Word: meaninglessness
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Grim Illusion. Listening from outer darkness, poor old Grendel is temporarily taken in, even though in his bones he knows men as murderers, life as meaningless. "It was a cold-blooded lie," he groans, "that a god had lovingly made the world and set out the sun and moon as lights to land dwellers, that brothers had fought, that one of the races was saved, the other cursed. Yet . . . it came to me with a fierce jolt that I wanted it, yes! Even if I must be the outcast, cursed by the rules of his hideous fable." Grendel soon casts...
...policy of Vietnamization and justifying a stepped-up U.S. withdrawal. But last week President Nguyen Van Thieu killed any lingering hopes for such a success. By ordering opponent Vice President Nguyen Cao Ky's name off the ballot, he turned the election into an all but meaningless referendum on his own performance in office (see THE WORLD). In Washington, Administration leaders were utterly dejected. "To say that we're disappointed gets nowhere near the depth of it," said one. "It's a goddam mess...
...companies comply, the act prohibits them from pinching holders for as much as a penny on lost or stolen cards. Though many cards carry stern warnings that holders must pay for charges run up before the issuing company is notified of loss or theft, the warnings are legally meaningless...
There is a disturbing grain of truth in the argument. To be black in America is indeed in many ways a political and social condition. All too often it is a condemnation to poverty and political impotence. For too many black youths, a numbingly meaningless school system becomes a sluice into crime, narcotics, precinct lockups, courts, and then prisons, with all the disastrous expertise that they have to teach. The nation's judiciary, for which politicians presumably have the ultimate responsibility, too often seems a collaboration between Rube Goldberg and Franz Kafka...
Herbert Marcuse's doctrine that the vote is meaningless seems to have relatively few adherents among the young. This month the Boston suburb of Woburn provided a nutshell refutation of Marcuse's argument. During most of July, the town had been racked by firebombings and clashes between youths and the police. Mayor Edward F. Gill rejected virtually all the youths' demands. After an angry protest meeting, more than 50 of the young suddenly stalked across to Town Hall to protest in a quieter but far more effective way. They registered to vote. Said a spokesman: "When they...