Word: powerless
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Social resentment, which measures increases in the number of Americans who are angry about recent social trends but feel powerless to change them, rose to 37%, the highest point since April 1974, when 27% were found to be resentful in the first Soundings taken...
...working class of students, mainly in the state schools and community colleges, whose future white-collar work strangely resembles what used to be considered demeaning manual labor. For students of the sixties and seventies, the lonely competitive present opens out on a future which is limited to powerless work in the lower or middle reaches of corporate or government hierarchy and a dull routine of working a key punch or a slide rule (even if one happens to understand Schopenhauer thanks to a college course...
DuChamp realized half a century earlier that an authentic aesthetic response is weak and powerless in the face of the pressure of public opinion. To most of us, an authentic aesthetic response is that ineffable "gut feeling," which in this age of narcissistic fiction, is resurrected to onanistic worship. But a gut feeling, exactly because its vague origin, which is so often confused with mystic truthfulness, is associational in its logic. The shudder of revulsion that comes when viewing a Lichtenstein is probably not an artistic response, but an externally motivated one, prompted by the antibourgeois biases of contemporary culture...
Christie quickly became mistress of complex, cerebral plotting. Though she once wrote a book based on the Lindbergh kidnaping (Murder on the Orient Express), she would probably have been powerless even in her prime to turn the Bronfman case into fiction. It was too badly bungled. Among the 65 thrillers she has written in a 55-year career are several classics: The ABC Murders is a fiendish triple trap, Murder in the Clouds, a sleek variant of the locked-room ploy set in the cabin of a small airplane, What Mrs. McGillicuddy Saw, a neat bit of one-upmanship...
...still addressed him as "Your Imperial Majesty." As recently as last December, he remarked to two foreign visitors, "I can convoke my ministers, generals and relatives whenever I like." After all those decades of absolute power, the old man apparently could not grasp that he had been rendered absolutely powerless...