Word: trivialities
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...first time, Dwight Eisenhower stood on the edge of a congressional defeat. At issue was S. 144, the relatively trivial Rural Electrification Administration bill, which would transfer power to approve or reject REA loans from Agriculture Secretary Ezra Benson to power-hungry Clyde Ellis, director of the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association. To farm-state representatives of both parties the bill was alluring; Ellis for weeks had been bringing his regional managers into Washington to buttonhole Congressmen. As drafted by Benson-hating Senator Hubert Humphrey, moreover, S. 144 was a direct slap at the bedeviled Agriculture Secretary and, indirectly...
...Chinese people have known for two centuries past. Yet the undertones of uneasiness occasionally audible in the proceedings of the National People's Congress carried with them the possibility that in some circumstances unforeseeable now the whole thing could come a cropper: a desperate people, overworked, underfed, a trivial incident of defiance, a single lapse of authority-such as an army unit's refusal to fire on a handful of insubordinate peasants in a commune-might set off a chain reaction. No one saw such prospects now. Yet better than anyone else, Red China's outwardly confident...
...without editing (a mouth is "closed again immediately afterwards, or rather pursed again, or rather sealed") and, in the New Realists' fashion, sets down the slightest detail with the pointillist's fanatic care. Yet his prose-wind's repeated excesses, by equating the important with the trivial, reinforce a savage statement of meaninglessness...
...insists, must face hard facts with hardheaded realism. Disease does not surrender unconditionally. The very sanitary techniques that did so much to control infections in the 19th century set the stage for the ravages of polio in the 20th. German measles, once universal in childhood and then only a "trivial accident," now skips many sanitized youngsters; but if a woman gets it in the first three months of pregnancy, she may have a stillborn or malformed child...
...Many political arguments are conducted at such a trivial level, merely about which law should be passed and which shouldn't," Shapiro observed. "It would be better to discuss topics such as 'Existentialism and Marxism as an Answer to Man's Alienation in the Modern World'." But, he added sadly, "since most people around here are of capitalistic backgrounds, we can never expect a very large following...