Word: mindlessness
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Julie Harris as Nora in Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House (NBC). In the semi-modern classic that for years was regarded as a ringing plea for woman's emancipation, she was superb as the child-wife who is treated as a mindless, soulless plaything by a priggish husband (Christopher Plummer). But while Actress Harris-kittenish, hectically gay and finally rebellious-could break out of Nora's plush Victorian prison, she could not wholly shake off the stilted language and obtrusive 19th century stagecraft which Adaptor James Costigan took over from Ibsen...
...dust, and wait for help to come -wait unaware that all the while, back in the headquarters of the Far East command, a little group of earnest, greying generals are solemnly debating a question that may carry, for the unmilitary observer, some suggestion of the impersonal horror, the mindless irony of war. The question: "Do we really want to hold Pork Chop Hill...
...Browns. In its most virulent form, says Tabori quoting a psychiatrist, stupidity serves "to disguise the truth from ourselves." Milder cases result in folly, credulity, superstition, plain silliness. Men of science have resisted progress with the mindless tenacity of Bourbons. Distinguished experts, including members of the famed French Academy, have on occasion "proved" that there are no such things as meteors and hypnosis; they have shown conclusively that man can never fly, that steamboats and railways will not work, and that the idea of laying undersea cables is preposterous...
...history also shows that Japanese women strongly resented being turned into mindless dolls who could achieve nothing except by yielding gracefully, as the bamboo bends before the gale. There have been few Joan of Arcs or Molly Pitchers in the annals of Japan. Even the brilliant Lady Murasaki, who wrote the famed Tale of Genji early in the 11th century, felt it necessary to conceal her accomplishments. The only heroic-sized woman known to the Japanese is the legendary Empress Jingo, who supposedly conquered Korea in A.D. 200-but Koreans indignantly assert that absence of records proves she never existed...
Already Odysseus has begun to question, to doubt. To his surprise, he begins to find newborn sympathies with slaves and common folk. The old Greek gods have become objects of scorn, and what started as a mindless search for adventure has now become a journey of selfdiscovery. In Egypt he and his pals thieve and loot, fight against the depraved rulers and finally lead a ragged army to the headwaters of the Nile. There Odysseus builds a Utopian city-state in which marriage is outlawed, children are held in common, and the old and weak are left...