Word: meaninglessness
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...wanted to come right out and say "nonsense," but the fact remained that Nikita's demand for total disarmament was so absurd and impractical as to be insulting. It paid no more than token heed to the all-important Western insistence that any disarmament agreement is meaningless and dangerous without an ironclad control system. It ignored the self-evident fact that no totalitarian government, whether in Latin America, Eastern Europe, the Middle East or Asia, would freely consent to dismantle the military forces on which its power rested...
...this life without dragging the reader through kitchens and bedrooms. There is a story of sorts. The small girl, with the awareness of the very young, sees a disastrous love affair founder, and she watches as white and native lives run courses that to her are not so much meaningless as mysterious. Already the Indonesians are rising in the first stages of rebellion: already the whites are grimly aware that force is not forceful enough...
...Bergman intends it as a kind of spiritual autobiography, identifies himself both with the masked magician and the drunken actor, who dies with his battered top hat on, raving: "I always longed for a knife to free me ... Then what we call the spirit would rise up from the meaningless carcass." Cinemagician Bergman seems to see both men as despairing artists whose creative imaginations doom them to social obloquy and the distrust and disdain of hardheaded authority. What scant optimism there is in this fatalistic philosophy lies in the final triumph of the Magnetic Health Theater: the artist suffers...
...could not agree to without, in effect, weakening Berlin and laying West Germany itself open to Moscow meddling. Early in the week Herter with lawyerlike logic spelled out Western objections, wound up by threatening to break off the talks unless Russia modified its stand. Gromyko then made a largely meaningless procedural concession, and agreed to discuss Berlin "simultaneously" with Russian plans for an All-German Commission. So eager is British Foreign Secretary Selwyn Lloyd to keep the talking going in Geneva so that he would not have to explain a breakoff to the House of Commons (before it adjourns July...
...tried to improve the situation by setting up a sub-category of "dark comedies" for All's Well, Troilus and Cressida, and Measure for Measure. But let's face it: All's Well simply is not a comedy, dark or otherwise--unless one wants to render the term meaningless by applying it to anything with a happy or, as in this case, pseudo-happy ending. (Actually, this ending is utterly absurd, unbelievable, perfunctory, and, for a man of Shakespeare's stature, inexcusable--the sort of thing one finds at the end of so many Hollywood movies when the makers suddenly...