Word: ritualization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...SOVIET UNION. For all the ritual pledges of allegiance to détente in both Moscow and Washington, the Nixon Administration's dealings with Russia face tests in several tricky areas. In Europe there are the plodding negotiations on East-West political relations in Geneva and the talks on NATO-Warsaw Pact force reductions in Vienna. The promised expansion of U.S.-Soviet trade is hung up principally on Senator Henry M. Jackson's opposition to a bill granting the Soviets most-favored-nation trading status. Jackson demands a Kremlin commitment to further increases in emigration of Soviet Jews...
London's Daily Telegraph saw the resignation as "an unconscious act of cleansing and renewal, with Richard Nixon as the ritual sacrifice, embodying all the less reputable aspects of [America's] rumbustious democracy. Even the festering remains of the Viet Nam hangover are included in the general exorcism, despite the fact that in this case it was Mr. Nixon who was the doctor who brought about the cure...
...adult." Yet as the admirer acknowledges, that cultivation may have undone Spassky. Despite the Russian's domination of the game for a decade, the Boris of Iceland displayed a literal and philosophical resignation in the face of Fischer's predatory inventions. The result was less drama than ritual: civilization vanquished by barbarism. Or was it decadence defeated by energy? Or was it an unconscious harbinger of detente...
...Lake is often lovely in its diaphanous scenes - a nighttime ritual of catching fireflies, for example. In this translation, at least, it is also sometimes disagreeable and unsettling. One passage in which Gimpei gets a massage in a Karuizawa bathhouse reads eerily like Arthur Bremer's diary, in which he described a visit to a Manhattan massage parlor some time before he started stalking George Wallace. There might be a good doctoral thesis in the psychological relationship between the literary and the political creep in the late 20th century. Kawabata could not offer any further advice for it, however...
...nations made a ritual promise to promote trade, but no settlement was reached on the basic issue that is holding up progress: the insistence by Senator Henry Jackson and majorities of the Senate and House that Russia liberalize its emigration policies before Congress grants the Kremlin lower tariffs and easier credits. Asked about the emigration issue, which particularly concerns Jews, a Soviet spokesman said: "I could put the question to you, 'Would you agree to making U.S. trade with the U.S.S.R. dependent upon the solution of the racial problem...