Word: foolish
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hostile question." Gomes makes cheerful academic jokes (on Ascension Day: "It is the Lord who graduates") and will quote Ogden Nash or Woody Allen as freely as Crisis Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr. But he offers no easy optimism or simple uplift to his young charges. "Human progress is a foolish myth of epic proportions," Gomes insists. "It is the fantasy of our age and time. Human perseverance in the face of human folly, it is that of which the kingdom of heaven is made...
...when a person was guided only by folk wisdom: an apple a day would keep the doctor away. But there is no going back. Today the apple must be checked for sprayed-on toxins. The alarm system is here to stay. It would be foolhardy as well as foolish to suggest that it be shut down; it is, in truth, indispensable for guiding those who wish guidance. What is needed is a strategy for getting through life passably happy de spite all the ominous background chatter...
...that quick-strike force had been at our disposal last month--would it have helped President Carter find a way to get the embassy hostage out alive? Would it have cowed the religious fanatics who provoked the crisis? Would it have accomplished anything except to make America look foolish for having spent billions...
...hypotheses about the real world to be tested like any others. For those who speak so glibly, if only occasionally intelligibly, about falsifiability, they seem curiously unwilling to subject their beliefs to empirical tests. The field I know is a normal academic cross-section, containing the variously brilliant, troubled, foolish, generous, devoted, opportunistic, self-righteous, insecure, hypocritical, self-examining, bigoted, humane, confused, courageous, narrow, fiery, and kind. The field is in a creative ferment, and the meaning which its workers find in it is as various as their own backgrounds, imaginations, and moral visions make it. There are Marxist sociobiologists...
...play picks up a bit when the men come on stage. Two members of the chorus of old men, Pinocles (Alan Ruof) and Mastocles (Ray Bertolino), put some expression into their voices, but their parades around the stage seem foolish. Smith, as Kinesias, brings energy to his role, but too often he delivers his lines in singsong yells rather than with the distress of a man in dire need of sexual gratification...