Word: stupidity
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...tough speech that it would be "a mistake to expect that anything can be gained by unilateral concessions, or that a show of weakness will make a negotiation go more swiftly, or even go at all." Addressing the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Ball declared: "I find it both stupid and unattractive when a handful of our countrymen, who have read little history or have not understood what they have read, engage in public self-flagellation, declaring in sanctimonious tones that American policy is thoroughly in the wrong and that we as a nation are as brutal and viciously ambitious...
...give coverage; or perhaps, like so many of us, he missed the whole thing in transit. At any rate, his erroneous reporting of the erroneous reporting reminds me vaguely of Bertrand Russell's observation that, in a democracy, at least one knows the leaders can never be more stupid than the people because, in so far as the leaders are stupid, the people are stupider for having elected them. Walter Cronkite for philosopher-king. Robert Somerby...
...Americans, meanwhile, have adopted comedy as their tool and social alienation and absurdity as their twin themes. Nearly every important American writer-Nabokov, Mailer Barm, Bellow, Malamud, Donleavy, Roth, Friedman, Burroughs, Heller, Pynchon, Willingham-works from an assumption that society is at best malevolent and stupid, at worst wholly lunatic. The gods are dead and their graves untended, morality is a matter of picking one's way between competing absurdities, and the only sane reaction to society-to its alleged truths and virtues, its would-be terrors and taboos-is a cackle or a scream of possibly cathartic laughter...
...older, you think better-up to the age of 22, that is. If you're a jerk at 22, you're always going to be stupid. If you're a genius, somewhere at 22 it's there...
...hippies have hit upon a stupid, inescapable, infuriating Truth when they assert their right to your money. That may be how you tell the Harvard-Radcliffe neo-hippies in their equally savage, equally expensive, clothing from the real hippies. Certainly none of us churning past text-books and drifting through exams, really believes that a man's wealth...