Word: reasonably
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...reason Michael Arlen bothered to produce two years of weekly columns on TV for The New Yorker, and then publish the best of them as The Living Room War, is that one hundred million or more people feed on television daily. It hammers them like malleable gold; it takes and does not give; it bludgeons man, and voraciously relieves him of whatever sensitivity he timorously guards. Television has been described with varying enthusiasm as the great galvanizer, tranquilizer, hypnotizer, pacifier, stupefier, paralyzer, agitator, commentator, activator, adjudicator, erupter, corruptor. It provides a daily vindication of American technological genius, a daily spectacle...
While this is not a surprising statement, it has serious implications. The most significant is that television programming is not a benignly vapid mess. In fact, the vapidity of television's material is responsible for its deleterious influence, which is primarily the enervating substitution of inoffensiveness for reason. Arlen writes of the most obvious example...
...number of observations may be made with reference to this last reason. One may question whether appealing to "rule and precedent" is on any count the best way of handling problems, especially in a period of rapid and unforeseen change such as our own. One may question the validity of the fear that the consequence of joining in a national effort to end the war in Vietnam will be to drown the Faculty in "continued and inevitably impassioned political debate." It is a great bother, and it takes a great deal of time, to engage in such debate. Most...
...series of votes on the anti-war resolution showed mainly how easily the Faculty can lose its legislative way. For some unexplained reason, the 268 votes that joined to amend the Moratorium resolution couldn't get together to call a recess-the obvious strategy for avoiding a formal vote. And when they finally faced a vote, the opponents seemed to have no ready plan for voting or abstaining...
...convocation eventually muddled its way through to adjournment. The only obvious casualty was the Faculty's sense that it can fill the New England town meeting role with something approaching reason or order. Despite the titters that ran through the room when the complicated voting plan was explained, the vote served a function and everyone could leave knowing that the bungles wouldn't have any lasting effect...