Word: planking
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...third plank in SEATO would be economic mutual assistance. The Thais and the Filipinos objected at once that such a SEATO was not strong enough. On the other hand, the treaty went just about as far as the British were prepared to go; the British wanted a "constructive, unhurried approach." The British even hoped that one passage in the treaty draft might be changed, leveling SEATO not against "Communist aggression" but simply against "aggression...
...science fiction off its rocket? Definitely, says Cleveland's Robert Plank, a psychiatric social worker, in a current medical journal. Argues Plank (in International Record of Medicine and General Practice Clinics): many science-fiction plots betray "schizophrenic manifestations" in the minds of their authors, who work out their fantasies by literary catharsis. Similarly, he concludes, readers release the steam from their own unconscious by reading the fantasies...
...Episodes of space travel are by no means rare in the imaginings of the mentally ill," says Plank. Equally symptomatic is the "last man" motif, in which all mankind has been annihilated save for one individual-or, more productively, a fertile couple, "Far from being a byproduct of atomic fission," Plank contends, this theme goes back to Greek mythology and "grows from the fertile soil of unconscious drives." Such standard schizophrenic symptoms as delusions of grandeur, of persecution, and of superhuman influence are science-fiction staples...
Psychologist Plank would not go so far as to say that science-fiction writers are "crazy" because they reflect schizophrenic trends. Rather, he argues, these signs are becoming more conspicuous in a mechanized civilization. Science fiction may be bad science and worse fiction, but to a good wig-picker it "is a sensitive barometer of our changing mental climate...
President Gustavo Rojas Pinilla is more moderate, but seemingly feels that he must go right down the line with his Conservative Party on its most heartfelt plank, union of church and state. He has increasingly turned the agreement against the Protestants. Such actions inevitably get Colombia a bad press abroad; sensitive Colombians may be astonished to learn that their country is well on the way to earning a reputation for bigotry second, among Western nations, only to Spain...