Word: harmlessness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Around China's bulging flanks, nations began chattering nervously of nonaggression pacts. Such harmless-sounding pacts, industriously promoted by Chou Enlai, were, in fact, designed to exclude U.S. power from Southeast Asia, leaving non-Communist nations at the mercy of Red China's burgeoning colonialism. The West's countereffort-a Southeast Asia pact-has yet to get off the ground. The U.S. has not yet decided who should belong or how much should be guaranteed. The British are not in a hurry, nor looking to a pact with teeth...
...Kfar Saba, a stone-and-stucco frontier outpost twelve miles from Tel Aviv, the border runs through tangled orange groves. Almost every night Arab infiltrators flit from tree to tree, and so across the border, to steal and destroy. Some of the intruders are harmless: they come to visit Arab relatives left on the Israeli side, or to steal a bag of oranges from groves that were once their own. But in the past month the settlers of Kfar Saba have lost six cows, seven mules, three horses and three donkeys...
...colors lost their infernal intensity, paled to harmless-looking but deadly pastels. Then, slowly the 100-mile-wide cauliflower drifted away and disappeared...
Rhapsody (M-G-M). Americans have nobler characters than Europeans. All great music was written by either Tchaikovsky or Rachmaninoff. Artists are the hottest lovers. Good musicians have long hair. All rich people are neurotic. Rhapsody is a relatively harmless tissue of such debatable propositions...
...eccentric comes to stay in a small British town. He is one of the harmless kind who imagines he is Napoleon Bonaparte, carries a rabbit in his old-fashioned beaver, decks out in a Dickensian weskit and cravat, and parades the streets in perfect weather under an open umbrella, followed by mobs of delighted children. Everybody calls him Napoleon, and is happy to have him around for laughs. The beauty of it is that Napoleon, in a well-juggled ending, turns out to be not so mad after all-or is he really much, much madder...