Word: numb
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...return it. Painting a surprisingly harsh portrait of Communism's common man, Evald Schorm, 34, debunks bureaucracy with unmuffled freedom in his Courage for Every Day. Chosen by a magazine as the exemplar of the socialist ideal, a factory worker stumbles over every slogan, ends by trying to numb his senses with sex and alcohol...
...deserved. Yet, for a nation where opera has been in a low state for many years, some of the criticism seemed downright tendentious. Le Monde found Barber "an ungainly spectacle." The orchestra "lacked finesse," the "comic effects were so broad that they seemed destined for a public with numb wits." Perhaps the most devastating crack of all came from France-Soir. Describing Soprano Peters' singing, Critic Jean Cotte wrote: "At each note America was risking another Pearl Harbor." Paris' bargain-basement Met, concluded Cotte, "was, for the French, a legend until yesterday...
Terror & Submission. In eight ruthless years, Duvalier has terrorized his 4,500,000 people into numb submission. Life expectancy is 32.6 years. Per-capita income is $70 a year. Population density is the highest in the hemisphere. Illiteracy runs 90%. "Haitians," Duvalier says quietly, "have a destiny to suffer." Duvalier's 5,000-man Tonton Macoute (Creole for bogeymen) roam the country, soaking up blood money from businessmen, torturing and murdering suspected anti-Duvalieristes-sometimes even slaughtering whole families. Early this year, one mutilated corpse lay a whole day in the Port-au-Prince sun, as a grim lesson...
Tough Talk. It was a few months later, while on patrol in Viet Nam's Central Highlands, that Sadler's short combat career was ended. He fell on a Viet Cong-planted punji pole, suffered an infection that left one leg scarred and partially numb. He returned Stateside, talking both tough ("You get a sort of satisfaction out of a good shot, leading a man running across a field and bringing him down") and tenderly ("We're overgrown social workers"). Mostly, though, he preferred not to talk at all except in his songs...
...soothe her, Segal played Vivaldi on the phonograph. "It was awful," she recalls. "After I got encased and began to harden, I couldn't feel my foot. It was numb. Then I couldn't move my hand. I began to itch. I knew this was an important piece, but all along I kept thinking, To hell with posterity...