Word: motiveless
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Goldbrick Boredom. Motiveless "busywork," the lowly chores of military housekeeping, and menial jobs that fall short of the challenges of civilian life are principal causes for low morale where it is found among reservists. "Our daily routine," fumed Sergeant Robert A. Levy, a District of Columbia Air Guardsman at Andrews Air Force Base outside Washington, "consists of reading magazines and newspapers, listening to the radio, playing cards, organizing and participating in chess tournaments, visiting the base gymnasium, pitching horseshoes and taking coffee breaks." Levy, who was president of a Maryland computer consulting firm until he was called...
...males, according to Price, do not suffer from brain damage, epilepsy, or any recognized psychosis such as schizophrenia. They are psychopaths, also called sociopaths-"unstable and immature, without feeling or remorse, unable to construct adequate personal relationships, showing a tendency to abscond from institutions and committing apparently motiveless crimes, mostly against property...
Afro-Islamic Harlems. The Dreams of Reason proceeds like a script for a dream film in 112 numbered but un-spliced sections. The action is arbitrary and apparently motiveless. The identities of the characters and/or freaks are seen for the first time, but they are recognizable as old friends or enemies, and the most bizarre events are totally credible. The question of truth never arises; it is only the interpreter of the dream who is confused. The reader -or dream interpreter -will have to sup ply his own factual journalism...
...first he seems a run-of-the-mill monster. "Should I give her one or not?" he asks himself in perplexity over whether to offer a caramel to the young ward of a friend. With petty but apparently motiveless malignancy, he hires some hooligans to humiliate one of his girl friends by smearing her gates with tar-a sign that she has lost her virtue...
...word. Ubu Roi furnished the absurdists with their basic attitude: shock the bourgeoisie and slam the Establishment. In a 1923 play, In the Jungle of the Cities, Bertolt Brecht furnished the theater of the absurd with its basic theme. Two men, Shlink and Garga, engage in a fierce but motiveless contest, and Shlink tries to sum it up: "If you crammed a ship full of human bodies till it burst, the loneliness inside it would be so great that they would turn to ice . . . so great is our isolation that even conflict is impossible." Although Brecht abandoned the theater...