Word: absurdities
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After years of relative obscurity ("Decent poverty is really an ideal environment for serious people," he said), Goodman became a kind of youthcult hero in 1960 with the publication of Growing Up Absurd, in which he argued that problem children were the fault of a society that offered them only dull jobs and squalid ideals. Two years later in The Community of Scholars, he attacked the colleges as bureaucratic machines that had proved unable to provide youth with genuine learning. "The ultimate rationale of administration," he wrote, "is that a school is a teaching machine, to train the young...
...however, Goodman was fired because of his freely admitted homosexuality, which later also cost him a teaching job at Black Mountain. "I don't think that people's sexual lives are any business of the state," he declared some years afterward. "To license sex is absurd." Indeed, although he and his wife Sally lived together for 30 years and had two children, they never formally married...
...Most of my intellectual generation sold out," he mused, "first to the Communists and then to the organized system, so that there are very few independents around that a young man can accept as a hero." Goodman, however, provided the young with an indictment in Growing Up Absurd: "Our abundant society is at present simply deficient in many of the most elementary objective opportunities and worthwhile goals that could make growing up possible. It is lacking in enough man's work ... in honest public speech ... in the opportunity to be useful. It corrupts the fine arts. It shackles science...
General MacArthur's argument that Olympic results reflect a nation's achievement outside of athletics is highly debatable at best. Some measure of chauvinism is understandable, but to interpret physical feats as evidence of sociological or ideological superiority is as absurd as trying to settle a United Nations debate with a foot race up First Avenue. And the tactic can backfire. At Berlin, Hitler had to sit and squirm as an American black-the legendary Jesse Owens-clearly outshone Germany's Nordic "supermen" to win gold medals in four events. Still, rampant nationalism continues to mock...
...uncommon blue-Italian blue, insist the proud Münchner-canopies the 890-acre expanse of wood, trail, meadow and stream known as the Englischer Garten. From their benches, the forgotten aged stare across the little lake into the sun or watch in silence the absurd parade of ducks and drakes or the wheeling Frisbees in the sky. Lazing in a field are clusters of young longhairs, some of them students, some wanderers from other nations. They all speak the same language: guitar and hash. Elector Karl Theodor designed this park in 1789. It was not Karl Theodor who inscribed...