Word: meaninglessness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Durants are sometimes superficial: they are bound to be, considering the scope of their enterprise. But they have also achieved depths and insights lacking in many academic works. The charge that they are popularizers is meaningless. Of course they are popularizers-and great ones. It is apt that in this last volume they write of an age when to be a popularizer was still considered something brave and even glorious. As Will Durant once said: "History is baroque. It smiles at all attempts to force its flow into theoretical patterns or logical grooves; it plays havoc with our generalizations, breaks...
Arthur Michael Ramsey, Archbishop of Canterbury, told an overflow crowd in Sanders Theatre last night the idea that "God is dead" is a meaningless concept...
...that's why they don't do it." In this "temple of worship for right answers, the way to get ahead is to lay plenty of them on the altar." The whole system, insists Holt, convinces most students that "school is mainly a place where you follow meaningless procedures to get meaningless answers to meaningless questions...
...begins, "I read the news today, oh boy,"--a strange, sad phrase which grows heavier as the song grows more hallucinatory. At first the news is about the Guiness heir, son of a Beer peer, dying in his Lotus elan, sad waste of youth, but comic in its utter meaningless. The singer turns on and the song turns more dreamlike, ushering forth a complex metaphor to rank with Dylan's best. "Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire/ And though the holes were rather small/ They had to count them all..."--this refers to Scotland Yard's search for bodies buried...
...nation's cumbersome social security system, which is $600 million in the red, French workers, he said, will now pay more taxes and receive fewer benefits. In addition, he announced, he has imposed compulsory profit sharing on all French companies, a measure rejected by labor as meaningless, opposed by big business as ruinous, and considered by most of his Cabinet members to be frivolous and unworkable. Both decrees may well lead to a general strike when French workers return from the beaches in the fall...