Word: visional
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...deal of time searching on the floor and taking drain pipes apart looking for wayward contact lenses [Ian. 29], but I think you are mean, mean, mean about us 6,000,000 wearers of contacts. We are not all starey-eyed, status-seeking basketball-player types. Contacts improved my vision (20, 80) to 20 25, and are directly responsible for my qualifying for a driver's license, getting through college and being able to work as a teacher for a living...
This Orwellian vision draws scalding scorn from the liberal economists. "Do you mathematicians expect to be able to see from the main computing center," asks Ivan Malyshev, deputy chief of the Central Statistical Administration, "all our vast territory from the cold rocks of Murmansk to the flaming sun of Kolkhida in the Caucasus, to see how people sow and reap, how every chemical complex functions, how every machine operates? If something goes wrong in Khabarovsk, can you merely press a button and straighten things out? A strange Utopia. Society is not the sum of mathematical zeros and digits...
Good writing is rare enough. Storytelling is an even rarer skill. A genuinely comic vision is beyond price. The Ordways has all three. Seven years after his doom-laden first novel, Home from the Hill, William Humphrey has made a surprising switch from tragedy to mock epic. The result is the most delightful novel so far this winter...
...contemporaries, respected their right to differ with him-most notably in his gallant defense of British soldiers after the Boston Massacre. Robespierre, by contrast, labored under a crabbed, crass perversion of Enlightenment philosophy that allowed no room for disagreement or human foible. Those who did not share that vision were packed off to the guillotine; some 17,000 were beheaded during the Terror. By equating Virtue with Terror, Robespierre set a comforting precedent for every subsequent despot from Stalin to Castro...
...Southern segregationist realizes, and the Northern liberal fails to grasp, is that with full and meaningful integration of the Negro, "society is going to be radically changed." However, says Merton, before the Negro revolution ever nears fulfillment, the liberal will respond by "goosestepping down Massachusetts Avenue." If this vision seems extravagant, the author argues persuasively that the struggle is a preordained spiritual purgatory for the white man, a redemptive mission for the black...