Word: tenuousness
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...scathing fairy tale, a parable about how everyone in a large town turns into a rampaging herd of large, loud, one-horned beasts. The lone holdout is a slightly sodden dreamer called Stanley (Gene Wilder), who regrets his inability to metamorphose, but who finally comes to realize the tenuous value of individuality. Stanley is a reluctant combatant and the winner of a dubious victory. His final assertion ("I'm the last man left, and I'm staying that way until the end") is as much an assertion of uncertainty as defiance, a bolster for his quaking confidence...
Even ignoring the fact that there are other theories as to the causes of the fall of the Roman Empire, my reaction to this argument is that if our civilization is indeed so tenuous that it could be destroyed by the mere exhibition of pornography, then it is not worth saving. But a far more important issue to me is what underlies Vizzard's reasoning. Axiomatic to his viewpoint is an absolute notion of corruptness of luridness. I deny this axiom, at least for most sexual matters. Whatever my personal reactions to its moral implications, pornography seems...
...suspicion must exist, of course, that the constant emphasis on corruption is like those "crime waves" that newspapers used to discover in slack periods when no other story dominated the head lines. Any story with however tenuous a "Watergate angle" has a better chance of making the front page. In this effort, journalism may have had a collaborator in Richard Nixon. Indeed, as the notes on those 18 minutes of missing tape show, the White House's first response to Watergate was to invoke public relations to "top" the embarrassing news: "We should be on the attack - for diversion...
...budgets are always rather dubious documents, based on tenuous guesstimates of anticipated revenues and expenditures. Even in this uncertain com pany, though, the spending plan for fiscal 1975 that President Nixon will un veil next month will stand out as an exceptionally shaky exercise in pondering the imponderable. The big unknown, of course, is the effect of the energy crisis, which could plunge the U.S. into a recession, slash Government tax revenues, and force big additional outlays for new job programs to ease the impact of unemployment. Whether or not Nixon formally proclaims the figure, the budget could well...
...that the vote cannot be construed as a popularity poll, they obviously are concerned by the extent of public disenchantment. Before the vote, Whitlam had been considering whether to dissolve Parliament in May when election for half the Senate is due in a bid to strengthen Labor's tenuous position (Labor controls the lower house, the opposition the Senate). Such a dissolution now obviously could mean his defeat and a premature end to Australia's socialist experiment...