Word: utopia
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Israel, a harassed and overcrowded Utopia-in-the-desert, is now shaking down to a grim fight to hang on, if possible, until long-term improvements begin to pay off. Israel's scant monthly food ration -four ounces of meat, two pounds of potatoes, a pound of frozen cod-makes oldtime British austerity seem almost pleasurable. Unrationed goods are priced skyhigh: $20 for cotton overalls, $8 for a pair of sandals, a month-and-a-half's wages for a radio...
...with fervent prayers for it. Graham seems to mistake this act of love for a sign of suicidal despair; he seems to understand only one side of the Trappist paradox of suffering and joy. If Graham interprets Merton's advice as Cistercian propaganda for a Marxist kind of Utopia, it is perhaps because in the Benedictine Order he has become overly enamoured with a concept of the democratic monk...
...advanced the world toward perfection would achieve immortality in the memory of mankind. Providence was the "Great Being," not God, but a personification of humanity. (A great and in some ways typical 20th century positivist was H. G. Wells, who believed that man was progressing through science to Utopia; Wells's last years, like Comte's, were spent in near-despair...
...star appliance salesman in the U.S. is a blonde named Betty Furness. In her TV apartment, a kind of electrified Utopia, she shows the American housewife how wonderfully easy life can be-if she has the right gadgets. Fashionably dressed to look the way a housewife would like to look if she only had time, Betty crawls into bed to show off her electric blanket, washes clothes and dishes, plays How Dry I Am on her electric dryer, and peers into ovens-all without disturbing a lock of Her carefully curled hair. Betty does this for $50,000 a year...
Some take arms against the world's sea of troubles; some take flight. But among those who turn heel on their fellows to beat the wild bush for an untouched utopia, pausing only to write a book so the world they seek to escape can support them, few have told their stories as well as Adrian Conan Doyle...