Word: spiritism
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...possibly sheer stupidity) know no sexual boundaries. Crew may also be more egalitarian than most sports in that efficiency, technical smoothness, and mental toughness can count as much as brute strength. The men in the boat trusted and respected the ability and seriousness of the Radcliffe rowers. In this spirit they rowed so well that they made it easy for the women to row hard. The women, in turn, rowed so hard, it was easy for the men to extend themselves to their own limits. A team effort such as this defies standard sexist categorizations and qualifications of the word...
...Catholic University puts it, "You have too many decision makers and too many groups trying to exercise a veto over decisions, and with that you reach a paralysis in government." In the extreme, there could be worse things than paralyzed government. There could come a breaking of that basic spirit of accommodation and mutual respect that, in the final analysis, is the very heart of American democracy - but not an abstract matter of "goodness." Everybody's self-interest is ultimately undermined when the capacity for give-and-take and conciliation erodes...
...comes The Flounder, a long, magnificent passage of wind, a pungent humanizing of the past and present in which the Weltgeist (world spirit) is a talking fish, a warty, cunning creature with a crooked mouth and two freakish eyes on one side of its doormat body. This turbot, as it is called on the Continent, is also a male chauvinist who echoes one of the two main themes of the book: the eternal power struggle between men and women. The other persistent melody, the importance of cooking and nutrition in history, is in the tasty flesh of the flounder itself...
...midst of a mound of millet I will relate instructively how the spirit became bitter...
Spender does not reprint such youthful blunders in a spirit of self-justification. He says, for example, that he is "thoroughly ashamed" of the essay in which he announced his joining of the Communist Party. He also notes that the party dropped him as soon as the essay was published, because he admitted having once doubted the total legitimacy of the Moscow trials. There is a comic poignancy to this imbroglio that pervades nearly all of Spender's political writing. His well-meaning, intellectual support of proper causes always left him at cross-purposes with improper people. He occasionally...