was guilty of "cowboy logic." It seemed to Americans an oddly flat and barbless phrase, something like the boiler-plate invective ("capitalist roaders," "unreliable elements") for which Communist regimes have a dreary genius. Terrorism is a haunted house, theater in the shadows. It needs its ugly special effects. Terror depends, so to speak, upon absolute artistic control. But suddenly in the Achille Lauro case, the house lights came up, and Arafat found himself blinking uncomfortably at the audience. No wonder his rhetoric sounded lame...
Arafat was right, in a way, about the cowboy logic. But his understanding of the word cowboy and an American's understanding of it are entirely different. Arafat meant the word as an indictment. Americans might take it as a compliment. They would think, "Damn straight we used cowboy logic, if that's ( what you want to call it." They might be delighted that they had been able to do a "cowboy" thing. It proved that the old American cliche can reappear now and then. It was not as if the U.S. had turned Rambo loose upon the Palestine Liberation...
...over the nuclear button, the fate of the world, this cowboy, this actor of cowboys. The half-awakened image that they had in mind came from the last 30 seconds of Dr. Strangelove: Slim Pickens clutching his cowboy hat, astride the falling H-bomb, whooping it up, riding "cowboy logic" down the air to global cinders...
...VOCABULARY really exists to describe what happened in San Francisco 20 years ago; like all spiritual visions, it took place in realms of the mind where conventions of words and logic were replaced by what seemed a newer, truer understanding of the world...