Word: trivialize
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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SANDERS Theater. Originally, it was built as a memorial to the brave sons of Harvard who gave their lives in the World Wars. Unfortunately, of late, it has come to represent something far more trivial: the Core Curriculum. No longer a haven for heroes, it is now home to "Ec 10," "Justice," "Jesus and the Moral Life," and the newest addition, "Cultural Revolution...
Campaigns, according to the civics texts and good-government groups, are supposed to be about issues and ideas, ideology and vision. Focusing on personality and manner is trivial. Yet this year, the fight for the Republican nomination involves something far more important than artificial differences on oil-import fees or taxes. It is a struggle between styles and temperaments that go to the heart of the kind of President each would...
Standing at attention while they eat, remembering how many ice cubes upperclassmen like in their drinks and memorizing large amounts of trivial information are a traditional form of initiation for West Point plebes. Cadet John Edwards was able to take the hazing as a freshman, but as a second classman (junior), he would not dish it out. "I couldn't treat other plebes the way I had been treated. It was absurd and dehumanizing," said Edwards last week after he had been expelled from the U.S. Military Academy...
Just before Washington and Moscow concluded their historic accord on intermediate-range arms reductions, the talks nearly snagged over a missing photograph. The matter was hardly trivial. The treaty called for the elimination of Soviet SS-20 missiles, but nobody on the U.S. team had ever seen one. Finally, the Soviets produced a grainy Xerox of a photograph of the missile, along with a promise to send the picture itself later. It has yet to materialize. One possible reason for Moscow's reluctance: the SS-20 is identical to the first two stages of the long-range SS-25, which...
...sometimes, and bathetic when it fails, but usually as pictorially brilliant as it is morally earnest -- to the ingrained limitations of its time. It sets its face against the sterile irony, the despair of saying anything authentic about history or memory in paint, and against the general sense of trivial pursuit that infests our culture. It is a victory for the moral imagination...