Word: rage
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...wouldn't normally quibble about one word; however, this one word is very important. In your cover story on "Rage and Reform on Campus" [April 18], you quote me as characterizing the style of the university by rationality and stability. Actually, the wire services earlier made the same error in reporting a press conference here. Probably it's my own fault for not enunciating more clearly. The word I actually used was civility, which is much more important for universities today than stability. Civility becomes increasingly vital if university people-faculty, students and administration-are to discuss instead...
...this production affords that gratification in triplicate to staunch Harvard Dilbert and Sullivan patrons. John McKean seems to have found, in Ralph Rackstraw, the Gilbertian lead to which he is best suited. The part calls for rapid changes of character: from a caricature of soulfulness to impetuosity to prideful rage to rapture to despair to pompous authority and back, finally, to rapture. That McKean can make so many transitions so rapidly is itself a feat worthy of praise; that he makes them so smoothly and so convincingly is simply amazing...
...rage against "a heartless country in which the poor get poorer." Alas, poor Yoricks: The decline of poverty in the U.S. is among the more astonishing and hopeful facts of human history. (In 1900, about 90% of our population was poor; in 1920--50%; in 90% 1930--34%; in 1968-15%). You will cry that 15% is outrageous. Agreed. The question is: How best abolish it? (A negative income tax makes more sense than anything your colleagues propose...
Another writer might be resentful of the past. But Vonnegut holds no grudges. He is, in general, a man more rueful than wrathful. Black-humorist contemporaries often vibrate with a febrile, apocalyptic rage, seeming to feel that America has the market cornered on greed and hypocrisy. Vonnegut takes a longer view. Though he has an old-fashioned Populist's distrust of the rich and powerful manipulators of society, Vonnegut's is closer kin to Twain than Kafka. Deeply pessimistic about the world, he is rarely depressed by it. Part of him, at least, would contemplate even the story...
...deny Martin Luther King's pre-eminence as the genius of the civil rights movement. Despite the celebrity that surrounded him-and because of it-King's was the symbolic presence and voice of the black, of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, his inchoate rage distilled into visionary phrases: "I have a dream." There were other components in King's leadership: his unusual stature among whites (culminating in the Nobel Prize), the combination of his Southern rural style with Gandhian ideals, and an almost unassailable dignity respected by both blacks and whites. Negroes kiddingly called...