Word: oddness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...AGNEW TOO read a telegram that arrived in the White House last week after the President's Viet Nam speech. In earlier Administrations it might have seemed odd to tack on the name of the Vice President of the United States, who is traditionally almost an official non-person in Washington. Spiro Theodore Agnew, however, is turning the vice-presidency into something like an oratorical happening, raising the No. 2 office to a level of visibility and controversy unknown since the days of, well, Richard Nixon...
Agnew is not merely seeking political capital in the South, nor is his rhetoric aimed only at Moratorium marchers and other opponents of the war. Rather, he is emerging as a kind of improbable mahdi of Middle America. His often odd, occasionally clownish locutions, rendered in a W. C. Fields singsong, are abristle with nostalgias and assumptions of what American life ought to be. Armored in the certitudes of middle-class values, he speaks with the authentic voice of Americans who are angry and frightened by what has happened to their culture, who view the '60s as a disastrous montage...
Other times, the sayings of Spiro are merely camp?howling violations of political politesse. "If you've seen one slum," he declared during the campaign, "you've seen them all." The odd thing is that the line makes a certain cockeyed sense: there is a miserable monotony about urban slums. If Agnew had made the point with any sensitivity, the effect would have been the opposite of the one he achieved...
...science ignores the ancient intuitions of poets and primitives, it is likely to become an arrogant distortion of its own truth. Practicing the sensibility he preaches, Eiseley begins each chapter under the guise of an old-fashioned personal essayist. Almost casually, he recalls a walk on the beach, the odd behavior of his shepherd dog one stormy winter night, a dig among American rhinoceros bones...
After the polls close, the ballots are locked up, and then brought next morning to the school auditorium. There, just before 8 a.m. the 100-odd election clerks begin a first, "unofficial" count of the "number one" votes for each city council candidate. The City has eleven wards, each with five precincts-so there are eleven little cubicles on one side of the auditorium, to allow the first precinct of each ward to be counted simultaneously...