Word: orientals
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Formed out of a meeting at the Harvard Faculty Club in 1973, the members of the Boston Study Group met weekly for four years, talking, writing, criticizing, trying to find a way to "re-orient American foreign policy" away from future Hiroshimas and Vietnams. In The Price of Defense, they have made sense of the senseless--they have brought order to the chaos of American foreign and military policy. The present system rests on the assumption that more military spending means a safer nation, and it fails to subordinate military spending to the government's foreign policy goals. The system...
...hell with it." There is good news for M. & M. The 1979 garden catalogues piling into mailboxes this spring offer a number of vegetables that look like spinach, taste better than spinach, but are not Spinacia oleracea. Some of them have been imported from the Orient, notably shungiku (Chrysanthemum coronarium) and tampala hinn choy (Amaranthus tricolor...
...spinach. For the venturesome home gardener, there is a new sweet pepper, Dutch Treat, whose pungent fruits progress from yellow to orange to red and are edible at all stages; it comes, naturally, from Holland. There is also an improved version of the so-called yard-long bean, a.k.a. Orient Express or asparagus bean because of its asparaginous flavor. From China come bitter melon, gow choy, a garlicky chive, bok choy cabbage, and an aromatic celery, heung kuhn -all valuable for good wokmanship. A Japanese melon called Honey Drip is described by its originators as "intolerably delicious." Vegetable growers, generally...
...strangest, least examined and most persistent of human habits is the absolute division made between East and West, Orient and Occident. Almost entirely "Western" in origin, this imaginative geography that splits the world into two unequal, fundamentally opposite spheres has brought forth more myths, more detailed ignorance and more ambitions than any other perception of difference. For centuries Europeans and Americans have spellbound themselves with Oriental mysticism, Oriental passivity, Oriental mentalities. Translated into policy, displayed as knowledge, presented as entertainment in travelers' reports, novels, paintings, music or films, this "Orientalism" has existed virtually unchanged as a kind of daydream...
Early Christian polemicists against Islam used the Prophet's human person as their butt, accusing him of whoring, sedition, charlatanry. As writing about Islam and the Orient burgeoned-60,000 books between 1800 and 1950-European powers occupied large swatches of "Islamic" territory, arguing that since Orientals knew nothing about democracy and were essentially passive, it was the "civilizing mission" of the Occident, expressed in the strict programs of despotic modernization, to finally transform the Orient into a nice replica of the West. Even Marx seems to have believed this...