Word: useless
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Seven British soldiers in postwar occupied Germany are assigned to guard the obsolete, World War II Bofors antiaircraft cannon. Their mission is obviously a useless exercise but the soldiers nonetheless mount their guard in a battered barracks, awaiting the dawn. Thus unwinds a tightly spun military yarn that has a touch of allegory. Shrouded in canvas, the Bofors gun is never seen in its entirety; though it orders their lives, it remains irrelevant to the soldiers, who blandly carry on their battle with boredom. So painstakingly does The Bofors Gun record the brutalizing effects of military routine that...
Supak feels that this "trifurcation" of self leaves one worse than useless and he urges for a start, a complete rejection of the "path of least resistance" which leads one into what he terms a hopeless compromise that destroy one's psychic well-being as its inherent contradictions emerge. He acknowledges the temptation to stay "in" since "you not only have to give up less; you won't be beat up, rejected by your parents and their friends...
...bring about a new type of politics one must do more than mouth vague generalities, one must seize the decision-making process and consciously change it. In some states that means building up--precinct by precinct--an organization in order to wrest control. Then turn around and render it useless by changing the state election laws to permit open primaries in the place of party nominating conventions...
...invaders as "the visiting fraternal forces." Overt opposition all but ended, and most Czechoslovaks did their best to tolerate their unwanted visitors. While they still felt great animosity to ward their occupiers, they nonetheless recognized that since they had not resisted at the moment of the invasion, it was useless to provoke repressive measures by acts of defiance now. As a result, the country began to assume at least a veneer of normality. TIME Correspondent Peter Forbath took the measure of the new Czechoslovak mood throughout the country last week, and filed this report...
Keeping Cool. Shaken, he returned to his suite. In one final gesture, which even he probably knew would be useless, he sought to end the violence, telephoning his campaign manager at the International Amphitheatre to tell him to withdraw the name of Eugene McCarthy from the balloting. "It looked," he remarked later, "like the convention might break up in chaos. I thought this might stabilize it." By then it was too late. The balloting in the convention hall had already started, and the count-and the violence below-went...