Word: deus
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...heart is pure law-and-order. Harry succeeds in tracking down the killer, only to see him slip away under the cloak of snivelling libertarianism. The district attorney, backed by an intellectual judge from Berkeley, informs Harry that the criminal's rights were violated. This inverted bit of deus ex machina gives Scorpio time to terrorize a busload of children and sends Harry off again on the righteous pursuit of his maniac...
...have some quarrel with this generation of radicals, which goes back to pre-Galbraith views. I have always thought that the Pentagon was more responsible for Vietnam than the Capitol. I'm saying that the Left, generally speaking, lets the Pentagon off the hook, by saying they're the deus ex machine , that they've been manipulated by the capitalists. I would rather put the blame right on the Pentagon...
Throughout U.S. Journal, a collection of Trillin's New Yorker pieces, the author reportedly lands like a benign ordering presence-deus ex-machine gunner-amidst chaos, humbug and hoopla. Covering a great deal of ground, he is naturally sympathetic toward other traveling men. He writes about a Dow Chemical recruiter who in 1968 had to go from campus to campus, removing his shoes to step over antiwar demonstrators, and try to answer such polite undergraduate questions as, "I was wondering if a Dow employee could be prosecuted as a war criminal ten or 15 years from now?" Elsewhere, Trillin...
...begun to seem as unreal as its '20s predecessor, The Sheik.) As for the literary plots that turn on forced marriages or horrific abortions, they will seem as dated as Prohibition stories. Free legal abortions and free birth control will force writers to give up pregnancy as the deus ex machina...
...might be antiexistentialist, though he detests labels and categories. Yet many of his characters are skepties. The God of Yascha. the profligate-turned-ascetic in The Magician of Lublin is a God who "revealed Himself to no one [and] gave no indications of what was permitted or forbidden." This deus absconditus appears in other stories as well. In "A Tale of Two Liars" Satan mocks a praying prisoner. "Are you stupid enough to still believe in the power of prayer? . . . There was enough prayer, wasn't there, when Chmielnicki came? How were those prayers answered? Children were buried alive, chaste...