Word: unreasonable
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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After 25 years of servitude, Bette twigs her sister's game. The shock, the realization that she has wasted her life, knocks a screw loose. With the cunning of unreason she connives a hideous revenge. Day by day she tantalizes her sister with sumptuous meals, but after the rat and the parakeet the cripple is afraid to eat. Day by day the victim grows weaker. When she calls for help, Bette rips out the phone. When she crawls downstairs, Bette ties her up and tapes her mouth shut. When she warns the maid, Bette cracks the woman...
Nixon's valedictory had a little of the quality of a suicide note; it was as if, after a career filled with speeches marred by flubs, sottises, and gaffes, he had made the decision to go for broke with one statement of nothing but unreason and cloudy error. Nixon, the old one, the new one, was always in those slips of the tongue; Nixon's nature was to make mistakes, not speeches. And in the final hours of the last defeat, Nixon chose to leave the stage in his own face and his own clothes...
...paradox that has fascinated all historians-of reason beside unreason, of rationalism beside blind faith-was never more sharply apparent than in the century (1558-1648) from Elizabeth to Richelieu and from Shakespeare to Descartes. It was a time when superstition was rampant; a king's touch would cure scrofula, corpses bled in the presence of the murderer, comets signified disaster-although Galileo was calmly regarding the heavens through a telescope that magnified 1,000 times. Witchcraft (in which Kepler believed) was widespread: the Archbishop of Trier found it necessary to burn 120 of his fellow Germans...
During his decade as Boylston Professor, MacLeish has written four more plays. In The Trojan Horse (1952) he turned Homer's tale into a tragic and powerful parable about McCarthyism and the destructive force of fear and unreason. He specifically authorized its production without scenery, or over the radio. This Music Crept By Me Upon the Waters (1953), a comedy about five couples who have withdrawn from the banalities of the business world to a "paradise" in the Antilles, does not succeed; its obscurities prevent it from working on the stage...
...Unreason Season. The farm problem promised to provide a veto target as big as a barn door. In February the President gave up trying to draft a bill to bring some order into the ever-growing mess of farm subsidies and surpluses, challenged the Democratic Congress to pass a reasonable bill on its own. The Democrats reasoned that it would be better to pass no bill and let Agriculture Secretary Ezra Taft Benson harvest some more blame for farm discontent. But word has drifted back from the farm belt that Democrats may well be blamed if they do not pass...