Word: paradoxical
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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SENATOR Henry ("Scoop") Jackson of Washington State is a perplexing study in political paradox. He gaily dismisses his frequent hawk label: "I'm not a hawk or a dove. I just don't want my country to be a pigeon." Still, Jackson remains one of the most rigid supporters of President Nixon's Viet Nam policies. He still firmly believes in the domino theory of Southeast Asian politics and, as far as the rest of the world goes, he is convinced of the ultimate malevolence of the Soviet Union's global intentions. President Nixon thinks...
Such notions are the stuff that paradox is made of-true grist for the comic novelist. In MF, Burgess takes off from a Levi-Strauss contention that a universal connection exists between answering conundrums and committing incest. According to this view, it was not by chance that Oedipus' unwitting incest occurred after he solved the riddle of the Sphinx. Among the Algonquin and Iroquois tribes, there is a legend of brother-and-sister love in which riddles are posed by talking owls. In a 1967 essay, Burgess marvels at this transcultural yoking. In MF, the old Algonquin yarn...
...itinerant early media man, he has worked for dozens of small-town radio stations. As the perpetual apprentice, whetting his skills and adopting names and accents to suit geography, he evolves into part of American folklore. As Dick Gibson, the paradox of his truest identity is that he is from Nowhere, U.S.A. "Regionless my placeless vowels, my sourceless consonants," Gibson ululates into the silence and emptiness-the somber and pervasive background of life that is Elkin's real concern. Like Scheherazade, Gibson holds fate off with talk, "life-giving and meaningless and sweet as appetite...
...candor, and even Nixon's lack of ease with his fellow men. "So often a nation wants to hear a President speaking to, and for, all of the people," says LIFE, "and so often it hears a Nixon argument tailored to a segment of the public. The curious paradox of Nixon is that even when he is intellectually prepared to act the statesman, he often explains himself through the inferior stratagems of the politician. Many who might rally to a policy recoil from the dissembling that accompanies it." In the end, says the editorial, "for all its underestimated qualities...
...just the riots, the angry cries of 426,000 invisible inmates from the Tombs to Walla Walla, that have made prisons a national issue. Public concern is rooted in the paradox that Americans have never been so fearful of rising crime, yet never so ready to challenge the institutions that try to cope with it. More sensitive to human rights than ever, more liberated in their own lives and outlooks, a growing number of citizens view prisons as a new symbol of unreason, another sign that too much in America has gone wrong...