Word: oswald
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...nation of Stoics. From the outset, Americans have been so compulsive about winning that losing is almost unAmerican. In this sense, the U.S. is only the most extreme example of the Western trait that Oswald Spengler described as Faustian?the refusal to believe in a static order or a fixed fate. The very freedom of Western culture puts a heavy burden on losers. Western man's destiny is largely up to him?and so are his failures. The fabulous opportunities open to a new people on a new continent became the basis of a secular religion, a faith in competition...
Indeed, a society that equates defeat with failure runs the risk of creating angry outcasts who eventually seek revenge and justification. In extremity, such explosive emotions can drive frustrated losers to the crime of "magnacide" (killing somebody big). Lee Harvey Oswald, the archetypal U.S. assassin, almost certainly murdered John F. Kennedy partly to borrow for himself the luster of a glamorous winner. The Oswalds are rare. Still, Americans do need a lot more help in coping with the problems of losing...
...tall lanky editor of the Paris Review has also offered up his body for three boxing rounds against Archie Moore, suffered humiliation across the tennis net from Pancho Gonzales, floundered in the watery wake of Swimmer Don Schollander, lost at bridge to Oswald Jacoby, and banged percussion instruments with the New York Philharmonic. He is, in effect, the actor of the average man's Walter Mitty dreams-the real-life agent of vicarious thrills. And now, in The Bogey Man, Plimpton records the humorous agonies of his experience as a mock-professional golfer...
...bill passed by an overwhelming 70 to 17. Aimed chiefly at helping the states enforce their own firearms-control laws by severely restricting the mailorder traffic in rifles, shotguns and ammunition, the law would make it impossible to order long guns-as did Lee Harvey Oswald-from an out-of-state gun mail-order house. Even within his own state, the buyer who orders a gun by mail will have to wait at least one week before the dealer ships the weapon. Similarly, when the gun buyer goes to an adjoining state to purchase a gun over the counter...
Within the past year countless other heads of U.S. colleges and universities have also quit, well before retirement age. They include U.C.L.A.'s Franklin Murphy, 52, Indiana's Elvis J. Stahr, 52, Swarthmore's Courtney Smith, 51, Kentucky's John W. Oswald, 50, San Francisco State's John Summerskill, 43, and Hawaii's Thomas Hamilton...