Word: trivial
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...North Vietnam, and the following April the U.S. used B-52 bombers for the first time to wreak massive and arbitrary destruction on the North. And only five years ago in April, 1970 President Nixon initiated the U.S. incursion into Cambodia. This April, too, each week brings fresh evidence--trivial or crucial, comic or tragic--of the continuing strength the most shameful strands in American history. As the country refers to old slogans about taxation without representation, it learns of an Internal Revenue Service training school that plied undercover agents with liquor and women, 'objects' it evidently regarded as equally...
...sort can illuminate any features of U.S. politics, aside from showing the obvious absence of both ideology and philosophy. The congressman tells Cavanaugh "we can't afford to spend the next three years discussing whether Nixon called Kleindeinst a cocksucker," and much of this book is on the same trivial level. Higgins says his job as novelist is to set down the factors and let the reader interpret--Higgins the journalist and lawyer interprets enough, he says. But the facts--as conversation--are hardly enough, any more than undisclosed White House tapes could suggest the full horror of the Indochina...
...FIRST three weeks of March, the managing editor of The New York Times had on his desk a news story he did not think fit to print. The story was not libelous or sloppily written, and was not trivial. By any standard, it was well worth running in The Times. But the story concerned the Central Intelligence Agency, and when CIA director William Colby got wind of it, he implored the paper to supress the news for a while. The managing editor agreed...
Apparently the only specific complaint of the visiting U.S. team was of the shortness of the lunch break-a pretty trivial objection to a system that is breaking up nearly three-quarters of a century of dehumanizing production-line monotony...
...Monthly deserves special credit for its attention to the problem--without the sort of criticism it offers. Texas will remain a shadow of its potential, narrow and self-congratulatory in its ignorance of its own faults and weaknesses. Without criticism, in McMurtry's words, "that which is corrupt and trivial in a people's character will certainly flourish and it will flourish--as it is flourishing in Texas--at the expense of those elements of character which are genuine and valuable...