Word: absurd
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...light of the massacre of innocent civilians at My Lai, doesn't the indictment of the Green Berets for the murder of a double agent seem absurd...
...Panther ideology. "We start with the basic definition," he said, "that black people in America are a colonized people in every sense of the term and that white America is an organized imperialist force holding black people in colonial bondage." From that quasi-Marxist assumption, absurd to most whites but increasingly appealing to some blacks, the Panthers conclude that the police are an occupying army. As the staff study puts it, for the Panthers "violence against the police and other agents of symbols of authority is not crime but heroism, not merely an unlawful act but a revolutionary gesture against...
...intention to shock by obscenity, absurd dress and confrontation...
...himself and his dream." A poetic-minded radical of the '60s, Carl Oglesby, described the comparable Utopian stance of today's revolutionary: "Perhaps he has no choice and he is pure fatality: perhaps there is no fatality and he is pure will. His position may be invincible, absurd, both or neither. It doesn't matter. He is on the scene." The new romantics scorned gradual reform; for them, it was Freedom Now, Peace Now-Utopia...
Many adult Americans were shocked by the most obvious manifestations of the new romanticism-nudity, casual sex, obscenity, absurd dress, confrontation tactics. These were, of course, intended to shock. In describing some of his wilder contemporaries, Françoise René de Châteaubriand might have been talking about Abbie Hoffman or Jerry Rubin when they confronted a House Un-American Activities subcommittee: "They rig themselves up as comic sketches, as grotesques, as caricatures. Some of them wear frightful mustaches; one would suppose that they are going forth to conquer the world." The heroes upon whom the romantics model...