Word: automatons
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...things are more frustrating than a vending machine that sits in smug silence after gobbling a harried human's coins. Michael DeNardo of Cranston, R.I., is not one to put up with such machinations. When an automaton at the foundry where he worked failed to produce the requested coffee, and the coin-return lever offered no peaceful settlement, DeNardo belted the contraption...
...health inspector who catches on to the massive eggplants which are infesting California, and it's a relief when he finally gets and eggplant of his own and becomes one of them. It's obvious that Leonard Nimoy is one of them from the start, although he plays the automaton well enough. Jeff Goldblum turns in the only creative performance as a counter-culture angry young man who gets pissed off at Nimoy's psychiatric platitudes. Brooke Adams is nearly as uninteresting nude as she is during the rest of the movie. Whatever fear there is in this comes from...
...this point, the cultist's life is no longer his own. Personalities change from the lively and complex patterns of normality to those of an automaton reciting what he has been taught. The usual problems of living have been replaced by a nearly childish existence in which the cult and its leaders supply all rules and all answers. Erich Fromm, in his classic treatise on the rise of Nazism, called this process the "escape from freedom...
...inaugural speech showed moments of eloquence: "The danger for modern man is that he would reduce the earth to a desert, the person to an automaton, brotherly love to planned collectivization. The church, admiringly yet lovingly protesting against such 'achievements,' intends, rather, to safeguard the world that thirsts for a life of love from dangers that would attack...
THROUGHOUT HIS CAREER, Richard Nixon remained a singularly bloodless character, an automaton with a five-o'clock shadow and an unerring ability to capitalize on the strong emotions he provoked but apparently could not feel. The classic opportunist, he was always running, always chasing after an Alger Hiss or running away from the Checkers mess, pursuing the phanton of "peace with honor" or retreating from the very real brown manila envelopes loaded with cash that his vice president used to collect every two weeks or so. As long as he was on the move-to China, to Russia...