Word: mankind
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...battered tramps of Godot might have been written for Laurel and Hardy and were in fact played by Bert Lahr and Tom Ewell, Robin Williams and Steve Martin -- but the humor intensified the sadness. In the play's most vivid and haunting image, one character cries out about all mankind, "They give birth astride of a grave." Beckett regarded himself as a sort of historian, a chronicler of misbegotten times. "I didn't invent this buzzing confusion," he said. "It's all around us, and . . . the only chance of renewal is to open our eyes and see the mess...
Sakharov's most lasting contribution to mankind may have been his effort to limit nuclear testing and encourage multilateral disarmament, for which he won the 1975 Nobel Peace Prize. But he was best known as the indefatigable champion of the dissident, the downtrodden and the persecuted in his country. It was in this role that he incurred the deadly wrath of Brezhnev and the KGB. In the decade before Sakharov's banishment to Gorky, his two-room apartment was a haven for men and women who had fallen afoul of Soviet totalitarianism. Sitting at his enamel-top kitchen table, drinking...
...incident did more to raise that consciousness than the Exxon Valdez disaster, which last March disgorged nearly 262,000 bbl. of crude oil into the pristine waters of Alaska's Prince William Sound. The images of dead birds and sea otters and miles of tar-smeared beaches graphically illustrated mankind's capacity to foul its environment. Coming in the wake of 1988, with its devastating droughts, mega-forest fires and record high temperatures, the Valdez spill convinced all but the most skeptical observers that humanity was courting ecological disaster...
...waste. Meeting in Helsinki in May, representatives of 86 countries declared their intention to phase out their production and use of ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) by the year 2000. All this is encouraging. But make no mistake: these are only the opening skirmishes in what may prove to be mankind's ultimate battle for survival. Mostafa Tolba, executive director of the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP), put the matter starkly in his keynote speech before TIME's Alexandria conference: "Addressing the global environmental crisis requires nothing less than a radical change in the conduct of world policy and the world...
Some playwrights, like Shel Silverstein in The Devil and Billy Markham, presume that Mr. Scratch has nothing to teach mankind: the sensible response is to spot the fiend's tricks and escape perdition. Other dramatists, like David Mamet in Bobby Gould in Hell, recall that Beelzebub is a fallen angel and reckon he must be something of a moral philosopher. Both authors seem to think nothing could be more instructive than a sojourn in Hades to enhance the remainder of a life back on earth. They give that opportunity not only to the title characters of their...