Word: triviality
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...that American satirists live in "constant danger of being blindsided by the truth." His twofold defense against that danger: to reduce large questions to the microscopic (President Reagan named as his Surgeon General a doctor once known as "the Tummy Tuck King of Palm Beach") and to enlarge the trivial to the grotesque ("Am I the only person who favors a law mandating life imprisonment for anyone who performs in public as a mime...
...does Watergate seem to Americans now? How did it change them? History since Watergate has, in some ways, bent opinion toward the French view of the affair. Watergate has always been a sort of conundrum of the disproportionate. How could such a trivial event as a midnight break-in at the Democratic National Committee, an idiotic little piece of ineptitude by five stooges, end by destroying the leader of the most powerful nation in the world? The break-in itself was, said Presidential Press Secretary Ron Ziegler, "a third-rate burglary attempt." The cause (a moment of incompetent political espionage...
...advocating that the department give more consideration to radical thought. Marglin focuses much of his argument on intellectual honesty. A range of viewpoints is beneficial to the student's learning and he says, "You don't know the important assumptions from the trivial assumptions the way it's done [now]. You don't know why this assumption is made: whether it's just to keep things near and simple whether it really is a fundamentally distinctive point of view that has to do with a particular way of looking at the world...
...Jewish communities in the real world are already at odds over such issues as the application of affirmative action policies and Israel's military and economic ties to South Africa. It would be tragically ironic if tensions between Blacks and Jews at Harvard became exacerbated over a relatively trivial problem, while the larger issues remain unaddressed. Gan L. Jackson...
Philosophy is concerned with two matters: soluble questions that are trivial, and crucial questions that are insoluble. Hannah Arendt always knew the difference; her critics sometimes did. In the disparity lay the tragedies and consolations of a career still sparking debate 19 years after the appearance of her most controversial book...