Though no one can write like Don DeLillo, he's inspired countless younger aspiring writers, each searching for a way to represent a national reality whose senseless violence and conglomerate delusions seemed beyond literary representation to believe that words still could be found to encompass, clarify, and in some measure redeem the kooky desolations of American society.
At a key moment in Into the Abyss (2011, Revolver, 12), a quietly metaphysical inquiry into the awful realities of senseless murder and state-sanctioned execution, an off-camera Werner Herzog asks an apparently self-possessed prison chaplain to "tell me about an encounter with a squirrel".
"[The Death of Klinghoffer] offers no real insight into the historical reality and the senseless murder of an American Jew," the sisters wrote.
All we can mean by wine is something that has certain distinctive effects upon the senses, 'and to talk of something as having all the sensible characters of wine, yet being in reality blood, is senseless jargon.' Why should the pragmatist maxim be accepted?
"It rationalizes, romanticizes and legitimizes the terrorist murder of our father," the Klinghoffers wrote, adding that the show "presents false moral equivalencies without context, and offers no real insight into the historical reality and the senseless murder of an American Jew".
But we would do well also to ask the question of whether any form of entertainment that involves harm to a living creature is really necessary; even the senseless devouring of insects on certain reality shows like Fear Factor.
The reality of it bored him senseless.
Unfortunately, some Indian reality show producers ended up introducing the same senseless act in their programs as well.
In reality, every dollar the feds spend on this senseless waste and abuse is one dollar less for disaster relief, education, air traffic controllers, national defense or any number of other worthy programs.
Rather, he asks us to view the senseless dousing of young lives as symbolic of a dire societal reality we have accepted for far too long.
