Word: present
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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More Mileage. In switching cars to natural gas, the big advantage is that the internal-combustion engine can be retained. The only requirement is a natural-gas mixer that fits on top of the carburetor and feeds the new fuel to the present combustion chambers. A dashboard control permits the driver to switch from natural gas in polluted areas to regular gasoline on the open road. With natural gas, the company claims, engine oil lasts up to a year, sparkplugs fire for 50,000 miles, and valve jobs are usually unnecessary. Better yet, 100 cu. ft. of natural gas gives...
...rage, scorn, self-pity and impotence so that an audience is held in a vise of attention. What Osborne has been able to find in himself is an astonishingly concrete symbol of the times. As Mary McCarthy once noted, "Although Osborne is no thinker, he understands the present very well, which is why he is sick...
When he gets sufficiently sick of himself and the present, he goes rummaging through history for one of his casebook period pieces like Luther, and now A Patriot for Me. The plays are seriously defective-partly because Osborne's own voice is badly muffled, and partly because he cannot work up the passion to breathe an inner life into these works. A further drawback is that he has a high-school-pageant idea of history. Everything moves episodically, in jerky vignettes, with time as a cardboard backdrop. The characters are not immersed in history, they merely wear it like...
Osborne's constant concerns are present-male camaraderie, an outcast's attempt to crash a caste system, scorn for a decadent elite-but in A Patriot for Me, they appear like footnotes on a blank page. History may be his favorite reading, but drama is no pastime art. Osborne's dramatic destiny is clear, demanding and inescapable. He alone can and must be the life of his plays...
...Every invention in the course of history," Darlington says, "from the first right down to the present-day computer, has required a mental effort to exploit it. It has therefore exerted a selective pressure against the less intelligent. This pressure has been responsible for the evolutionary improvement of the human species throughout time." Indeed, evolutionary chance rather than human design accounts, in Darlington's view, for the entire spectrum of human intellectual progress. One example he gives is the celibacy of Roman Catholicism, a medieval practice. By preventing the inbreeding that this ruling class might otherwise have practiced...