Word: bafflements
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Author Wilson's heroine is a smart, smug, vastly muddled and grimly girdled figure of middle-class bafflement. Meg Eliot is widowed in a fit of absentmindedness : her husband, a prosperous lawyer, is shot by a confused Asian student, who is really gunning for the Minister of Education of an Indonesian state. "If that had happened when we were young, there would have been a war about it," one character remarks. But there is no war, not even compensation for the widow. Instead, Meg faces only a set of sad second choices-social work, the society of Angry Young...
Even when cloaked in don't-quote-me anonymity, a member of Congress rarely admits that a major national problem totally baffles him. But on Capitol Hill these days, lawmakers are confessing bafflement in the face of the massive and growing farm-subsidy scandal. "I admit I don't know what should be done," says a don't-quote-me G.O.P. wheat-state Senator. Vermont's George Aiken, ranking Republican on the Senate Agriculture Committee and longtime farm policy specialist, shakes his head in confessed bewilderment. Louisiana's Allen Ellender, Agriculture Committee chairman, mutters...
Needed: A Moses. The same bafflement was evident in the face and voice of Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson last week during his grim, two-day appearance before the Agriculture Committee to argue his case for lower price supports.*The arithmetic of Benson's battle fatigue: when he took over as Agriculture Secretary six years ago, he vowed to slash the cost of farm programs, which had averaged $1.5 billion a year in 1950-52; but in 1956-58, Agriculture Department outgo averaged $4.5 billion a year, and in the current fiscal year the total is estimated...
Convicted of murder, they accepted their fate with an air of bafflement about the white man's justice. In their eyes could be read their failure to understand why they had been arrested. True, they had killed Basuas-but are not the Basuas enemies of the Panamoli? True, they had disguised themselves in crocodile skins-but why not? They ate part of their victims' bodies-but how else could they appropriate the victims' personal qualities...
...fastest-breeding peoples. Trinidadians shunned the simplest mechanical devices, which Wright sadly pronounced, in any case, "an upper-mental-class activity, no good at all for Indians, Indonesians or Japanese." He finally tried a really simple, standard tablet that foams in the vagina, should kill all spermatozoa. Same bafflement: women took the tablets home and went on conceiving...