Word: threatenings
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Through one of the disquieting coincidences which threaten to reduce criticism to an exact science, 1883 was the natal year of a pair of Czech novelists whose lookouts on the problem of monolithic authority and what to do about it are presently very much in point. In a country which has earned its reputation as the common stamping ground of optimistic power, Franz Kafka and Jaroslav Hasek came to know the texture and stink of vast administratives schemes so vicious, irrational, and irremediably tacky that they generate comedy and tragedy, like industrial waste, in awe-some volume, beyond...
...cherish the sanctity of the spoken word as does Charles de Gaulle, especially when he has spoken it himself. Three weeks ago, when an exodus of francs began to threaten the stability of France's currency, De Gaulle loftily dismissed the possibility of the franc's devaluation as "the worst absurdity." Almost no one believed him. Speculation against the franc continued to mount until it neared crisis proportions, threatening to unbalance the entire, delicate mobile of the Western monetary system. The money managers and bankers of Europe and the U.S. assembled in Bonn in an emergency session...
...come to bear his name. Russia, he said, has the duty and the right to intervene not only in Communist countries like Czechoslovakia that are within the East bloc, but also, for that matter, in "any socialist country" where the forces of imperialism and capitalism and bourgeois revisionism threaten to make a come back. In repeating the justification for taking over in Czechoslovakia, Brezhnev cited a novel new source: an unnamed U.S. magazine that had outlined "precisely what was expected" by the West in Prague had not Moscow moved...
...violence comes on slowly. Periodically, the panel discussion is blacked-out, and the rioters enter to threaten the audience. We are confronted with ghetto rats, miscegenation, and bayonets. A disquieting sense of unease forces us to abandon our earlier role of the enlightened, liberal audience. Each time the panel resumes, the absurdity of the very pretense of a "discussion of race relations" becomes more evident. All of the panel's proposed "rational" solutions--individual initiative, integration, compromise, separatism--collapse. Even the experts are not safe...
Beneath this is Their unfailing tendency to see Woman lurking behind every individual and to define Woman exclusively as a sexual being. They don't like women to deviate from preconception, and when women do threaten to leap the boundaries their achievements are either discounted or attributed to some mysterious quality of femininity. At one point Mrs. Ellmann quotes an article on Sylvia Plath...