Word: sagas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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CONSIDERING the surroundings, the plaque on the office door does not appear particularly foreboding: two chessboards dominate the lacquered shield, overshadowing the more traditional military insignias. Nor does the name beneath the plaque sound too threatening: the Studies Analysis and Gaming Agency (SAGA), you think, sounds like a fun place, perhaps the headquarters for a bunch of pudgy high-school kids who spend their afternoons at board games while their mesomorphic friends are outside playing touch football. But then you think again about the surroundings, which are the Pentagon, and about the people behind the door, who are generals...
They have returned to the offices of SAGA, a currently little-known branch of the Pentagon that is reported to be gaining steadily in influence with the top military brass. The civilians return two or three times a year--SAGA's top-secret guest list reportedly includes influential university presidents, major corporation officials and important foundation chairmen--and then they play around with new computer scenarios for blowing up the most strategic parts of the world. It's all a game, of course, and no one ever gets hurt; all that happens, it seems, is that the generals and their...
Indeed, it may be too early to start worrying about this odd pastime. SAGA, after all, has yet to gain broad public acceptance along the lines of that accorded the think-tankers of the early '60s. President Bok, for instance--perhaps remembering the fate of Bundy and the rest of the "best and the brightest"--said last week he had never been invited to a SAGA brain-storming session, and knows of no one else at Harvard who might have gotten the call. Several other Ivy League presidents have issued similar denials--making it clear that SAGA, for the time...
...RESURGENCE of ROTC programs, coupled with the possible return of the draft, casts a different and rather chilling light on the computer games that go down in SAGA's Pentagon office. Games may be fun, but they lose a great deal of their appeal when some of the contestants decide to play for keeps. That is exactly what could happen when the Pentagon brass realize they do not have to fool around with numbers anymore, because all of assudden they have the boys back in uniform. MacNamara and Bundy may be gone, but no one has to tell the Joint...
...drew her first cartoon at age five and went on to too many years of art school. After teaching drawing in Paris, she began selling freelance cartoons to comic-strip magazines. Among those early Bretéchers were Turnips in the Cosmos, a sci-fi epic, and Cellulite, the saga of a husband-hunting medieval princess. Publisher Claude Perdriel was impressed by some of her more satirical strips, and in 1974 offered her the newly vacant job of regular cartoonist at his Nouvel Observateur. "I submitted my work on the condition that they did not require me to hang around...